The World Orienteering Championships, Wikipedia, and Commons

The women relay flower ceremony(Maiken Sandberg, CC BY-SA 4.0).

In front of and during the World Orienteering Championships last year I was a member of the media team. My objective was to write (almost)real time route analytics and comments during the races.

A few weeks before the event one of the persons responsible for outreach asked me if I could update some of the outdated articles on the Swedish Wikipedia. I said “sure”. I could need some more experience actually editing Wikipedia.

Prior to this the Swedish Orienteering Federation had updated their site(“big event, lot of exposure - lets update our site”). Guess what, they broke all their links.

Once my bot was done updating them all I could start editing. When the championships started most of the relevant biographies was up to date.

At this point I started to improvise a small project, I convinced a key member of the media team that it would be a good idea to publish images taken by the media team under open licensing so they could be used on Wikipedia. Because it was so close upon the event and so improvised I had to chat with all of the different authors and import the images from the official image gallery on my own.

I did the last batch upload just a few days ago and now I have uploaded more than 240 images(including logos), not a large number but for a one man project reaching beyond what I usually do, I’m happy with the result.

There is of-course a lot I would do in another way next time(when it’s not improvised). At least next time I will be able to give an example of a media team at a major sport event which worked with Wikimedia Commons.

Checkout the World Orienteering Championships 2016 category to have a look at the images.

Tove Alexandersson running towards the gold medal during the middle distance(Klas Bringert, CC BY-SA 4.0).