Image taken at the Belgrade Fashion edit-a-thon. Photo credit: Tina Kaplani.
The American Alliance of Museums Media and Technology Professional Network granted the Europeana Fashion series of Fashion edit-a-thons a 2015 Bronze MUSE Award!
The award was announced Sunday at the MUSE Awards champagne reception, which took place at the Atlanta Marriott Marquis. Earlier winners of the award include the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, who received a silver MUSE award for their use of digital media. The Gold and Silver Awards in the category 'Open' went to the Europeana Foundation for the GLAMwiki toolset and to the British Library and Wikimedia UK for the project Mapping the Maps.
Europeana Fashion organized twelve edit-a-thons in nine countries in collaboration with local Wikimedia chapters and volunteers from the community. Some of the editathons were supported by third-party organizations.
The work in all of them focused on asking museum partners to open their doors to invite in would-be editors of Wikipedia, attract Wikipedia volunteers to help organize the event, add media from Europeana Fashion content partners to the Wikimedia Commons platform and subsequently use these images for relevant articles on Wikipedia. When after the first few edit-a-thons we felt comfortable with the formula, we also attempted a parallel set of editathons that shared the same theme with an additional online challenge, and explored the possibilities of hosting a GLAM-Wiki collaborative event in the framework of a larger cultural or fashion-related festival.
Image taken at the Belgrade Fashion edit-a-thon. Photo credit: Tina Kaplani.
The events were organized in order to reach specialists from the fashion domains, students and existing Wikipedia editors, with the stress on a particular target group shifting from event to event. We look back on the series having learned a lot from all the different people that took part and attended and look forward to continuing working to improve and share fashion knowledge on the world's free and collaborative encyclopaedia!
For the full story on our Fashion Edit-a-thon series, read our project report D6.6 Wikipedia Report II [PDF] or, alternatively, browse the images we've made openly available on Wikimedia Commons.
