14 DAY TRIAL // The Wikipedia town project seems to be inspiring followers. Earlier this year, Monmouthpedia, the project which aimed to make the entire town of Monmouth Wikipedia-friendly, debuted.
The idea is to scatter QR codes all over town, at the interesting locations and have those codes point to Wikipedia pages describing the place, monument and so on, in the reader's own language.
The town's people put some effort into it and completed the project in a few months. Now, there's little place to go there and not find a Wikipedia link.
Gibraltar is now trying to do the same and get the "title" of the first Wikipedia city. Gibraltar is technically a British territory, despite its location in the strait of the same name. It houses some 30,000 people and cites the Rock of Gibraltar as its main attraction.
There is now a project to scatter the peninsula with QR codes, at all interesting locations, to point to the Wikipedia pages. The project is housed at GibraltarpediA.org.
"GibraltarpediA is the first Wikipedia project to not only embrace a whole city, but it also aspires to bridge two continents. The project aims to cover every single notable place, person, artefact, plant, animal and other things in Gibraltar in as many languages as possible," the page reads.
"This is a large wiki-project; it's at least three times bigger than MonmouthpediA. The area of interest includes the Strait of Gibraltar, the south coast of Spain and the North coast of Morocco. (Borders 'to be decided')," it adds.
The project is underway, but it still needs to pass the biggest hurdle, getting people to collaborate and create the pages necessary. Even harder will be to have all those pages in as many languages as possible. But if Wikipedia is testament to one thing, that is that you can't underestimate the power of the crowd.