Communities are built on connections. Wikimedia Community Ireland collaborates with volunteers, institutions, and organisations within Ireland, the UK and the wider European Community. Our collaborations focus on opening up knowledge, elevating minority languages particularly Irish, digital literacy, social engagement, and knowledge equity.
Together with partners in our network, we have organised edit-a-thons, training sessions in person and online, exhibitions, conferences, and photography competitions. Read more about our ongoing partnership with the Wiki Women Project and Erasmus+ here.
If you’re interested in discussing a partnership opportunity contact us anytime at: info@wikimediacommunity.ie
WikiWomen Erasmus+ Project- Wikipedia, minority languages and the gender gap
From 2021 to 2024, Wikimedia Community Ireland has partnered with the Wiki Women Erasmus+ Project. The aim of the project is to encourage secondary school students to edit their minority language Wikipedias by creating or improving articles relating to women.
Disappointingly, the internet reflects reality when it comes to gender equality. Wikipedia is not immune to this issue and women are seriously underrepresented there. The same is true for biographies in libraries and archives, and even in history books. Women’s voices are often marginalized or go unheard. With this in mind, the project aims to address this imbalance.
Additionally, Wikipedia is a great tool for preserving and promoting minority languages, which are often under threat from larger, more dominant languages. The project works with partners from Ireland, the Basque Country, and Friesland where minority languages are spoken with two dual goals in mind. Firstly, to bring more women’s stories to life on Wikipedia and invite students to reflect on gender equality and gain a greater understanding of the structural and historical reasons behind this imbalance. Secondly, it offers an opportunity for students to use minority languages to engage with current societal debates in the digital realm to ensure these languages remain relevant for future generations.
The Hunt Museum
The Hunt Museum is the only cultural organisation in Ireland which has made a strategic commitment to open policies, with a policy to publish all images and digitization of their collections under a CC0 license. Wikimedia Community Ireland facilitated their first upload of images to Commons in 2018, making them the first Irish institution to make such a direct upload. Since then the community has also held a number of workshops with the Hunt Museum, primarily focused on the Sybil Connolly and related collections. The aim of this partnership was to widen the audience for Sybil Connolly’s designs and sketches and make them accessible to the public online. In turn, this will serve the education research and creative industry communities across the world in many ways.
Celtic Knot conference
The Celtic Knot Wikimedia Language Conference brings people together to share their experiences of working on information distribution in minority and minoritized languages on the Wikimedia projects. At The Celtic Knot, people working on growing and maintaining their communities meet, learn from each other, and support each other on topics like community growth, technical tools, or collaboration with partners.
The conference was first convened by Wikimedia UK in Edinburgh in 2017. In 2020, Ireland was due to host the conference in Limerick, but due to the pandemic, it was held virtually instead. The first post-pandemic in-person edition of the conference is due to take place in Ireland in 2024. Watch this space!
Wiki Loves Pride
Wiki Loves Pride is an international campaign aimed to improve the representation of the LGBTQIA+ communities across Wikimedia projects. Activities range from photography competitions to running Wikipedia editing workshops. Wikimedia Community Ireland has held a number of events at the GAZE Festival in 2018 and in 2023 at the Outhouse in Dublin.
Wikimedia Community Ireland also presented at the international conference, Queering Wikipedia, in 2023.
University College Dublin- Collaborative Authorship, Information and Communications
Wikimedia Community Ireland has had a long-standing partnership with UCD since 2014. Each year we collaborate with Dr. Crystal Fulton to work with Undergraduate and Postgraduate Information and communication students to teach them about editing Wikipedia pages, using citations, avoiding plagiarism, writing tone, and use of reliable sources.
University of Limerick- Wikipedia and Historical Outreach
Since 2020, we have worked with Dr Karol Mullaney-Dignam on a module as part of her Public History MA. Each year, students chose a topic to either write a new Wikipedia article about or improve an existing one, associated with their area of historical research. The module is less about the finished article, but more about the process and thinking about Wikipedia as a method for historical outreach.
Trinity College Dublin
Since 2017, we have held a number of one-off editing events with the Library at TCD with different themes including Art+Feminism and Childrens’ Literature.