More than 16,000 structures and landmarks were destroyed in the recent Los Angeles fires. A group of volunteers are trying to preserve their histories through Wikipedia entries.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Sixteen thousand structures and landmarks were damaged or destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires earlier this year. They include favorite hiking spots, 100-year-old family businesses, neighborhood watering holes. Some still have websites or Instagram accounts or articles about them somewhere on the internet, but if you want their full histories in context, those largely don’t exist. With help from photographer Gabriel Kaplan, KCRW’s Andrea Domanick brings us the story of a group trying to change that.
ANDREA DOMANICK, BYLINE: It’s a Sunday afternoon at the Hammer Museum in LA. Kids and couples mill about in the sunny courtyard between gallery visits. But turn the corner, and signs invite you to participate in something a little different – a Wikipedia LA edit-a-thon.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Hello. Welcome.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yeah, just grab a seat, help yourself to some snacks ’cause we’ll walk through some basics and then…
EMERY DALESIO: My name is Emery Dalesio. By – my day job is a rocket scientist, and I am a facilitator and organizer with WikiLA, Los Angeles’ Wikipedia editing group. Today, we’re here at the Hammer Museum to edit Wikipedia articles relating to the wildfires.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #4: We’re going to have a lot of questions.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: I’m sure, but that’s OK. That’s why we’re here.
DOMANICK: For five hours, two dozen or so volunteers congregate over laptops, cups of coffee and doughnuts iced with the Wikipedia logo. They’re writing new entries for places lost in the fires, adding citations, updating information and uploading photos.
DALESIO: We have the potential ourselves to preserve what we lost and make sure that what was destroyed in the fires isn’t forgotten.
DOMANICK: But you don’t have to be a rocket scientist like Dalesio to edit Wikipedia. Everyone, including the editors, are volunteers.
DALESIO: There is no, you know, headquarters of Wikipedia with editors working 9 to 5s and making sure that things are right. It’s all people like you and me.
DOMANICK: Which doesn’t mean you can create a Wikipedia article for whatever you want.
DALESIO: So just the fact that, you know, you met your wife at that McDonald’s, like, that doesn’t make it important. But maybe it’s a really big one, and it’s architecturally significant.
DOMANICK: Shannon Vergun is a first-time Wikipedia editor who showed up to the Hammer with an abundance of photos from Malibu and the Palisades, where she grew up.
SHANNON VERGUN: I felt so helpless. I don’t have a whole lot of money to give, but I can definitely contribute to these archives.
DOMANICK: She shows me some of the photos she’s adding to the page for the Malibu Feed Bin, a decades-old pet supply and gift shop that was destroyed in the fires.
VERGUN: My family used to have horses, and we’d often go to the Malibu Feed Bin for supplies. We even bought chickens there. And I happened to go just the other day, just on a lark, and took, as usual, too many photos. Now I know what to do with them.
DOMANICK: The Wiki page Vergun created for the Malibu Feed Bin is among more than 40 articles created or edited at these edit-a-thons so far. And they’re already resonating. Dalesio says those articles have racked up more than 200,000 views since their edits.
For NPR News, I’m Andrea Domanick in Los Angeles.
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