I’m talking to you. Yes, you, the person who reads my blog, or clicks on the links I post on Twitter, who is involved in contemporary theatre and performance. I need you. All of you, to help me solve a pretty big problem. We’re invisible. On wikipedia.
Stop laughing.
This is important. Because this is one BIG way in which laypeople (in any subject area) discover. It’s how I find out more – in a reasonably unbiased way – about countries in the news, about complex physics discoveries, about the history of Henry V who it turns out got short in the actual face by an arrow when he was only 16, about the peasants’ revolt, about a TV series and when a previous episode was broadcast. Wikipedia is fundamentally part of most people’s first pages on google searches. It is an entry point. And contemporary performance is all but invisible on there. Consider this outreach. Mainly because that’s exactly what it is. This is a really important way of putting contemporary theatre and performance where people are. Of helping them find out about us.
We’re small community, and it appears very few of us are on there updating and creating articles. So, here’s what I propose: we all sign up to wikipedia today, and commit to creating an article every week or two weeks. Just one, on an aspect of contemporary performance/theatre of which you feel like you can contribute something. This is our lives, don’t tell me you can’t tell me something.
So far (and a while back) I’ve done an article on Dan Rebellato, but I quickly got overwhelmed by how many other artists and companies were missing and just let it fall by the wayside. So I want your help, I want to know I’m not alone, and I want to commit, along with a few other people, to doing at least one article a week/every fortnight.
I even made us a hashtag so we can share new articles, and so others can know they’re out there, create new ones or help develop current entries. You don’t make hastags. Shut up, Hannah. Use #wikitheatre, if you like.
And, to help us all out, and because it can look a little daunting, I’ve put together a few tips, a how to get started, and a how to format guide in below.
