Wikipedia:Meetup/DC 13/Notes

Attendees

User:Aude
User:Mindspillage
User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao - was an art history major!
User:Edsu
User:Econterms + User:Bkwillwm from Bureau of Labor Statistics
User:CutOffTies

Topics

Social media outreach

The fundraiser has been launched, we are getting record donations, though the past few days had some technical glitches. The fundraiser is being done in a much more grassroots way this year, getting volunteers to submit ideas for banners, etc.

Something else new this year is that we are engaging in outreach via social media. We have Twitter and Identica accounts (@wikicontribute) which is run jointly by WMF staff and volunteers. We are monitoring tweets that mention "wikipedia" and thanking people who tweet that they donated. There are canned tweets (suggested wording once you donate) and some people have their own unique things to say about donating. We especially try to recognize these, and RT interesting and pertinent things.

Once the fundraiser reaches its target, we want to turn our social media outreach efforts to involve and engage more people in contributing to Wikipedia. These kind of contributions are just as important as monetary contributions.

In getting feedback via Twitter, we also see numerous messages about how helpful and useful Wikipedia is to people. User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao noted that (w/ the NY Times article about Liam Wyatt, and the article a couple years ago about Epicadam) that the media and the public are taking Wikipedians and Wikipedia much more seriously.

Dan and Deniz were supposed to join us via Skype to talk more, but couldn't (and wifi didn't work). Instead, they gave User:Aude an e-mail with info. She summarized it, but felt it best to forward the e-mail to the mailing list or have Dan/Deniz do so.

TODO - Dan and Deniz, send e-mail to wikimedia-dc list!

Public policy initiative

The public policy initiative is a grant-funded initiative to enable collaboration between Wikimedia and universities around the United States. The purpose is to improve Wikipedia articles pertaining to public policy — an area of Wikipedia identified as being weaker [than other topics] and in need of improvement. The idea is to get students to work on improving Wikipedia articles in the area of public policy, as opposed to just writing term papers that get discarded after the semester.

In the DC area, participants in the Wikimedia public policy initiative include professors and students at George Mason University (one class?), at Georgetown University, and George Washington University. For each class, Wikimedia has volunteer campus ambassadors assigned to help guide the instructor and students, and provide some training. (?) The program also involves online ambassadors who can be mentors for the students and provide online help.

For the Fall semester, the program is going very well at Georgetown, but not quite as successful so far at GWU. For the Spring semester, we can keep some of the professors in the program, while others might not continue and there will be room for new professors and courses. Wikimedia Foundation is also recruiting new campus ambassadors for open slots, and always recruiting more Wikipedians to be online ambassadors.

Smithsonian

This past June, the Smithsonian hosted Wikipedians for a meetup at the National Museum of the American Indian. Alex (User:Sadads) was key in getting this organized, along with User:Digitaleffie of the Smithsonian Archives. We had previous contacts with the Smithsonian via the NYC chapter, with participation in Wikipedia Loves Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in February 2009. More recently, people at the Smithsonian took notice of what Liam Wyatt was doing, as "Wikipedian in Residence" at the British Museum. Thus, we had the June 2010 meetup to discuss ways Wikipedians in the DC area could collaborate with folks at the Smithsonian.

In August, we conducted a workshop for the Smithsonian, bringing together approximately 20 of their staff — many working in areas of web outreach and digital humanities — from various museums, libraries and archives around the Smithsonian. Since then, Alex (Sadads) has returned to university, at James Madison University, and has been away and busy with school, as well as his role as campus ambassador there. He is off to the UK in the spring. So, either the collaboration was going to wither, or someone else was needed to carry things forward.

