ArtWikiMarathon in ArtNews Magazine, April 2008

Lamar Clarkson of ArtNews Magazine wrote about The Great Internet Art Wiki Marathon that went down on January 26, 2008. We had several dozen participants from all over the world, hundreds of edits, and tons of fun! Marathon #2 is coming up this Saturday, April 26th, save the date.

Article scan: (thx Steve)

Transcript:

WIKI BUSINESS: “If it’s not on the Internet, it doesn’t exist,” Irene Polnyi said as she clicked through gallery Websites, looking for information about William Powhida’s large-scale drawings to add to the Wikipedia page she was creating for him. “He’s one of my favorite contemporary artists,” she added. “He recently became my friend on Facebook.”

Polnyi was one of dozens of people around the world participating in the Art Wikimarathon, a daylong effort to increase the visibility of contemporary art on the popular website Web encyclopedia, which anyone can edit. The online event, organized by artists Steve Lambert and Joseph del Pesco, drew art enthusiasts from Malta to Marfa, Texas. Marathoners armed with laptops gathered at artists’ homes, at bagel joints, and at Eyebeam, the experimental art & technology center in New York where Lambert is a senior fellow. Altogether, the groups made nearly 100 edits by the end of the day. They kept in contact via an instant-message group chat, which dinged every few seconds with tips, links, and chatter.

Despite Wikipedia’s reputation for sloppiness and amateurism (contributors must cite sources but needn’t vet them), the site is often a first reference for Web users. As a result, artists without a Wikipedia presence might suffer, said video and performance artist Marrisa Olson. “I’ve actually heard people dis artists by saying, ‘He doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page,’” she told ART-news in an e-mail.

Lambert hopes that people will continue contributing entries and says he may organize another marathon. Among the new entries logged that day were the 1990s Australian cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix and a catchall page on the Bay Area art scene. Because Wikipedia forbids article subjects from editing their own entries, the artists confined themselves to starting pages for their friends — also verboten, but as one participant told the chat group, “I think they mean, ‘Don’t make pages for your nonfamous friends.’”