Program/Documenting rural areas by WikiTakes activities
- Notes
- Format
- Presentation
- Keywords
- Rural areas
- Heritage
- Wikimedia Commons
- Community
- When and where
- Saturday 21 July, 10:30
- Duration: 25 minutes
London
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- Presenter(s)
- Topic area
- Relationship to theme
Content Quality
Abstract
One of the gaps in Wikimedia projects is the lack of information about rural areas compared to urban contexts, both textually and photographically. This causes an invisibility of a valuable rural heritage from which we usually do not have multimedia documentation under a free license.
In the context of the "No Spanish municipality without photography" project, which since 2015 seeks to obtain at least one free photograph of each municipality in Spain, we organize Wiki Takes activities in rural areas underrepresented in Wikimedia.
After several activities focused on small towns, in 2017 we organized the first Wiki Takes that covered an entire region, La Manchuela, in the province of Albacete. Two volunteers selected the villages to cover and the elements to photograph. During three days, 11 volunteers visited more than 30 villages, photographing every outstanding heritage element (like churches, chapels, town halls, schools, fountains and even an aerodrome) and then uploading those images to Wikimedia Commons. Participants were provided with both accommodation and food in several villages of the region.
Later we organized an edition event focused in several Wikimedia projects (a Wikimedia Pentathlon) to create articles about the region and use the images obtained. In 2018 we organized a new edition, this time focused on the province of Cuenca and with the same objective.
Outcomes
The success of these Wiki Takes activities may be useful as an example to other groups or chapters to develop similar activities in order to get documents of underrepresented rural areas in their countries or territories.