How about sharing a memorable encounter with something in Wikipedia (as well as its broader Wikimedia system) that totally suprised you, making you feel “Wow, I never thought that was possible?”
As a lover of photographer I offer the discovery of Wikishoot Me back in 2014. It’s amazing! It detects your geographic location (if you permit) and presents a map of entries in Wikidata that are colored green if there is a photograph associated with a location and red if it needs one.
At the time I was on an extended fellowship at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. When I pulled up the map, it offered quite a few records needed photos, but one was directly across the street from the residential building on campus I was staying it.
It was a place I had walked past but never paid much attention, the home of the campus radio station CFBX. It took but a few minutes to take a photo on my phone, upload it to Wikidata, and add one more tiny bit of information to the Wiki system accessible on wiki data at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5010451. And because of the way Wikipedia is designed, this automatically became part of the Wikipedia article on radio station CFBX.
This even led me to visit and eventually get a full tour of the radio station, even to say something briefly on the air.
This always worked as a great activity to help people understand how to add information that is relevant to their location. I can check again and indeed I see red dots needing photos very close to my location.
Okay, share some kind of “wow” or surprise experience you had with Wikipedia.
My Wikipedia Wow is bittersweet. For a long time, Wikipedia had a Book Creator tool, which one could use to assemble a series of articles into a really nicely formatted PDF or ODF, with each article being a chapter. This tool made it trivially easy to make the first draft of an OER textbook on essentially any subject. Sadly, it was discontinued. It’s still possible to remix their content, of course, but that tool just made it so easy!
When I first got started in Open Ed working at UBC Library, we were hosting Indigenous Authors Wikipedia edit-a-thons. This was my first time learning about how to edit, what Wikipedia considers reliable sources, neutral POV, etc. It was also my first time learning about TALK PAGES!
Now, whenever I look at a Wikipedia article, I always take a peek at the Talk pages to see what the editors have been discussing. Sometimes it’s boring, but sometimes it’s interesting to learn what’s been added or removed and why.
One specific page that I immediately became obsessed with was Talk:Bruce Pascoe, an author from Australia whose claim to be Indigenous was (is?) under a lot of dispute. There are 3 Archives worth of (at times) very heated discussion between editors that lasted about 5 years.
Thats really valuable and easy to overlook. To me it makes visible almost a hidden layer of the human-ness (good and sometimes not so good when it gets out of hand) of Wikipedia. A 5 year discussion is like a world unto its own?
Indeed we know and value so much the creative and open network skills that the WikiChallenge project as done for a long time- absolutely well deserving the Open Pedagogy Open Education Award in 2024
And not to mention the also impressive Wikifundi platform that provides offline wiki editing experiences to communities lacking internet connectivity, again recognized in 2021 for Open Infrastructure.
loved it