Who are Wikimedia Community Ireland?
Wikimedia Community Ireland is an affiliate of the Wikimedia Foundation in Ireland. We promote the creation, promotion, and dissemination of free knowledge.
Our goal is to promote a culture of openness across Ireland. We believe that creativity and knowledge from Ireland should reflect the full diversity of the island and should be seen and shared internationally without barriers.
Wikimedia Community Ireland’s mission is:
- To assist and encourage people to collect, develop, and disseminate educational, cultural, and historic content in the public domain or under a license that allows everyone to freely use, distribute, and modify said content without the payment of royalties.
- To encourage public and private galleries, libraries, archives, and museums in the island of Ireland to make their holdings more freely available
- To collaborate with cultural and educational institutions in an effort to preserve the heritage of the island of Ireland.
- To make use of, encourage the use of, and educate people in the use of free and open-source information resources, in any form, for the advancement of education.
- To encourage the development and release of these materials in the languages of the island of Ireland including but not limited to English and Gaeilge.
- To help to safeguard and promote the Irish language.
Wikimedia Community Ireland, established in 2014, is a non-profit, volunteer-driven organisation.
What does Wikimedia Community Ireland do?
We support people and organisations to contribute to Wikipedia, and other Wikimedia platforms through events, training, and partnerships.
Our key activity areas include:
- Education: We partner with schools, universities, and other organisations to help people learn about and how to edit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms and to learn about collaborative authorship, citations, presenting information from a neutral viewpoint, and how to avoid plagiarism.
- Events: We host workshops and edit-a-thons to add to or create new Wikipedia pages or add images to Wikimedia Commons so that we are constantly helping to expand open knowledge on Wikimedia platforms
- Run and facilitate local engagement in global campaigns including Photography competitions like Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth.
- We bring together a community of volunteers and Wikipedians
- Advocate for open access knowledge and the creation of free cultural works
- Elevate minority languages, particularly Irish and participate in ways to keep them current and have a place in the digital realm especially
on Vicipéid (Wikipedia as Gaeilge). Read more about Vicipéid. - Advance gender equality, by increasing women’s participation and amplify women’s voices on Wikipedia with the aim of making Wikipedia more gender balanced.
If our vision and work seems inspiring to you please get involved! You can email us at: info@wikimedia.ie