GLAM/Newsletter/September 2014/Contents/Mexico report
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50 hours of art in Wikipedia
50 hours of art in Wikipedia: the Museo Soumaya editathon
Between September 26 and 28, we literally lived in Museo Soumaya of Mexico City during a 50-hour editathon, surpassing the mark of 35 hours established by Amical Wikimedia in 2012. With the full support of the museum, we finished this great challenge achieving 64 new articles in Spanish Wikipedia and more in English, Catalan and Hebrew with editors outside Mexico City, in Uruguay, Venezuela and Israel. There were also editors who came from the States of Puebla, Jalisco and Aguascalientes just to be part of this wondrous occasion.
Museo Soumaya made a great effort as well: they developed a logistics plan that included the active participation of researchers, investigators and museum curators, offered unique support for the wikipedists' stay, established a small temporary library with references, created a complete program of cultural contents (including guided visits to the museum and its thematically divided halls), visits to the Inbursa Aquarium and UNOtv studios, and provided hot meals and beverages during the 50 hours of the event on top of it all.
The event began with the presentation of the new museum website, presented by Alfonso Miranda, head of Museo Soumaya, and followed by a special message of opening by Lila Tretikov, executive director of Wikimedia Foundation. "We are so proud to partner with institutions like Museo Soumaya as part of our ongoing relationships with the world’s leading galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. I want to thank the organizers of this event, the incredible team at Wikimedia Mexico. Your passion, enthusiasm, and energy are unsurpassed. You inspire me with your creativity and commitment", said Tretikov in her message.
We had special talks by Herminia Din, from the American Association of Museums, and Liam Wyatt, currently GLAM coordinator at Europeana and long-time GLAMmer.
At 10:01 PM Sunday 28th, everyone in the museum celebrated reaching 50 hours of continuous Wikipedia edits and we had a small cocktail celebration, and the ceremony award from the Museum to the people who wrote more articles.
The results of the activity are huge: 64 new articles in 5 languages, 1616 editions to the Wikimedia projects and 15 new and active registered users. We hope to continue working with the museum in our shared mission of free knowledge dissemination to the whole world, one art piece at a time.
View all the images of the event here.
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