Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Things I’ve learned because of shoes

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Things I’ve learned thanks to shoes

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Students from University of Padua and IUAV Venice during the Europeana Fashion Editathon in Stra. Photo by Niccolò Caranti.

Here we are, at Rossimoda Shoes Museum in Villa Foscarini Rossi, Stra (Venice). We are running the Europeana Fashion Editathon 2013 about footwear, fashion history and made in Italy shoes produced in this region. You can see me in this picture, and this is surprising. I've tried to organize this event (and I've succeeded!), with university students and their professors, and this even more surprising for me! What happened exactly? A short time ago I've became a member of Wikimedia Italia and I've quickly discovered that, like in many associations, you can choose to do something, a lot, or nothing at all but that, if you're looking for an opportunity, here you'll find it.

I had no idea about what to do inside Wikimedia in the beginning, I just wanted to... try to do something, when this opportunity occurred: the digital library Europeana Fashion was contacting fashion museums participating in its project and Wikimedia chapters in Europe to organize as many editathon as possible in November 2013. The goal: promote knowledge of cultural heritage, improve Wikipedia articles related to fashion and history of costume fields, and enrich Commons with images from the museums. Fashion and history of costume are my longtime passions and so I accepted to work on this project.

And I've learned just a few of (important) things.

First of all: if you like it, do it!

If conditions are good (for instance if you're working with an international digital library, an excellent museum, a collection of books, academic professors interested in proposing an unusual learning experience to their students), don't give up because you're not an expert. This is exactly the moment in which to become an expert.

People are the key

Without the involvement and the sheer force of will of the museum's curator, I wouldn't have done anything at all. She looked for and found contacts inside the university, people which in turn sustained us. She provided a proper connectivity inside a historical building. She ordered sandwiches and pizza for everyone (almost 80 people during the morning, 40 during the editathon in the afternoon). She sent me a mountain of email and patiently followed my to-do infinite lists.

Working for an international project is rewarding

Our project was about shoes and historical footware production, a very specific and local issue. But without Europeana initiative (and its Dutch contacts), the availability of Wikimedia Sweden in setting up a post-editathon Fashion Challenge, art books and catalogs offered by participating museums and Wikipedia itself, this very local issue would have remained just... local and unknown.

Organize other people's work is a responsibility

As everyone involved in Wikipedia introductory workshop knows, almost everyone is stunned, and often confused by the complexity of wiki projects (click on Edit and you’ll find an entire world!). The only way to avoid the sense of confusion arising from 40 people altogether has been give them a general presentation about Wikipedia and then make them work with guided paths. So the students, divided in groups of 5, have worked on specific issues and goals to achieve, having the rights books and sources to base their work on, and articles to write previously chosen for them. Telling the students "have a look to fashion articles" or "look for your favorite fashion designer" would have been simpler, but this is maybe an important lesson to learn also for other kind of laboratory (for examples in libraries): suggesting an issue, or a guided path, is more effective, even if it requests much more preparatory work in advance.

To create a new article you don’t need to be an expert. Just look for information and declare your own limits

Insist on having a from scratch new article written by an absolute beginner is the best way to scare him, and make him risk to do every kind of mistakes. So I tried to have students working on existing articles and, where the right articles didn’t exist yet (how much is the average wikpedian interested in shoes? I don’t think so much...), I created it in advance following my personal rules: put a source for every line, and never forget a stub template!

The best cultural collections in the world don't really exist unless they are online, and our human beeings' duty is to put them there.

One of the pictures donated by the Rossimoda musem: depicted is woman's shoe in silk slipper-form, Rococo style, from Venice, 18th century.

For me, quite a beginner in the wiki world, the most difficult part has been solve the puzzle about the "liberation" of images. Rossimoda Shoes Museum was available to publish with an open license photographs representing a part of its shoes collection. I had only a previous little experience consisting in uploading a horse picture made by me on Commons, something not so far from uploading a photo on Flickr actually (horse or not), and now there were this kind of brand new things to face: explain to the Museum curator that Wikipedia is the only place on the Internet where copyright is literally respected. Find a model of authorization to the publication under CC BY-SA conditions license. Wait in anxiety for the managing director of the Museum signature. Deliver the authorization to OTRS service. Upload the images one at a time to write down the exact description for each of them, set whit Museum curator, in Italian and English. Discover the existence of the arcane user rotate bot. Ask for help a Commons admin to choose the right categories for the images, and create some new ones we needed. Inform people involved in other fashion editathon in Stockholm and Israel about the result and enjoy for everyone's enthusiasm. Understand that yes, they are just a few images, but they can serve as a precedent to show to other museums and institutions and that they are absolutely rare historical images (Venetian shoes could also be the only existing samples and this is amazing for me and I wonder how many people in the world!)

Get public sector role into perspective

Universities involved (University of Padua and Venice IUAV) played a fundamental role in the editathon. But not alone. Rossimoda Museum is the typical corporate museum, and therefore a private one. The wiki infrastructure, with its own peculiar mechanisms, is completely extraneous even from the contrast between public and private sectors. If you're a public servant like me, you're looking for an opportunity to fulfill a project and learn new things, don't rely only on the public administration you work for. Working for a public library as I do is a good chance and even a honour because it means working for the public good. But there are alternatives, even better ones.

And finally, I've learned that editathon is written editathon

And not edithaton or every other variation I've used, making a mistake even on the URL of project page where you can find (in Italian) information about the initiative.

People who helped me in this project, and which I personally thank, are: John Andersson, Alessandra Arezzi, Aubrey, Romano Cappellari, Luca Corsato, Cotton, Elitre, Shani Evenstein, Brigitte Jansen, Jaqen, Gabriele Monti, Federica Rossi, Alessandra Vaccari, Erwin Verbruggen and Xaura.

Virginia Gentilini for Wikimedia Italia