Celebrate Wikipedia’s birthday in Sicily to nurture the community and document climate events

Sicily is an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, at the crossroads of many cultures and tectonic plates, and the scene of a rich and ancient history.

Since 2023, Wikipedia volunteers have been working to reactivate the community through various events and campaigns. We wanted to take the opportunity of the birthday celebrations to continue this effort by connecting with volunteer editors from 3 different areas of the island, sharing our common achievements but also building on the excitement to start new projects.

In Palermo, the capital city of the region and heart of political decisions, we are nurturing the local open source community to get them actively involved in the Wikimedia movement. We continued to forge links with the participatory citizenship ecosystem in the neighborhood of Kalsa, in the historic center of Palermo, by organizing our event at Orbita, a newly created social and cultural center.

We gathered a dozen of Wikimedians as well as open source activists curious to know more about the projects, and presented Wikipedia, Wikidata, but also the collaborative map OpenStreetMap, while celebrating Wikipedia’s birthday with a delicious cake. On the second day we organized a mapping party: with the user-friendly StreetComplete app in hand, we walked through Palermo to add information about the city’s streets, commercial activities and accessibility.

This weekend of celebrations and collective activities helped strengthen ties between existing and new Wikimedians in Palermo, enabling them to grow an autonomous group.

In Catania, home of the main community organizers and digital hub of the island, we are building partnerships with aligned communities (open data, Linux and developers groups), taking advantage of every event to strengthen the bonds between our respective volunteers. 

At the occasion of the birthday, we also established connections with Legambiente, one of the organizations working on nature protection in Italy, in order to build bridges for the launch of the Wiki Loves Earth campaign later this year. We organized our celebration meetup in their headquarters in Catania and focused our presentation on the topic of documentation of protected natural areas, showing the list of parks in Sicily that are not yet illustrated on Wikimedia Commons.

Finally, in Ragusa, last stage of our journey and pulsing heart of Sicily for tourism and agriculture, we wanted to discuss how the Wikimedia projects can help document the natural heritage of the island, but also the effects of climate change on the ecosystems. A few days before our Wikipedia celebration, two natural disasters struck Sicily: Cyclone Harry, which hit the coasts of several regions in the Mediterranean, caused significant structural damage and accelerated coastal erosion ; a few days later, heavy rains triggered a major landslide in the village of Niscemi, causing significant damage to human constructions and causing distress to the residents.

During these traumatic climatic events, the Wikipedia community has a role to play in documenting not only the immediate consequences of the disaster, but also the long-term changes to ecosystems. Our Wikipedia meetup in Ragusa was the occasion to gather the volunteers who are actively working in Niscemi to gather information and pictures and publish them under a free license, which will ensure a good coverage and archive of this episode of the village’s history.

During the meetup, we also met with a local nature guide, introduced her to Wikipedia, and discussed how guides and rangers could be involved in the Wiki Loves Earth campaign, publishing their pictures of natural landscapes on Wikimedia Commons. We went on a hike together in one of the protected natural area of the region, near the mouth of the Irminio river, and had the opportunity to take pictures of the partial destruction of dunes and cliffs due to the recent cyclone.

The three Wikipedia birthday events we organized in Sicily were not only the occasion to celebrate the achievements of the community in the past 25 years, but also to highlight the relevance of Wikipedia today, and the importance of empowering local volunteers who are in the field, documenting climate events and keeping track of their effects on natural and human ecosystems.Later this year, the Wikimedians in Sicily will continue their efforts on documenting protected landscapes, participating in the Wiki Loves Earth campaign, and organizing various Wikipedia meetups. Are you in the area and interested in joining? You can have a look at our upcoming events in Sicily on Italian Wikipedia.