Madrid Hosts its Very First Fashion Edit-a-thon

The capital of Spain is home to a range of renowned museums and classy inhabitants. One of these museums is dedicated to fashion and costumes: Museo del Traje. This Europeana Fashion partner, together with enthusiasts from Spain’s Wikipedia volunteers, organised our ninth Fashion Editathon on the premises of DIMAD Central de Diseño at Matadero Madrid.

Almost three years ago, Museo del Traje joined Europeana Fashion, a major European project aiming to increase fashion and costume collections’ visibility online. The initiative includes the most important museums of fashion and costume in Europe. By the end of the project, in February this year, Museo del Traje will have contributed almost 17,500 pieces from its collections. 700 of these digital objects come from the museum’s extensive fashion library.

One of the key aims for the museum is to present the fashion and historical evolution of clothing in Spain. It aims to enhance research tools in this area and therefor the idea of hosting . An edition of the project’s series of edit-a-thons fell onto fertile ground. For those who haven’t followed the blog: ‘editathons’ are events in which bloggers, writers, students and curators come together to improve articles on Wikipedia.

The Spanish fashion community had already expressed its disappointment with the lack of quality information available in Spanish online. The edit-a-thon meant a step forward and wanted to change the current situation by improving Wikipedia articles related to fashion.

Photo: Edit-a-thon Europeana Fashion, Madrid 2015. By Barcex. Available under license CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The fashion edit-a-thon took place in Madrid on 24 January. It, attracted 53 participants, almost 20 of which followed the activity online. Participants included students, designers, fashion bloggers, professors and people who simply love fashion.

Wikimedia Spain, whose volunteers had recently organised a massive editathon at the National Library of Spain, made sure Wikimedians were there to explain how Wikipedia work. Most participants had no previous experience with uploading content to or writting for the online encyclopedia. As we’ve seen with other fashion edit-a-thons, the topic is especially attractive to female writers, a trend that sets them apart from many other so-called GLAMwiki events.

Due to technical reasons, the activity could not be hosted at the Museo del Traje itself. Thanks to the hospitability of the Central de Diseño (DIMAD) we were able to develop the activity as scheduled. The museum’s collections department worked on a list of articles proposed to be edited and its library offered more than 90 sources to consult related to theose articles.

It was an incredibly successful event, which gathered new participants, brought together shared interests and helpful feedback from the editors. Thanks to this fashion edit-a-thon, today there is more than 32 % new fashion-related content on Wikipedia in Spanish, and this figure is going to be increasing progressively because editors promised to continue working on their own. To get an overview of all that was accomplished, check Wikipedia event’s page or take a peek behind the scenes with this collection of event photos.

Photo: Edit-a-thon Europeana Fashion, Madrid 2015. By Barcex. Available under license CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

From the Museo del Traje we want to thank Wikimedia whose, volunteers who work on the idea of spreading the free knowledge. Their mission inspired uss is to organise similar events in the future.

We also want to express our gratitude to the organisers of the edit-a-thon at Biblioteca Nacional who shared their experiences with us, and finally to DIMAD Centro de Diseño for making available their location. We encourage other institutions to carry out this activity!

Vorschlge, welche plan hausarbeit schreiben ihren wnschen und zielen entsprechen