GibraltarpediA is the first Wikipedia project to not only embrace a whole city, but also aspires to bridge two continents. The project aims to cover every single notable place, person, artefact, plant and animals in Gibraltar in as many languages as possible. This is a large WikiProject; it's at least three times the size of MonmouthpediA. The area of interest includes the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, the Strait of Gibraltar, the Spanish municipalities along the coast of the Bay of Gibraltar, the northernmost coast of Morocco and Ceuta, it is around 14 Miles from Morocco. Many people in Gibraltar are bilingual and speak both English and Spanish, Berber and Arabic are spoken by the Moroccan community, as are Hindi and Sindhi by the Indian community of Gibraltar. Hebrew is also spoken by the Jewish community and the Maltese language is still spoken by some families of Maltese descent.
The project came about when Tyson Lee Holmes a Gibraltarian Wikipedian saw the press coverage for MonmouthpediA, he got staff from the Gibraltar Museum involved including Prof. Clive Finlayson who contacted the Government of Gibraltar. Victuallers and I were invited to come to Gibraltar and a few weeks later I launched the project at Wikimania. Gibraltar has such and amazing variety of special things, in the week I have been there I visited the last place Neanderthals were known to have lived, been in the largest cave I have ever seen, saw killer whales and monkeys, walked down a small bit of the over 30 miles of tunnels and saw Africa for the first time.
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Government of Gibraltar press conference on Gibraltarpedia, 18 July 2012. -
As part of the project we aim to cover every plant in the Gibraltar Botanic Gardens which spans around 6 hectares (15 acres). -
Oussama Larhmich with a trial GibraltarpediA plaque in Morocco, we want to use QRpedia and multilingual NFC -
Jim Crone who runs VisitGibraltar the largest Gibraltar tourist website has kindly released it's text and images to give the project a boost of material -
Africa is really, really close -
Did I mention there were monkeys?
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How to be Involved edit
The Gibraltar writing, illustrating and mapping (using Openstreetmap) challenge for GibraltarpediA will run from now until Boxing Day (26 December) 2012. Everybody can help in any language to collaborate on writing articles relating to Gibraltar. Any wikipedian with a named account (on any wiki) can participate. Two ore more wikipedians can form a team and participate jointly: this means you don't have to be multilingual! Other things you could do include:
- We realise that most people can't take photographs in Gibraltar but there are hundreds on Flickr and other sites to transfer to commons
- Tell people you know who might be interested in taking part
- Suggest things we could do as part of the project
- Volunteer to help run part of the project, if you're interested in running your own project this a great way to get experience
- Adopt a new user in Gibraltar I'm moving to Gibraltar soon to teach people how to contribute in person, hopefully working with schools and other community groups
- Hopefully there will be opportunities for Wikipedians to come to Gibraltar
We would like to invite you to contribute to the GibraltarpediA project, the world's first WIkipedia City. The project needs writers, photographers, translators and others to help build the first wiki city which bridges Europe and Africa. We are going to transform Gibraltar and the surrounding areas in Morocco and Spain into areas rich with encyclopedic content immediately accessible using QR codes and NFC on plaques for visitors and local people. There are prizes to reward contributors in the Gibraltarpedia Multilingual challenge for the best editors, photographs and cartographers... whoever you are. More at Gibraltarpedia.org |
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