Back in May of 2004 I started working with my current co-worker Frosti, who was then head of the Vestmannaeyjar department of environmental issues and public works. My role was mostly technical, but one of our pet projects was to try and collect data for a promotional CD for Vestmannaeyjar.
At the time I was an administrator of the Icelandic Wikipedia, which at the time was small and unremarkable, but growing at a staggering pace - I was mostly active contributing to the Mathematics articles, but also wrote an assortment of other articles that appealed to me for some reason. Some wiki users are powerful editors, fixing minor errors and checking references - I’m the other kind; I sit down every now and then and hammer out something large and full-fledged.
I approached Frosti with a different proposition one day: Instead of making a CD, let’s make a Wiki. A far more specialized wiki than Wikipedia, explicitly about Vestmannaeyjar. And he bought the concept almost immediately. At first I saw several differences between our wiki and Wikipedia, so I started writing my own piece of software. But then one day I saw the light and decided to just use Mediawiki, slightly altered, and figure it out. It has worked out great.
We got a fairly substantial government grant, a project called OpinMenning, or Open Culture. They granted us 1.5 million kronas to develop the wiki, that we soon dubbed Heimaslóð.
By the end of 2005 we were running just under a thousand articles and some hundred photos, but we also had a small team of people from the islands actively contributing. During the summer of 2005 I ran a small editorial group consisting of five people, partially funded by the aforementioned grant and partially funded by Iceland’s unemployment fund, who decided they had a stake in funding numerous interesting projects like ours.
During the summer of 2006 I did an internship at DeCODE Genetics rather than work in Vestmannaeyjar, so Daníel Steingrímsson, my friend and the star member of the editorial team from the previous year ran the show.
Summer 2007 I was back in Vestmannaeyjar, busy doing other things although working at the same place, so Daníel ran the editorial team again with a fair amount of success. We collaborated that year on converting the entirety of Vestmannaeyjar town plans into Google Earth format and linking some of the datapoints up to the wiki. We also worked with Helga Jónsdóttir on launching a hosted side-project on the Wiki called Byggðin undir Hrauninu, or, The Town under the Lava. It was opened later the same year with several dozen articles and about a thousand photos.
At the time of writing the ownership of Heimaslóð is slightly unclear, as is the management of it. In the coming weeks I am going to suggest to the Mayor of Vestmannaeyjar that the Wiki be opened up and published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike Noncommerical License, and that the owners of photos on the wiki be asked to license the data under the same.
Currently there are 6917 pages in the Wiki, whereof 2774 are active articles in the main namespace. The pages have been visited 2.096.839 times in total and consist of 30.033 edits.
The most-visited pages are:
- Forsíða (97.335)
- Heimaeyjargosið (16.358)
- Tyrkjaránið (11.010)
- Byggðin undir hrauninu (10.543)
- Flokkur:Fólk (8.198)
- Um Vestmannaeyjar (7.965)
- Saga (7.850)
- Flokkur:Hús (7.783)
- Menning (7.621)
- Þjóðhátíðin (7.226)
The largest articles are around 40000 bytes, the smallest some 30 bytes. The Wiki contains several full books republished in their entirety on a per-article basis, with gracious permission from the copyright holders.
As my path has diverged from Heimaslóð slowly with time, I look back on the project with pride. It is a success story of a small Wiki that emerged, but at this time I think many of the institutionally enforced bureaucratic decisions are stifling its further growth tremendously. It needs to be set free.
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