I like to add interesting bits of trivia to some of my scrapbook pages. If I attend a baseball game, I include the score of the game on my layout. When I did a page about my walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, I included some facts about the bridge. Most of this information is pretty easy to find, but I thought I would tell you about a four different ways you can use Wikipedia in your scrapbooks.
Tip #1: Time
You can use Wikipedia to give you ideas as to what to scrapbook. Searching by month gives you a lot of great ideas of interesting facts to include about any given month. Taking this a step further, you can scroll down to the bottom of the page of the month you have selected and choose a specific day. All of a sudden you have information on things like famous people born on a particular day in history. There are also links to external sites with more events that occurred on a particular day. What a great way to scrapbook a birthday in a new way.
Tip #2: Places
Do you ever travel to new places? Do you ever travel to the same place over and over again? Well, look up that place on Wikipedia. If its a state, you’ll learn the state’s flower, bird, and other interesting facts about the state. Out of curiosity, I looked up my hometown and my itty-bitty hometown (pop. 5,685) has some information available. What an easy way to find out new details about a place you visited.
Tip #3: Favorites
Look up your favorite things. Whether you enjoy Trader Joe’s or ice cream, you can find an entry on your favorite thing. If you are making pages about the more everyday aspects of your life or completing a book of me album, you find it entertaining to learn more about your favorites.
Tip#4: Events
Maybe you attended the Super Bowl. Maybe you hosted a Super Bowl party. Either way, you can often find entries about specific events. The Super Bowl has a general entry plus additional entries for each Super Bowl. If you can’t remember the score of a game or want to learn the history of an event, check it out on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a great source to find trivial information about things that matter to you.
Stephanie
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
