123 languages and 130,000 visitors in two weeks: the Verdi edit-a-thon in numbers

On 11 November, ICCU and ICBSA collaborated with Wikimedia Italy to host the 9th Europeana Sounds edit-a-thon, dedicated to Giuseppe Verdi. 21 experts from institutions from all over Italy came together to share their knowledge about Verdi and his work. With the help of books and online resources, they created 12 new Wikipedia articles and enriched 19 existing ones to bring their knowledge to a wider public. The day has been productive, and you can read more about the session on Europeana Sounds. Now, let’s take a look at some figures.

The coordination page of the Giuseppe Verdi edit-a-thon on Italian Wikipedia.

The article about Giuseppe Verdi is available on Wikipedia in 123 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Bulgarian, Korean, Urdu, and so on. The Hungarian version has been voted by its Wikipedia community as “featured article”, which means that it is considered among the best articles Wikipedia has to offer, according to Wikipedia editors themselves. The English and Japanese ones received the “good article” status: the articles meet a core set of Wikipedia editorial standards, but are not quite yet ready to be considered “featured”. For now, the Italian article, though very exhaustive, underwent a community peer review and has been proposed as a “good article”.

A list of the languages in which a Wikipedia article about Giuseppe Verdi exists

Regarding pages covering Verdi’s work, 18 Wikipedias at least have an article dedicated to each opera. The most translated article is Aida (55 versions), followed by La Traviata (50 versions), Rigoletto (49) and Nabucco (44). Rigoletto, La Traviata, Otello and Falstaff were made “featured articles” on at least one version of Wikipedia (respectively the German, Hungarian, Catalan and English Wikipedias). The Russian article about Alzira, the Japanese entry for Macbeth and the French one for Luisa Miller have been voted “good articles” by the respective communities.

The Japanese article about Macbeth

In less than two weeks, the 90 files made available by ICBSA for Europeana and the Verdi Wikimedia edit-a-thon have been viewed by over 130,000 visitors! Europeana partners can enrich Wikipedia articles with audio content to make their collections available in a context relevant to the user, ensuring they reach a wider audience. As Wikipedia offers a reliable start for any encyclopedia research, Europeana enables to enrich any search by browsing millions of images, texts, audio files and videos. Considering the past nine edit-a-thons, the cooperation between these two projects is a reciprocal improvement towards the valorisation of the European cultural heritage.

Luca Martinelli – ICCU/Wikimedia Italia, Elisa Sciotti - ICCU