Over the last weeks we generated a lot of media coverage - partly international - in view of our initiative 'Wikipedia for World Heritage' and the online petition already hit the milestone of 25.000!
In the meantime we prepared a draft with which we plan to contact people of
public interest and aks for their vocal support of "Wikipedia for World
Heritage!" Please find an English draft version attached! As always,
please feel free to modify it according to your needs. Furthermore, if anybody
of you need material or support of any kind just tell us. We'll be happy to help!
The petition text has been translated into more than 30 languages by now. Wow! Thanks! It would just be fantastic if we could also add a few more subtitled versions
of Jimmy's video message. Your contributions matter so much! By the
way, note that the number of people who have signed the petition has
increased significantly in the last days, especially with people from
Italy signing extensively. That's because Italian users put a side notice in the Italian Wikipedia. Thanks for this one! Might be a good idea to have more translation of the petition form itself. Just send it to me or Sebastian.
Dear...,
when the free encyclopedia was founded in 2001 nobody could have dreamed of the success story it would be ten years later. With more than those 18 million articles in 280 languages Wikipedia today accounts for the largest collection of knowledge in the history of mankind. The concept of free knowledge as a whole has grown with Wikipedia’s success.
It started with a simple idea: “Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.”
In the beginning this idea was considered utopian, but in just ten years we all have made big steps towards reaching this goal. Ten years in which the vision of free knowledge has evolved into a system of sharing knowledge beyond national und cultural borders. The enthusiastic work of volunteers has already changed the global dissemination of information profoundly. Wikipedia’s 10th anniversary is a wonderful event to mark all this and show that the free encyclopedia today is so much more than a website where people find free information.
Wikimedia Deutschland has recently started an initiative to convince the UNESCO of recognizing Wikipedia as the first digital World Cultural Heritage site. With “Wikipedia for World Heritage!” we want to discuss and to pinpoint what it means that there are tens of thousands of activists all over the world who spend their free time collecting mankind's knowledge and freely sharing it with everyone else. Their efforts change society, education and ways of thinking.
Wikipedia meets many of the UNESCO criteria for World Heritage recognition, e.g. that "the site represent a masterpiece of human creative genius". However, this initiative does not aim at meeting single UNESCO criteria but at emphasizing the project as collective work and the greatest collection of human knowledge in history. Please help us to convince the UNESCO of recognizing Wikipedia as the first ever digital World Heritage site.
Please join in and sign our online petition. It will be presented to the UNESCO at the beginning of next year. More than 25000 people have already expressed their appreciation for Wikipedia by signing the petition. We would highly appreciate if you did the same. Every supporter is most welcome to spread the word and the goals of the initiative. Feel free to send us a video message, a letter of support or join us for an interview. Any kind of support brought forward in your name will greatly increase the likehood of this initiative reaching its goal.