Bringing Fashion to Wikipedia

On Monday, May 13th, Europeana Fashion is organizing its second edit-a-thon. We wrote before about how at Nordiska Museet in Stockholm, we gathered almost 50 fashion students to enrich Wikipedia with articles about fashion history. This time, we’re bringing together enthusiasts, curators and Wikipedians to gather their fashion knowledge and bring it to the world’s best known source of information. The event will take place at Europeana Fashion partner Centraal Museum in Utrecht.

Centraal Museum Utrecht. Image used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Centraal Museum owns the 50.000-piece collection of the city of Utrecht among which are pieces of design, paintings and: pieces of fashion. Its costumes span over three centuries, covering the development of the silhouette from circa 1750 until the most intriguing works of today’s fashion designers. Their recent exhibition on Blue jeans that closed in March of this year explored the garment in all its detail – from its earliest traces to contemporary fashion’s love for denim. The other Europeana Fashion partner organizing this event is Sound and Vision, the broadcast archive of the Netherlands, that will bring broadcast content about fashion events to the Europeana Fashion’s portal.

Also joining the event is the ModeMuze project – a national project still in progress, started by curators from seven Dutch museums who saw the large benefits of putting online their rich but fragile costume collections.

This is one of the images Centraal Museum has made available on Wikimedia for the edit-a-thon. Men’s Gambeson, ca. 1660-1670. Collection Centraal Museum, Utrecht. Photo: Centraal Museum, Utrecht / Dea Rijper. Image used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

The event will be supported by Wikimedia Netherlands: organised in national chapters, volunteers make sure that the gigantic Wikipedia undertaking is sustained. Another activity they undertake is developing Wikimedia Commons, a vast repository of media that can be used freely for educational or other purposes. You can find the reusable images from Europeana Fashion’s project here – why don’t you dig in and see what you could use for an encyclopedic article… right now?

It is our conviction that Wikipedia is a wonderful place to bring fashion knowledge to, as it is the go-to information source for the world and is still lacking information that approaches fashion as a fundamental component of our culture. By bringing together fashion experts, from bloggers to curators, with the Wikipedia community at various physical events, we hope to spark an online relationship that expands our understanding and the readily available knowledge of the fashion domain.

If you want to join us on Monday, you can:

1. still sign up on Eventbrite and join us in Utrecht or
2. write from home! Here is a good article about getting started with wikipedia and here you can add any articles you write throughout the dayIt is not clear when razer plans to launch flexispy how to install the iphone game controller