Freopedia

Freopedia is a project to build a community-driven encylopedia of Fremantle. It encompasses Wikipedia articles, Wikimedia Commons categories, Wikidata items, and a standalone wiki at freopedia.org (that you care currently reading).

History

There are a few starting points for the current form of Freopedia:

In 2012 the Freopedia WikiProject was established on English Wikipedia, to improve coverage of Fremantle topics in the encyclopedia. It followed the example of Monmouthpedia, a 'WikiTown' project in Wales, and installed around 50 QR Code plaques on buildings around the West End; these could be scanned by passers-by to retrieve Wikipedia articles in their own language.

In about 2014 Garry Gillard started building a website, called Fremantle Stuff (later Freotopia), about the history of Fremantle, that would expand over time to include many hundreds of pages and thousands of photos. He researched and wrote about a wide range of topics, and included original material from many sources, including the full texts of a number of significant written works about Fremantle (such as all articles of the Fremantle History Society's journal Fremantle Studies, and Hitchcock's 1929 History of Fremantle).

In 2024 Garry donated the contents of Freotopia to the Wikimedia movement, in the hope that people would continue to research and add to the material. It was decided that the material should be added to a new site, called Freopedia, which would provide a platform for anyone interested in Fremantle history to be able to improve the articles. This new platform would make it easier for multiple people to work on articles. This migration of material is, as of September 2024, still underway.

In 2010, the Fremantle Society started a website called FreoWiki, which was hoped to become a general repository for information about Fremantle. The main part of it that did get worked on was the digitisation, uploading, and description of the three and a half thousand photos of the Fremantle Society Photographic Survey that members took in the 1970s. This project was the first comprehensive assessment of the heritage importance of thousands of buildings around Fremantle. In 2024 the FreoWiki material (i.e. mostly the FSPS photos, but also hundreds of pages about streets and people) was added to Freopedia.

Organisation

The future of the material on Freopedia is still under discussion as of 2024, and policies around editorial control, what to include and what to leave out, and other issues will be figured out soon and documented here.