There is little doubt among experts that Italy’s A1 and A2 male volleyball leagues are the most professional, fan and media friendly volleyball leagues in the world. This week, they have further proved this point, by entering a mutual partnership with Wikipedia, where most of their media registries will be made public on Wikipedia pages and beyond, according to Volleyball.it. This is part of Wikipedia’s Wikicommons, Wikidata and Wikimedia projects, and of Lega Volley’s constant efforts to the development of Italian volleyball.
The current results of the partnership up until now is the presence of almost 500 players’ photographs in Wikicommons – the database of images and multimedia files connected to Wikipedia. In addition, each player was also designated a personal category on the site, which will allow their images to be used in over 290 linguistic versions of Wikipedia, including the one in Italian. Here is what the people involved with the project had to say:
“I am very satisfied with the success of this project, especially for the support given by many users of Wikipedia, Commons and Wikidata, who with their expertise and availability, have made this success possible. In addition to the direct results, we took the opportunity to ‘rearrange’ the topics related to volleyball on Wikimedia projects and to create a standard for future enlargements. With Lega Volley, whom I thank for the constant dialogue and fruitful collaboration, we can continue on this path, also obtaining images of the players of the past. Moreover, I hope that this type of collaboration can open the way for being able to work also with the leagues and the federations of other sports.” – Cristian Cenci, Wikipedia user and project coordinator.
“We are always very protective of the data we have collected over the years with the help of the clubs, especially on the statistical material that is free to consult on our site, but at the same time we always aim at the maximum visibility of our Championship. At the base of the work there was the need for Wikipedia, among the most consulted online sources in the world, to work with official and authorized quotes and links. We also wanted to highlight and reward the silent, free and passionate work of the compilers of volleyball pages on Italian-language Wikipedia: people who dedicate dozens of hours of their free time to sports culture. We had already anticipated the project last summer at our Media Day during the Volley Market 2017.” – Fabrizio Rossini , Vice Director and Communication Manager of the League
Projects like this really help advance the use of copyright-free images, sound, and other media, which in turn, contribute a lot to the work of small sports media portals.
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