GLAM/Newsletter/December 2015/Contents/Basque Country report
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Local Library weaves a community at Iurretapedia
Iurreta is a small village of Biscay, it has a population of 3.800 inhabitants. In 2015 they were celebrating their 25. anniversary of the constitution as single and independent municipality. Many events had been done during the year. In that context, the local library, seeing that Basque Wikipedia's article about the town was quite a stub, decided to organize the local associations and citizens to enrich all together the article about Iurreta. The most associations participated in this idea, specially Geridiaga Elkartea, which is dedicated to local history. They were inspired by Amarapedia, a similar event driven in Donostia.
As a result, one introductory conference and four training sessions were organized where the local associations participated. Each person worked at home the subject they wanted to develop, and on the 12 December all met up at the library for the, what we called, herripedia (townpedia): the construction of the local knowledge by locals with the help of Wikipedians. More than 20 people came to edit the day. The article in Basque was tripled in size, but more importantly, the people understood how Wikipedia works and how powerful could be the collaborative work. Besides, in this case, Wikipedia served as integration and convivence tool for the local community, as we could see people from very different political ideas working together to built their village knowledge.
