Wikipedia:Meetup/Adelaide/Meetup 16

Adelaide Meetup
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Meetup 16 - Thursday 7 May 2015

Time: 8pm, following the public launch of the Port Adelaide wiki at the Port Adelaide Library (5-8pm).

Location: TBA, at a nearby pub or restaurant in Port Adelaide.

Agenda: Post-launch discussion of the semantic media wiki for Port Adelaide

Guests: Members of the Port of Adelaide Branch of the National Trust of SA involved in setting up the wiki

List of current members of the Adelaide Wikipedia Users Group

Please add your username if you are interested in joining in group activities:

Timeline

Early discussions

In late 2014 Bahudhara met with a number of organisations, including Port of Adelaide Branch of the National Trust (PoANT), Port Adelaide Historical Society, Woodville Historical Society, and the Port Adelaide Residents Environment Protection Group, which showed varying levels of interest. He also met in September with the president of the Gawler Local History Group, which operates the Gawler Now and Then wiki, and in January 2015 with members of the Willunga Branch of the National Trust, who maintain the Gawler Now and Then wiki.

Other PoANT members raised the project with the Port Adelaide University of the Third Age, where there is some interest.

The October 2014 Meetup was held at the SA Maritime Museum. The director, Kevin Jones, said that the SAMM's efforts are currently being directed towards Adelaidea and the SA History Hub, which have been set up by History SA. (These aren't wikis as such, instead being themed collections of short essays written by experts, with attached blogs for public comment; there is no map interface, such as the Now and Then wikis have.)

At the October meeting of the PoANT committee, a letter to the CEO of the National Trust of SA was tabled and approved, requesting that he negotiate with Darren Peacock over an appropriate licence for the Port Adelaide Now and Then wiki. Darren earlier indicated that a cloned empty shell of the wiki could subsequently be hosted and ready by mid-November, but later said that it would be created by the end of this year.

A tentative launch date for the wiki was originally suggested for late January 2015, but was delayed for a number of reasons.

History SA coordinates events for the annual "About Time" history festival which takes place in May, and to register the public launch of the wiki in the event calendar (which had to be done by the end of January), the date of 7 May was selected, even though the wiki still hadn't been set up then. Further delays in setting up the wiki software have occurred, but it is now expected to be in place by April 24 at the latest.

A number of people have expressed interest in contributing to the wiki, but due to the short timeframe it is expected that only a limited amount of content will be added prior to the actual launch. Some topics may be covered in greater depth, but many others will only be in the form of 'stubs'. Rather than being viewed as a negative, this will be promoted as an opportunity for others in the community to become contributors to the wiki.

While a lot of the content of the wiki will be of material that may not meet Wikipedia's strict notability and verifiability standards, it can be expected that through being created by a community of contributors known to each other (rather than by anonymous editors) drawing on their own extensive knowledge and experience, that a high standard can be achieved. As a parallel project, several PoANT members are being trained through the State Library in recording oral history interviews.

Launch of the Port Adelaide wiki

Time: Thursday 7 May, 5-8pm.

Location: Port Adelaide Library, 2 Church Street, Port Adelaide

Location: Please note that it is essential to book for the event at: Launch of "Port Adelaide Now and Then" community heritage wiki.

Resources

Port Adelaide Enfield Local History - a new addition to the Council's website, using a GIS-style map interface with historical aerial photography and maps to geolocate the local library's collection of around 2,000 historic photos. The launch of the website was reported in the Portside Messenger as "Story map of Port Adelaide Enfield's colourful past an Australian-first" on 20 August 2014.

Couper-Smartt, J (February 2003). Port Adelaide: Tales from a "Commodious Harbour". Friends of the South Australian Maritime Museum Inc. ISBN 0-646-42058-5.

The proposal for the Port Adelaide semantic wiki involves creating a clone of the community history wikis discussed by Darren Peacock at Meetup 11 in July:

Now and Then Mallala

Now and Then Gawler

Now and Then Willunga

N.B. - there is also an Adelaide Hills wiki with pages on the history of Hahndorf and Mount Barker, with a relatively unsophisticated interface compared to the Now and Then wikis.

