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Welcome to Freopedia!

An encyclopedia of Fremantle, Western Australia.

This site currently contains 17,697 pages, including information about 551 streets and roads, 172 buildings, 109 people, and the following suburbs: Beaconsfield, East Fremantle (suburb), Fremantle (suburb), Hamilton Hill, Hilton, North Fremantle, O'Connor, Palmyra, Samson, South Fremantle, White Gum Valley.

Much of it is in a state of being re-organised at the moment, so please excuse any broken links or wayward formatting.

History of this site

There are a few starting points for the current website:

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.

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

For more information, please contact Sam Wilson.

Get involved

Some of the current work is:

• Importing Freotopia.
  • Import all text. Done
  • Import all images. Done
  • Updating the timeline. Done
  • Move all .html pages to have correct titles.
  • Fix up page headers (removing some banners, converting others to templates that can be used on sets of pages).
• Add all heritage-listed buildings with Wikidata IDs.
• Link or create pages for all relevant articles in English Wikipedia's Fremantle category, using the {{Wikipedia}} template.
• Fremantle Society Photographic Survey work:
  • Make sure all street pages are using the new {{FSPS street gallery}} template.
  • Add each photo to a building or street (or other) page.

Similar websites

Other places around Australia and the world have similar websites:

Australia

• Armadale, Western Australia: https://www.birtwistlewiki.com.au
• Gawler, South Australia: https://gawlerhistory.com
• Mallala, South Australia: https://mallala.nowandthen.org.au

International

• Karlsruhe, Germany: https://ka.stadtwiki.net
• Portland, OR, USA: https://portlandwiki.org
• Davis, CA, USA: https://daviswiki.org
• Charlottesville, VA, USA: http://www.cvillepedia.org
• Craighead County, USA: https://craigheadcountyhistory.miraheze.org
• London, UK: http://www.cityultima.com
• Córdoba, Spain: https://cordobapedia.wikanda.es