It all begins with an idea for an edit….

Learn to add text and a citation to a Wikipedia page.

When you have found a page that needs an image, it’s very simple to add it to the page. This video illustrates the “Visual Editor” that lets you simply click a menu and add an image.

It’s really quite easy to do, and can make a lot of difference on lace pages.

You might have a great example of a lace style, or a special regional bobbin, or some lace ephemera that should be seen by the world. This video explains how to add images into Wikimedia Commons, so they can be used on Wikipedia pages.

If you want to try to edit, the first step is to create an account. This 5 minute video shows you where to go to start.

Choose a username (anonymous or pseudonymous is fine—real name is not required). Set a password. Start reading the guidelines and click around.

This video gives an overview of the Enhancing Lace in Wikipedia project. The aims of the project, the reasons that it is important, and how to find us and participate.

I’ve been inspired by Molly White’s work, and here she encourages you to begin to edit in Wikipedia with some helpful beginner information.

As a new editor, adding changes to existing pages is a good way to become familiar with Wikipedia editing. Creating a new article from scratch is an extra hurdle.

Adding images to Wikimedia Commons makes them available to others to improve the pages.

Infoboxes add structured data to a page, which is easier for search engines to process. This makes it more likely that the information would be discovered by people searching for it.

My personal journey to lace includes immersion in Ipswich lace history and reproduction. In this talk that my colleagues and I did for the Maine Historical Society, you can learn more about this special New England lace.

Mundillo lace, made in Puerto Rico, is a bobbin lace with a characteristic lace roller pillow.

Alençon lace is a needle lace, that is: made with needle and thread and not with bobbins. This video (in French) illustrates how that is done.

Reticella is one of the oldest forms of lace, and it is another kind of needle and thread lace.

A needle lace from Italy, practiced still today in Burano, uses a pillow as a base and an additional object to lift the pattern up.

This video shows the basics of tatting with a shuttle. There is another type of tatting—needle tatting—with a similar outcome but a different tool.

A lacemaker from the Queyras region of France uses a specific kind of lace pillow called a “tambour” or drum pillow.

In Italian, but largely music and making bobbin lace on large bolster pillows.

There is a broad community of tatters around the world, and videos are often made to be accessible in multiple languages. But sometimes just watching is enough if you have the basics down.

This lace machine, from a museum exhibit, appears to be a Barman machine. It makes copies of some of the simpler laces using the same motions a lacemaker would.