Venipedia: An English Language Data-Driven Wiki Dedicated to Venice

For the past twenty-five years the Venice Project Center has been collecting data pertaining to Venetian culture and heritage. In an effort to distribute this work and to create a usable resource on Venice for English speakers, Worcester Polytechnic Institute launched a wiki-style website known as Venipedia.org in 2007. Venipedia sought to fill a gap in the lack of specific statistical information on the individual objects and artifacts in Venice by creating a website that would allow users worldwide to collaborate to expand the website and create a comprehensive database on “every brick and stone” within Venice. In doing so the website would aid in preserving the heritage of Venice, essentially creating a single expansive and comprehensive source for English speakers to access everything in Venice. As recently as 2011, Venipedia reached over 4,500 pages on different objects and artifacts in Venice. Unfortunately, Venipedia became plagued by spam and inconsistencies because of its open allowance of contributors, many of whom did not follow strict page templates. This project created an entirely new Venipedia by moving the old website to a different domain, transferring only exemplary pages back to the reborn Venipedia.org, while coordinating the addition of new data from this year’s projects and developing a sustainable plan for the future growth and development of the site.