Cameras in hand, around 15 sightseers traversed packed West Village streets on July 20 to snap photos of the Blue Note Jazz Club, Cornelia Street and over a dozen other renowned spots. Tour guides dotted chronicled histories with personal accounts in their retellings of the social and political nuances that built Lower Manhattan.
The group, however, wasn’t one of tourists; it was local Wikipedia editors looking to revitalize the site by uploading photos for its outdated or scarce pages.
“We really try to highlight and promote capturing content that’s missing from Wikipedia, and that might not get captured,” Pacita Rudder, executive director of Wikimedia NYC, said. “That’s what we focus on — ‘What’s not on Wikipedia? What can we capture and get on Wikipedia?’”
The photo walk was one part of Wikimedia’s annual New York City Wiknic—a picnic-meets-editing marathon that aims to improve the city’s Wikipedia representation by encouraging locals to contribute articles and photos. While this year’s event was scheduled to take place in Washington Square Park, a sudden downpour moved the editing portion to an indoor office in Hell’s Kitchen.
Earlier this year, a panel of eight scholars selected 400 people and neighborhoods, out of 1,000 nominations—with winners including the East Village music club CBGB, founder of Gravesend, Brooklyn, Deborah Moody, and Ray’s Candy Store owner Ray Alvarez. Rudder said one of this year’s standout subjects was Perfecto Sanchez, a New York-based Iraq War-veteran who has since had a successful career in agency management and tech entrepreneurship.
“We’ve just kept chipping away, like a sculptor chipping away—and of course, there’s no end in sight,” longtime Wikipedia photographer Jim Henderson said. “We just gradually make it better and better.”
Henderson led the day’s photo walk, starting in Washington Square Park—where the picnic was supposed to take place before it was rained out—then heading down to Bleecker Street and into the West Village. He stopped intermittently to give historical briefs while group members took photos of buildings and sculptures based on Wikipedia’s image request map—something he’s been doing for more than a decade.
“It starts when I’m walking down the street I haven’t walked down for five or 20 years. I’ll open WikiShootMe, or the Wikimedia Commons app,” Henderson said. “And then when I get home, I see what I’ve uploaded and compare it to Wikipedia to see if there’s any place where it belongs.”
Henderson worked as a telephone operator for nearly 40 years before he started editing Wikipedia articles in the early 2000s’, shortly after the site was founded. He began with minor edits, such as linking different articles and correcting grammatical errors, and said he enjoyed the process of learning new information as he worked — eventually relinquishing his initial skepticism of the site. His involvement, particularly in photography, grew when meetings with groups of editors began to pop up around the city and he met other editors.
Over the next several years, Wikipedia editors based in New York City helped the site develop a formal manual and style guide. Richard Knipel has been a prominent organizer for Wikimedia over the past several years and served as a Wikimedian in Residence at the Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum and Metropolitan Museum of Art, transferring research at the museums to the site. Now, he works to incorporate Wikipedia editing into science, history and writing classrooms at the City University of New York.
“I see what’s in different languages on Wikipedia. I see what’s on WikiData, I search what’s on Google, I search through some books. I look through journal articles, I try to think of the historical terms that might be related to this topic,” Knipel, who studied anthropology and now predominantly edits articles about New York City history, said. “It’s about trying to find the little missing pieces of information there that are not in your regular media.”
Both Wikipedia veterans and newcomers comprised this year’s meeting. Adina Polatsek, a graduate student at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, said that she had never edited an article prior to the event but uses it regularly and wanted to get more involved. Another attendee, Demetra Andriani, has written more than 200 articles and made more than 33,000 edits—most have focused on ancient Greek history.
The event was one of several hosted by New York City’s Wikimedia chapter this year, with several more scheduled through August and September. Throughout the get-togethers, attendees will continue to focus on this year’s 400 topic nominations in honor of the city’s 400th anniversary.
“When I’m here, I feel like I’m at a family reunion,” one attendee, who said he preferred to be referred to by his Wikipedia handle, “Sidepocket,” said. “Everyone still has this mindset that it’s 20 dorks on the internet. We keep forgetting that there’s, like, millions and millions of articles.”
