Wikimedia Israel receives Roaring Lion award
Wikimedia Israel (WMIL) has won a Roaring Lion in the category of Internet and cellular for its public outreach during the tenth anniversary of the Hebrew Wikipedia in July 2013. The awards are given out annually by the Israel Public Relations Association and are modeled on the International Public Relations Association's Golden World Award.
Itzik Edri, the chairman of the board of the chapter, told us that they nominated themselves for the award after the smashing success of their planned celebrations, which included coverage in television, radio, Internet, and traditional print. About half of the coverage was pre-planned, with WMIL working with press organizations to provide accurate history and statistics: "To show the power of Wikipedia we collected a lot of numbers, such the most viewed articles of the last five years, numbers of edits, words and many others, [leading] to many items covering the history of [the Hebrew Wikipedia]", Edri said. Still, they wanted to go further.
To do so, they enlisted the help of Gideon Amichay, an Israeli advertising executive and professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Amichay went to Channel 2, one of Israel's most-watched channels, and proposed a partnership between the two. Channel 2 jumped on the opportunity, something that was unsurprising to Edri, who noted that it was a "collaborative project between the major channel news and the major knowledge website" which presented Channel 2 "as leaders—their senior staff were writing articles on Wikipedia and giving back to this huge project."
Amichay's idea manifested itself in five of Channel 2's senior reporters writing a Wikipedia article, after being trained to do so by Wikimedia Israel. The resulting five video segments, about a minute each, were broadcast over the span of a week. They received enough attention that they were shown again during the following week.
On 2 July, nearly a year after their efforts, representatives of WMIL traveled to the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv to receive their Roaring Lion. The award, which was first awarded in 2004, is given out for at least twelve categories and carries weight in the country; the Israel Public Relations Association, the organization behind the Lions, has 4000 members that represent a large majority of the PR professionals in business, the public service, and the voluntary sector. Previous winners have included the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2011, the Israeli government's Ministry of Tourism in 2012, Hassadah in 2013, and Israeli President Simon Peres' PR team in the same year.