Toronto WikiClub hosts its annual Wikipedia Day celebration

Article written by OhanaUnited

On January 19, Toronto WikiClub hosted its annual Wikipedia Day celebration in downtown Toronto at the One Yonge Community Centre. The goal of this meeting is to recruit new editors and attract those who frequently use Wikipedia as a reader around the Greater Toronto Area to better understand different various Wikimedia projects. Over 40 individuals attended this event.

After a round of introductions, attendees were given a quick tutorial on editing Wikivoyage, a free travel guide. They are also introduced to the then-ongoing Wikivoyage Asian Month contest and encourage them to edit Asian-related contents, including destination cities and language phrase books.

This was followed by a video call to an English Wikipedia administrator in Nunavut, Alan Sim (username CambridgeBayWeather). Alan is based in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut and contributed extensively on northern Canadian airports, meteorological instruments and Inuit culture. He made over 250,000 edits on English Wikipedia and uploaded over 1700 freely licensed photos, many of which were taken in Northwest Territories and Nunavut. In the video call, Alan talked about his editing journey over the past 19 years. Participants in Toronto asked about editing challenges in the very far north and the importance of editing Canadian-related topics. This brought up a lively discussion about whether copyright exists for a photo taken with a security camera at an airport (verdict: there was no agreement among the attendees whether this photo is in the public domain). It also highlighted how few photos were uploaded about Northern or remote parts of Canada, most of which were taken opportunistically during travel and some of those uploaded photos are often quite old. A suggestion was made to have a virtual meeting for readers and editors in Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut to increase their representation in the project. 

After lunch, another presenter talked about going “down the wiki rabbit hole” and presented fun facts about the history of Wikipedia. An editor talked about notability when choosing a new topic to write about and gave a walkthrough on adding references to an article, while using a former Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King as an example.

A discussion about different languages of Wikipedias raised awareness about editing in non-Canadian official languages. It highlighted the importance and role of a multicultural country like Canada and particularly around the Greater Toronto Area, with many citizens who are multilingual. These potential editors help diversify the contributor base of non-English and non-French language projects and write about topics from non-English speaking countries, furthering the resilience of these projects and increasing the depth of the projects.