McLuhan wikisprint

A one-weekend wikisprint organized in Kunsthalle Budapest

Wikisprints are special workshops where people gather to create, edit or improve one wikipedia article.

This wikisprint was part of Marshall McLuhan centenary series of events and also for the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia.



The Kitchen Budapest media lab celebrates the Marshall McLuhan centenary and the 10th anniversary of Wikipedia with a “wikisprint” event within the framework of the “No One Belongs Here More Than You” exhibition held between March 25-April 23, 2011 in the Kunsthalle Budapest.



The wikisprint organizers invite the public to collaboratively work on the development and publication of the Hungarian Wikipedia article about Marshall McLuhan. The intention is to follow on the concepts and works of one of the greatest media theorist: Marshall McLuhan.

“If you want to learn about something, just write a Wikipedia article about it.”



It is arguable what an encyclopedia project has to do in an art exhibition? The biggest success of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is that it does actually work. This simple fact is something hard to illuminate thus we want to bring it into the context of the exhibition.

Can editing of a Wikipedia article be understood as an artistic act?



Wikipedia is the victory of knowledge sharing and the essence of community supervised quality. It is important that all of us can be part of this dialogue, but it is good that there are experts in the community who do recover from mistakes.



In this promotional video for wikisprint Alvy (Woody Allen) gets in a quarrel with a Professor while they were queuing in a cinema, but fortunately McLuhan himself is at hand, and so he resolves all contentious issues.