Wiki@Home/en

Wiki@Home is a project managed by some members of Wikimedia Italia, together with the Italian version of Wikinews.

The project aims to contact notable people and to interview them. In this way, we can also explain what Wikipedia and her sister projects really are, and try and find some possible collaboration. We reach an interviewee because a member of Wikimedia Italia already knows her/him; the interviewer is not a professional journalist but a (maybe different) member of WMI with a personal interest in the topic. The community also arranges the questions which will be made: the result is usually a friendly exchange of opinions, as opposed to a formal interview.

There are already a number of interviews (all in Italian, of course).

Among the people interviewed there is Antonio Spadaro, a Jesuit priest who is in the board of the Civiltà Cattolica, an influential review which is an unofficial voice for the Holy See: Father Spadaro is an expert of "new media" and back in 2006 he made a deep analysis of Wikipedia with its strenghts and weaknesses. Antonio Serra is an important Italian comic-strip writer; a nice byproduct of the interview is that he gave us some comics produced by him for inclusion in Wikipedia.

The project is ongoing: we are now scheduling an interview with Margherita Hack, a well-known astrophysicist who was our host at an event attended by WMI in Bologna.