A not-for-profit called Wikimedia Australia is running workshops teaching folks how to edit Wikipedia pages so they better reflect Australia’s vibrant and vast music landscape.
According to their website, the charity’s goal is to “empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally”.
Translation: “make it heaps easy to chuck solid info on the net”.
The event runs in conjunction with Melbourne Music Week – a yearly event run by the City of Melbourne.
Music writer Sosefina Fuamola told the ABC that the event is aiming to demystify the process of contributing to open-source internet databases such as Wikipedia.
“Hopefully we’ll be able to break down that stigma of everything on the internet is really scary,” she said.
“I feel like having these sessions where we can actually learn more about the website, learn more about the format, and learn how to actually construct and present a really cool historical narrative of artists … I think that’s a really cool thing to learn.”
Since Wikipedia gets more than 18 billion page views per month, director of the project James Gaunt says it’s vital for Australian creatives to have a presence on the platform.
“Unless you are Kylie or Nick Cave there isn’t a whole lot about Australian music on Wikipedia,” he said.
In the same ABC article, Gaunt showcases a few examples of how Aussie musos are getting short-changed due to their absence on the online encyclopedia.
Searching for Beat Magazine which has been a trusted source in the Aus music scene since 1986 leads us to find absolutely zilch, nada, nuthin’.
But it doesn’t gotta be this way.
If you’re free in Melbourne this Saturday and feel like picking up a cheeky new skill, zip down to the Collingwood Yards from 10am till 1pm. Click this link to suss the event.
No experience needed, just a device you can type on!
Oh, and did we mention it’s FREE?
It’d be rude not to.
