A three-day Editathon on Plastic Pollution in the Environment

Accumulation of plastic waste on a beach in Accra, Ghana. CC-BY-SA-4.0 / Wikimedia Commons

Wikimedia Bangladesh organized the third editathon to celebrate World Environment Day. During this event, Wikipedians wrote and improved articles on plastics and the environment in Bengali Wikipedia (https://bn.wikipedia.org/). It was a three-day-long editathon jointly supported by Wikimedia Bangladesh’s regional communities, the Chattogram Wikipedia Community and the Mymensingh Wikipedia Community. The main objective of the campaign was to create a new Wikipedia article focusing on the impact of plastic pollution on the environment. Plastic pollution has emerged as a pressing environmental issue, as the production of disposable plastic products has outpaced the world’s capacity to manage them effectively. This editathon played an essential role as Bengali Wikipedia usually lacks such types of articles. Earlier this editathon was organized on Bengali Wikipedia on the occasion of World Environment Day in 2020 and 2021.

Preparations

In accordance with the experience from previous years, an event page was created on Bengali Wikipedia with a table containing a list of articles showing whether they exist or not. The list includes articles from the plastics and the environment category, making it much easier to find articles in the list and add new ones. The Fountain tool was used for article submission and review, facilitating both processes. Fortunately, the response was as good as expected. Participants are provided with Wikipedia Barnstar and e-certificates issued by Wikimedia Bangladesh.

Results

The three-day editathon was held from May 5th to 7th, 2023. We are proud to announce that this year we had another successful editathon. This year, we broke our records, and 21 participants from Bangladesh and West Bengal wrote a total of 42 new articles on Bengali Wikipedia, with most articles focusing on plastic recycling. Additionally, Wikidata pages for the newly created articles have been updated. User Tanbiruzzaman has written a maximum of 11 articles. 19.05 percent of the total contributors were female Wikipedians. Moreover, the Chattogram and Mymensingh Wikipedia communities had especially significant contributions to this event. Finally, this type of editathon makes an exemplary contribution to reducing the content gap in Bengali Wikipedia while enriching global awareness articles.