Italy is a country well-known for its outstanding cultural heritage and beautiful landscape, but did you know that the country has an invisible fracture between North and South? The economical and human ressources gap between the two sides of the country can be experienced in the frame of Wikimedia activities and community engagement as well.
In the Northern regions, that have access to more economical resources and where many of the students and workers emigrate, we can find a lot of active Wikimedia communities, partnerships with institutions including funding, events and meetups, etc. Meanwhile, in the Southern regions, which are facing a huge brain drain and whose population fluctuates according to the flow of holidaymakers, there tends to be fewer contributors, fewer organized groups, and GLAM institutions with whom Wikimedians traditionally build partnerships have access to fewer resources. This leads to less activity on the Wikimedia projects when it comes to the culture, heritage, biographies, languages and landscape of the Southern regions.
Faced with this situation, active contributors from the south of the country came together at the Italian WikiCon in Bari in 2023 to create WikiSud (Italy). The aim of this collective is to create more interaction between volunteers in the southern regions, to pool resources and ideas to carry out different projects, and to offer contribution activities for residents of the south and north, highlighting the cultural, historical and natural heritage of regions such as Sicily and Puglia.
During this presentation, we will take you through the collective's first steps, the various activities we've carried out, and our ideas for the future. Our aim is to inspire other people and affiliates facing similar challenges and to exchange ideas, in order to boost 🌶 the Wikimedia community and collaboration with institutions despite economic and structural barriers.

Session recording: https://youtu.be/FtaTgx73oZo?t=14277