As a long-time "patron" of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I (User:Aude) have been following them on Twitter and Facebook. In late September, I commented on their Facebook status about their Cristo & Jean Claude exhibition closing, saying how "I really enjoyed the exhibition, thank you! and look forward to what's next" (me not really knowing what's next, but likes everything!) Sometime later, SAAM replied and referred to their listing of upcoming exhibitions, planned through 2012. I noticed the next exhibition was to feature the work of contemporary artist Alexis Rockman, and noticed his Wikipedia article was a mere paragraph. Yet, he is a very notable and accomplished artist. This seemed like a good opportunity for Wikipedians to work with SAAM on improving his Wikipedia biography. SAAM can help direct us to reference sources, give peer review, help us obtain images of the artist, etc., and we can handle wiki-markup, writing, and dealing with wiki processes. Along the way, SAAM people can get a better idea of how things work on Wikipedia. So, for the past month, I have worked on expanding the Alexis Rockman article, getting it featured in the "Did you know..." section of Wikipedia's Main Page. I'm still struggling with connecting with the right people at SAAM but have made progress. I'm also having difficulty with obtaining some reference materials (checked out of the Smithsonian Libraries, obviously by the SAAM curators). But, still optimistic, and I'm also now in contact with the artist (who noticed his article changed!).

In process of working on the Alexis Rockman article, I am now in contact with people at the Archives of American Art. One of their staff was at our August workshop. They are very interested in collaborating with us! The next steps with them is to compile a list of artists that they have papers and materials for. They will provide the list, we will wikify and organize. We will work with them to identify 5-10 articles that are not so great quality now but they could make a big impact on improving, given their knowledge and resources. Some of their staff may be interested in helping with these. After the holidays, we may do a brown bag lunch presentation focusing on how they could contribute and collaboration options. They also have images and materials, some which they could go on Wikimedia Commons and some could be published on their site, particularly original materials like papers which don't quite belong in Wikipedia. They also understand about copyrights and our stringent policies, and a task for them will be to better evaluate the status of items in their collections. This is a one-time task, once done is done, but is quite a task. For the summer or as a longer-term possibility is to bring in an intern to work on some of these tasks, as a "Wikipedian in Residence" or something.

At the end of October, I also had the opportunity, along with Liam Wyatt, to attend the Museum Computer Network (MCN) conference. The conference focuses on technology and digital humanities. There, I made additional contacts with the Smithsonian (Natural History, Air & Space, American History), as well as the National Gallery of Art. This means that if we have Wikipedians who want to collaborate on something in one of those topic areas, we are better capable of connecting volunteers and Smithsonian and other museum folks. And, they have a better understanding of what we do.

At MCN (and prior), I also have met and talked with someone at the Holocaust Museum who is also very interested in working with Wikipedians and perhaps having an intern to contribute to Wikipedia.

Now the interest from cultural insitutions in working with us is growing quite a lot, so we need to think about how to scale and manage things. An idea for future article collaborations and organizing things could be to structure in the way that the public policy program is. To have *campus* ambassadors or Wikipedians in Residence who can provide onsite support, training, and coordination, together with online ambassadors or mentors who can also help. We may also want to reach out to professors and involve students, say an art history class, connect students with resources at the Smithsonian and have them work on Wikipedia articles about art. This approach might work with the Archives of American Art.

Talking with User:Ser Amantio di Nicolao, we found out he was an art history major in college! He thinks potential good partnerships could include the National Museum of Women in the Arts. He is also very keen on us focusing on African-American (and African) art and topics, to help address the problem of systematic bias on Wikipedia. The American art contacts we have now could help connect us with people and get us going in that direction.

National Archives

The National Archives is another big collaboration possibility. Beginning in the summer, I have been involved with the FedFlix project. This is spearheaded by Carl Malamud who is a proponent of putting public domain materials online and such. He is working to put online video obtained from the NTIS and the Pentagon, and has a group of DC area volunteers going to the national archives 2 in college park to duplicate videos (DVDs). The archives sends the duplicated DVDs to Carl who then uploads them to YouTube and the Internet Archive. 99% of the material is in the public domain and in ogg theora format which is good for wikipedia. I've been thinking about ways for Wikipedia to make use of the materials, and setting up WikiProject FedFlix. There is much potential for Wikipedians to support FedFlix directly and in a complementary way, with major benefits for everyone. (we get more video, make articles better, make good use of features developed by Michael Dale and put the technology to use, etc.)

Bureau of Labor Statistics

User:Econterms and User:Bkwillwm talked about what the Bureau of Labor Statistics is doing, and interest they have in making their economic data available to Wikipedia. There is a possibility of taking the stats and generating infoboxes that could go in articles like Economy of Virginia. If the infoboxes go in such articles, it's probably agreeable to Wikipedians, whereas the information could be too specific to go in a general overview article like Virginia. The BLS could have a bot to facilitate this.

