Wikis Take Manhattan
Wikis Take Manhattan is a photo scavenger hunt aimed at gathering photos for over 500 Wikipedia and Streetswiki articles that lack them. On Saturday, teams spread all over the city in search of target items to photograph. All of the photos are released under a Creative Commons' Attribution-ShareAlike license, which allows for free and easy reuse. This years event was organized by The Open Planning Project, Free Culture @ Columbia, Free Culture @ NYU, NYC Wikimedia Meetup, and Creative Commons.
[intro music]
Speaker: [00:02]
Wikis take Manhattan.
Lily Bernheimer:
[00:05] Wikis take Manhattan is a photo scavenger hunt and its goal
is to create… take freely licensed photos for StreetsWiki and Wikipedia
articles which don’t currently have photos.
Speaker: [00:20]
If you open up your packet you’ll see the most important thing on
there is the list of targets.
Speaker: [00:25]
On your marks.
Speaker: [00:27]
Get set.
Speaker: [00:28]
Go.
Speaker: [00:29]
Good luck everyone.
[music]
Speaker: [00:35]
Here we have to go 131 Charles.
[music]
Speaker: [00:39]
We’re on bikes so we can cover anything faster than everybody.
Speaker: [00:42]
We’re going to Savoy, we’re going to get every Vanderbilt on this
list.
Speaker: [00:46]
We’re going to Brooklyn which means we can cover a heck of a lot more
territory cos everybody else is on foot and milling around Downtown
Manhattan.
Speaker: [00:51]
I’m the card holder. What have I got? Rollerblade.
Speaker: [00:56]
Hey, hey rollerblade.
[music]
Speaker: [01:03]
Wikipedia is something we both use a lot and it’s frustrating when
there isn’t a photo, so it’s kind of cool to be able to contribute.
Lily Bernheimer:
[01:10] StreetsWiki is a community created encyclopaedia for transportation,
urban, environmental and public space issues. For instance, New
York has recently installed a number of dedicated bus lanes which are
distinguished by their terracotta colouring. People can read about
this on StreetsWiki to find out what a dedicated bus lane is, how it
works. They can also read about this in other parts of the country,
in the world, where they might not yet have dedicated bus lanes, and
will now have a photo for our dedicated bus lane article.
[music]
Speaker: [01:42]
Oh, green bike lane, green bike lane.
Speaker: [01:44]
R4.
Speaker: [01:46]
Perfect.
Speaker: [01:49]
We found a block party, we just came upon it and even though it’s
a small one…
Speaker: [01:53]
It’s on 8th Avenue and Change Street, it looks like a very
intimate one.
Fred Benenson:
[01:55] Creative Commons makes the licenses that make it all legally
sound. So that means, you know, Liveable Streets Network can use
it and Repeater can use it and then everyone in this room can distribute
it and share it, and so without Creative Commons there’s no kind of
legal agreement, there’s no public license to use the work.
Speaker: [02:13]
We’re just uploading the pictures that they took on their cameras
onto our computer so that then we can upload them to Commons.
Speaker: [02:22]
First prize of a dinner with Jimmy Wells at the lovely Pure Food and
Wine Restaurant goes to XPost Photos.
Speaker: [02:36]
We won.
Speaker: [02:37]
Yeah, we won. We do heart the internets and the free culture and
the free software, so it all sort of fits back together.
