The places lost to wildfires this year aren’t just personal property.
Maybe it was your favorite hiking spot, or the 100-year-old family business that was part of your weekend errand routine. Maybe it was the beachside restaurant where you had that first date that changed everything, or the neighborhood watering hole where LA finally felt like home after you moved here.
If you’ve spent any significant time in Los Angeles, there’s a good chance you share some history with at least one of the 16,000 structures and landmarks that were damaged or destroyed in the January 2025 wildfires.
Some of their websites or Instagram pages are still up. There are articles strewn across the internet. But if you want their histories, their cultural heritages in context, those — like so many of the structures themselves — are largely scattered to the wind.
Which is why one organization is taking on a less traditional form of disaster relief: Fireproofing history, by preserving it online.
Signage outside the Nimoy Studio at the Hammer Museum directs people to the Wikipedia LA Wildfire Edit-A-Thon. Image by Gabriel Kaplan.
On a recent Sunday afternoon at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, as kids and couples mill about in the sunny courtyard between gallery visits, a series of Scotch-taped signs leading to the Nimoy Studio invites visitors to join in a different occasion: A Wikipedia LA Edit-A-Thon.
For five hours, two dozen or so walk-in volunteers and trained Wikipedia editors — who are also volunteers — congregate over laptops, cups of coffee, and donuts iced with the Wikipedia “W” logo. They’re writing new entries, adding citations, updating information, and uploading photos to Wikipedia articles related to the January 2025 wildfires.
Donuts iced with the Wikipedia “W” logo help sustain volunteers at WikiLA’s Wildfire Edit-A-Thon at the Hammer Museum.
“We have the potential, ourselves, to preserve this history, to preserve what we lost and make sure that what was destroyed in the fires isn't forgotten,” says Emery Dalesio, an aerospace engineer who moonlights as a volunteer facilitator, organizer, and editor with WikiLA, Wikipedia’s Los Angeles editing group.
Tallulah is a high school junior and first time editor who created the Wikipedia article for Malibu’s Cholada Thai restaurant, which was destroyed in the Palisades Fire.
“I found out it’s a family-owned business, and it’s really devastating that piece of community has been lost now,” she says. “I would really hope that there’s someone who is able to see that this place that they thought was just gone still has left a mark, even if it’s just in a digital sense.”
Examples of photos of Cholada Thai, prior to being destroyed by the Palisades Fire, that were added to the restaurant’s Wikipedia page at the Hammer Museum Edit-A-Thon. Photos courtesy of Wiki editor Jackg98/Wikipedia.
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist like Dalesio to edit Wikipedia articles.
“There’s no ‘Headquarters of Wikipedia,’” Dalesio says. “It's all people like you and me.”
The nonprofit does not pay its editors, nor does it have a marketing budget or other resources typically associated with large online platforms. The donations it solicits go towards “keeping the lights on.”
Editors pitch in when and how they can, as long as it's in keeping with Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines centered on writing articles without bias and representing all views fairly. The point is to make Wikipedia a better reflection of its goal: "a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."
Dalesio is quick to clarify that, contrary to common conception, Wikipedia is not a source; it's a collection of other sources, which editors are tasked with summarizing.
“Our job is not to go talk to everyone whose house burned down and figure out what happened. My job is not to go be a scientist and figure out how physics works,” he says. “My job is to go read what the physicist wrote and put that into words that other people can understand, to distill what's important about this, what is important about these fires.”
Volunteer Wikipedia editors work on an article about the Little Red Hen Coffee Shop, which was destroyed in the Eaton Fire. Image by Gabriel Kaplan.
To help the Hammer volunteers get started, the WikiLA team directs them to a suggested list identifying articles in need of updates and critical citations. There’s also a list of subjects that have been flagged as candidates for article creation, including Cholada Thai, the Malibu Feed Bin, Altadena Hardware, and the Little Red Hen Coffee Shop.
But editors can’t just create articles for whatever they want.
“Why should someone in China care about this, why should someone 100 years from now? What's important for them to get from it?” Dalesio says of the questions a Wiki editor should ask before writing. “ Just the fact that you met your wife at that McDonald's, that doesn't make it important. But maybe it's a particularly special McDonald's that is a really big one, and it's architecturally significant.”
Name tags and login materials await volunteers at WikiLA’s Wildfire Edit-A-Thon at the Hammer Museum. Image by Gabriel Kaplan.
Dalesio admits it’s more of an art than a science: “Those types of questions are hard to answer. There's a lot of dispute on Wiki we've been having. There's different factions of people that have different levels of, ‘Oh, well, I don't think that's notable, but that is.’”
The hard part, he says, and what Wikipedia tries to do, is arrive at a common understanding.
"So we get these different perspectives. And this is one of the things I think everyone can learn from Wikipedia — that when we're editing, we try and assume good faith.”
Which is why bringing in more volunteers through the edit-a-thons matters. WikiLA usually hosts around three edit-a-thons per year, but since the fires hit, they’ve already planned three just for the first few months of 2025.
A projector screen slide from WikiLA’s introductory presentation at the Hammer Museum Edit-A-Thon. Image by Gabriel Kaplan.
Shannon Vergun is a first-time Wikipedia editor who showed up to the Hammer with an abundance of photos from Malibu and the Palisades, where she grew up.
“I felt so helpless. I can't go back into the neighborhood. People don't need stuff. I don't have a whole lot of money to give. But I can definitely contribute to these archives,” she says.
Vergun says she tends to take way too many photos, as she did when she stopped by the Malibu Feed Bin a couple months ago. The decades-old pet supply and gift store was destroyed in the Palisades Fire days later.
Shannon Vergun (center) edits a Wikipedia article with two other volunteers at Hammer Museum. Image by Gabriel Kaplan.
“My family used to have horses, and we'd often go to the Malibu Feed Bin for supplies. We even bought chickens there. And I happened to go just the other day, just on a lark, and took, as usual, too many photos,” she says. “Now I know what to do with them.”
The Wiki page Vergun created for the Malibu Feed Bin is among more than 40 articles created or edited as a result of wildfire edit-a-thons. And they’re already resonating: WikiLA estimates that those articles have racked up more than 204,000 views since their edits.
The next edit-a-thon is slated for April 26 at Pasadena Heritage. If you want to get started sooner, the best way to do so is simply, as Dalesio puts it, “click the edit button” (and maybe check out this guide).
“Find something you think could be better, find a source that backs you up, click edit and do it. There’s no such thing as a small edit and the process itself is super easy,” he says. “ The best edit to make is the one you're actually going to do.”
Images and contributing reporting by Gabriel Kaplan.