Tuesday 5 October 2010

Adventures On Wikipedia

Write what you know, it is often said. And love, is what I’d like to add. In embarking on the Wikipedia adventure this past week, the saying has certainly proven to be a very helpful starting point for me. Whereas I expected finding a suitable topic would be the main challenge, I knew what to write about within ten minutes.

For me, ‘what you know and love’ usually leads to a pop culture-related topic rather quickly. And so, starting from the requested articles, the first entry to consider was on an episode on one of my favourite tv shows. But I wanted to contribute a little more than a synopsis that not a whole lot of people of going to read anyway. I moved my focus to film and immediately decided to contribute to the list of European film festivals. At this point I hadn’t yet decided on writing in either Dutch or English, but seeing that the wonderful Cinekid Festival did not have a page on the English Wikipedia yet made it easy to make up my mind.

Cinekid Festival is an international children’s festival for film, television and new media based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It is the largest of its kind in the world and I feel it is important that an organisation and event like this has a solid presence on a large work of reference such as Wikipedia. Although Cinekid is represented on the Dutch Wikipedia, with my contribution I hope to expand its potential audience internationally.

My entry was put up on Monday 4 October and has since only been edited by me. A small but valuable contribution from fellow Master of Media Marije excluded: she helped tweak the image that I put up, which turned out to be the main challenge in my first active Wikipedia experience. So far, so good, but hopefully the entry will receive some comments or edits in the future. I have taken the initiative to inform Cinekid of their new Wikipedia page and am currently awaiting their feedback.

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