The Dreadnought Project - a naval history wiki focusing on naval history in the period 1880-1920.

"The Dreadnought Project augments rather than replaces the information available on Wikipedia. While Wikipedia has many well-crafted articles on the ships and navies of this period, its policies bar editors from using primary source materials and from doing original research. By contrast, our articles exploit our large and growing library (currently well over 50,000 pages) of original documents, affording a natural opportunity to advance public knowledge by bringing more information out of the world of archives and closed collections and into a place where a Google search can find it. Unlike paper publications, we are not hindered by page counts and we can freely go back and fix errors. We find this a rewarding way to explore history."

An interesting approach, and a good source for info and images of naval vessels visiting Port Adelaide, such as those participating in the arrival of the Australasian Auxiliary Squadron on 2 October 1891, and the associated events.

List of Wikipedia articles which may be in need of improvement

For noting

Summary of Meetup 16

Attendees

AWUG members: Bahudhara

Guest speaker: Dr Darren Peacock (CEO, National Trust of SA)

Others: Brian Samuels (Port Adelaide Historical Society); Jimbo (WOW FM 100.5); committee members of the Port of Adelaide branch of the National Trust; and members of the public, making a total of 20 participants.

Apologies

One, from a PoANT committee member.

Reports and comments

The event, held as part of the "About Time" History Festival. was hosted by Merdith Blundell, Local History Librarian of the Port Adelaide Library, which kindly provided some nibbles for the occasion.

Although billed as being the launch of the "Port Adelaide Now and Then" wiki, there had been an unfortunate series of delays (the shell of the new wiki had only just been created as an unmodified clone of the Willunga Now and Then wiki, with fresh content - including stubs for more than 20 articles already submitted by PoANT members - still to be added).

Dr Peacock's presentation was essentially the same as that given at Meetup 11 in July 2014 and later at the rather poorly-attended AGM of the Friends of Torrens Island in November 2014.

The larger audience at this event showed great interest, with many questions being asked. Dr Peacock suggested that the group needed to become more organised, with members agreeing to take on specific responsibilities for roles such as administering the wiki, and the associated Flickr account.

Outcomes

As progress on the Port Adelaide Now and Then wiki stalled after its "soft launch" on 7 May, "Plan B" was implemented instead.

This involved setting up a new MediaWiki installation from scratch, entitled the "Port Adelaide Wiki" (PAW). Since being set up on 17 May 2015, progress was slow at first due to the steep learning curve involved. With increasing experience, the wiki has been expanded with new sections containing article stubs for all the entries on the Bird species list for Torrens Island (completed in time for the recent eco-summit on the Adelaide International Bird Sanctuary, held 13-14 August 2015), and for many of the names on the Workers' Memorial in Port Adelaide. As the Workers' Memorial will celebrate its centenary in December 2018, getting this project underway now will ensure that it will comprise a substantial body of work by that date.

The wiki now has a new URL, at: Port Adelaide Wiki. The hosting platform has also been upgraded for greater speed and responsiveness.

The PAW concept is rather different from the Now and Then wikis in more closely emulating Wikipedia, particularly through the importation of WP templates for infoboxes, navbars, etc. and customising them to suit the new wiki. (One advantage of this is that future PAW editors will be trained in using essentially the same editing interface as Wikipedia, thus enabling them to transition to editing WP if they so desire. The Now and Then wikis use a semantic form-based approach for editing input, more suitable for very inexperienced users.)

However the PAW will differ from Wikipedia in a number of significant ways, particularly in having more relaxed policies on "Notability", "Verifiability", and "No original research", thus allowing a greater capture of local knowledge. (In a parallel project, National Trust members of the local branch have been undergoing training in techniques of recording oral histories, theough courses run by the State Library of SA.) It is anticipated that quality issues can be adequately addressed by having an active and engaged community of local editors overseeing the project and meeting on a regular basis. Anonymous IP editing will not be allowed, to minimise vandalism.

As interest in the new wiki grows, it is anticipated that classes to train new editors will be held at the Port Adelaide Library in the near future.