Building a Wikipedia Article from Scratch
Since 2009, I have been contributing to Vikipeedia, the Estonian-language version of Wikipedia.
Over time, curiosity about history turned into hundreds of edits, designing and editing visual material, new articles and more evenings on Vikipeedia than I probably care to admit. The same interest in the Estonian War of Independence that had inspired the game design of Wabatahtlised (2008) eventually led me to writing about the topic on Vikipeedia as well.
Danes fighting for Estonia in 1919
In spring 2013, I participated in a Denmark-themed Wikipedia article competition organized by the Danish Cultural Institute, the Royal Danish Embassy and Wikimedia Estonia. My contribution focused on the article about the Danish Volunteer Company that participated in the Estonian War of Independence.
I liked that it was such a niche subject. The time frame was short, the number of sources limited and the scale small enough that, at least in theory, it seemed possible to find out every little detail about what happened.
Influence
I have been curious about the Estonian War of Independence since I was about ten years old. It was our own war that we had actually won, full of our own battles, characters and heroic stories, and as a child I found that fascinating.
A Danish company participating in the war is a less known subject. I first became interested in it through the memoirs of Richard Gustav Borgelin, the Danish captain who led the volunteer company to Estonia.
The book that sparked my interest in the subject.
What fascinated me was seeing the Estonian War of Independence and the newly forming Estonian military through the eyes of a Dane. His account provided much of the story, but I still needed other sources to verify details and establish the correct timeline and wider context.
A Historical Detective Case
In addition to writing and referencing the article itself, I searched for archival material, restored and processed scanned historical photographs, designed a map and created original visual elements to help structure the topic more clearly for readers.
What began as a writing project gradually turned into a historical detective story. The more I read, the more questions appeared. Why were the Danes here, fighting for Estonia's freedom? How did they see us? What happened to these people afterwards?
A large part of the process involved comparing fragmented historical sources and building a coherent overview from information scattered across different materials and languages.
I genuinely enjoyed chasing those answers. There was something fascinatingly exotic about discovering Danish volunteers in the middle of Estonian history and then trying to piece together their stories from old photographs, memoirs and archival documents.
The Story That Keeps Growing
The article later received a special prize in the Denmark–Estonia category. More importantly, it gave me an excuse to spend an unreasonable amount of time reading about a topic that genuinely interested me.
One thing I like about Wikipedia is that an article is never really finished. It is a living thing: when new sources, photographs or details surface, they can be added, corrected and connected to what is already there, gradually making the article more complete.
The original Estonian article has since also been translated and adapted into several other languages across Wikipedia.
