Hi there,
Seddon from WMF UK mentioned this list and Alison helped get things
started. Greetings from California.
Although I don't speak a word of Irish, I have six featured content credits
at the Irish Wikipedia. What I do is digitally restore historic media.
Have done a few restorations specifically about Irish history and culture,
mostly for Alison because she's such a fantastic person. The most recent of
the restorations was Daniel O'Connell.
There's an idea I'd like to put forward to the Irish community, to see if it
would help to grow the Irish Wikipedia. People have been looking for ideas
about how to help the smaller Wikipedias grow. I'd like to try a pilot
project with the Irish community, if you're amenable. The basic idea is to
build interest in the project with quality media.
Two things happen when people see featured pictures about their culture:
they're delighted and they want to share information.
Most people are aware that the English language Wikipedia is the largest in
terms of total articles, and that German is second. In terms of featured
pictures, though, German doesn't have the second largest collection. The
Turkish language Wikipedia does. A group of about half a dozen Turkish
editors have been going through the featured media from other projects,
translating the captions, and getting the material featured at their own
project. They have nearly a thousand featured pictures in the Turkish
Wikipedia now--about two hundred more than the German language project.
From time to time I do a restoration about Turkish
history, in thanks for
their efforts.
It would be exciting to see if the Turkish featured picture project could be
emulated at the Irish Wikipedia. The greater aim, of course, would be to
improve the reader experience and get more readers to begin editing.
After all, it's much easier to translate a caption than to translate a full
article.
I could help by doing more restorations of particular relevance to Ireland
and the Irish people, and by assisting as an image editing coach for people
who want to learn how to restore images themselves. With a little bit of
assistance on my end, WMF Netherlands has built a partnership with the
Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam where the museum is opening more of its collection
to digitization and free culture, while volunteer editors have helped
present a physical space exhibit at the museum. Perhaps this kind of work
could open doors in Ireland also. Until we get that far, there's quite a
bit of material already available through the Library of Congress. As long
as people such as Alison and yourselves supply enough context that this
ignorant Yank can make sense of them. :)
Let's work together.
Best regards,
Lise Broer
(Durova)
--
http://durova.blogspot.com/