How you can help
There are hundreds or thousands of personal accounts of the war online, whether on large sites like Europeana 1914-1918, national libraries and archives, or individual diaries transcribed and posted online through small local projects. The challenge is to link these personal accounts by creating links from the individual who wrote them to their military unit.
In this phase of the project, the aim is find a personal narrative - a diary, letters, memoirs or images - for each military battalion or regiment in the Allied Armies.
Have you got a few free minutes to take on a small research challenge?
Getting started is easy:
- Take one of the personal diaries, letters or memoirs listed
- Match its author with a regiment or battalion. Sometimes you can find them just by googling their name, sometimes it'll require sleuthing through World War One records
- Send in the results via this form or edit the wiki directly to add their diary to the relevant battalion or regiment page
Other ways you can help
- Add to the lists of personal diaries, letters, memoirs. If you're not used to wikis, use this form to suggest a link.
- Add to the list of official unit diaries and histories
- Spread the word! Tell your local history group, museum, library or archive about this project and suggest they add any diaries they know about
- Add lessons you've learnt about researching World War One records and information about private letters, diaries and memoirs to help others get started and learn how to interpret what they're seeing
- Help fill in the battalions for each regiment. Some battalions are already listed in the country pages on the left-hand side but populating the lists is a huge task. Find out more or discuss it on Populating lists of military units.
- Add detail for battalions through 'infoboxes' that describe how different military units were related to each other (this one is a bit more technical, Find out more or discuss it on Creating structured data about WWI military units
- Asking questions can also be helpful! You can start a conversation on the Talk page Talk:How you can help.
- If you have MediaWiki skills and can offer some help with structure, design, scripts or infoboxes, I'd love to hear from you! I'm aiming to keep a current To Do list on Talk:How you can help.
If you've got a diary you want to add now, search for their regiment or battalion - if the page doesn't already exist you will be prompted to create it. If you're not used to wikis, use this form to suggest a link. You can can also click on any red-linked page name to create that page.
Don't worry about doing it perfectly, any help is better than none and it's easy to gradually improve wiki pages!
