Thank You/Iolanda Pensa

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If only my grandfather could have seen Wikipedia, he would have loved it.
He considered the center of the world to be our little village in northern Italy, Esino Lario. And after the second world war, he started collecting Esino’s local history &mdash; documents and archives dating all the way back to the 14th century, even some incredible photos of the mountains nearby and the whole Lake Como area. Today, I’m carrying on his life work and his passion for recording local history and heritage. The difference is I have a tool my grandfather did not &mdash; Wikipedia. We created a center in Esino to give his collection a space where scholars could see it. But since we started uploading it to Wikipedia, anyone, anywhere in the world, can access this wealth of knowledge &mdash; all for free. There are millions of pages of local history on Wikipedia, offering a unique glimpse into life in one small town within the vast scope of world history. I volunteer a little of my time, and Wikipedia does the rest.

None of this would have been possible without Wikipedia.

Your knowledge is needed, too. Will you help keep this amazing collective resource online for the world to use?

 &mdash; Iolanda Pensa

''Iolanda Pensa was born in Switzerland and currently lives in Milan, Italy. Beginning in high school, she’s traveled everywhere from the U.S. to the U.K. and from Russia to Africa. An active Wikipedia contributor since 2006, Iolanda is deeply involved with the WikiAfrica project, which has produced more than 30,000 uploads to expand knowledge about Africa. She works as scientific director and curator of projects for lettera27, a nonprofit organization promoting literacy.''

Image Attribution: by Adam Novak, under [//creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported], from Wikimedia Commons.