We talked about what level of disclosure is recommended and what issues could there be with Federal employees editing and doing this? from the perspective of the government, as well as from Wikipedians? We think maximum disclosure and transparency is best. For dealing with getting government approval and a policy for participating in Wikipedia, it's noted that some government agencies do have policies in place now for participating in social media sites (e.g. Twitter). In particular, the Department of Defense has addressed this and now has a policy that permits employees to tweet, etc.

Naming the bot, for example, "BLS_bot", would be good. Also, talking with people in states WikiProjects, as well as those who maintain Infobox_settlement is a good idea, and they can give feedback and/or point in the right direction to talk to other people. Initially, the idea can be tried with manual edits, but as the idea and implementation materialize, there could be a bot and it would be proposed through the bot approval process.

Related to the idea of bot generated and maintained economic statistics infoboxes, we remember that Rambot created articles in ~2004 about each US census place, based on 2000 census data. With the 2010 census just conducted, we wonder if/how all the 2000 data in Wikipedia will get updated? Most of the articles have changed since they were created and not in a standard format.

User:Aude also brought up the fact that the World Bank is putting out data (data.worldbank.org) about various countries and is big on "open data". If Wikipedians are open to the idea of taking in such data, we are certain the World Bank would allow and want us to take it (we can sort through any copyright issues with them). The question is if/how Wikipedians would want the data, recognizing that people do protest the World Bank and their data might not be considered neutral. But then, it may fill in where we have no info now or we have info from the CIA World Factbook. (CIA = yay, neutral!) Undertaking something like this would take effort of Wikipedians, and not sure we have the capacity right now it's out there as a possibility.

An important benefit and opportunity of putting economic statistics and info out on Wikipedia is that it will get translated into other languages, and be available on Spanish Wikipedia, German Wikipedia, etc.

Wikipedia 10th anniversary

Wikipedia's 10th anniversary is coming up soon, in mid-January. Do we want to do anything special in DC to celebrate? Maybe not on the same exact day as events in NYC, SF, Boston, but maybe the following weekend we could do something. User:Phoebe will be in DC and would be awesome to do something then, like a day for a mini wiki conference. We need someone to take the lead in organizing this. This might take place at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), maybe similar in some ways to our meetup last January at the Library of Congress (w/ lots of attendees) but better organized this time.

Next meetups

We had a smallish turnout, yet it was somewhat short notice and first time to try something on a weeknight. The size was good to get useful discussion and people could all hear each other. We got people for whom the evening/weekday time of the meetup convenient since they already are in DC for work, but it's a bit of effort to come on the weekend. Yet, we were missing people who can come on the weekend but can't make it into DC on a weeknight.

There seems to be no perfect meetup time/day for everyone. So, it seems best to keep doing events, perhaps doing them more often, and worth trying a weeknight again but definitely vary the time/day/format of the meetups. We have enough to do and talk about to make them more often (monthly?). We might also want to try things like attending Smithsonian events together (there is a film series at SAAM and lectures coming up in the winter). Even if just a few people can attend, this sort of activity together could be a good thing?

DC chapter

If we want to hire an intern or do such activities that require getting and spending $, it would help to have a chapter in place to help facilitate.

Options are to do a local DC chapter and do all the paperwork (non-profit status, etc.) ourselves. The downside is the duplicate paperwork and efforts, but the positive is that it helps to work with and approach local organizations as the *DC* chapter rather than a branch of the NYC or northeast chapter. I think we are as a group in favor of this.

Though, if possible and it won't lesson our autonomy, we would like to see some collaboration and minimize duplication of efforts. Pharos has suggested we have a US Chapters or volunteer council (not a new idea, been on meta wiki for a while) or some loose structure to help coordinate things on a national level. This would involve Wikipedians in places like Chicago where they are not strong enough yet to have a chapter and only do sporadic meetups. But, we may have GLAM organizations come to us and it would help to have someone to point them to.

Questions remain as to how much autonomy and localized we want the DC *chapter* to be. There are trade-offs either way, in going with a 100% local, autonomous chapter or regionalising things with less autonomy. What's the right balance for us? It needs broader and more discussion among our local group, as well as US Wikimedians, so we can come to some consensus. And, sooner than later. By spring, it would be great to have a DC organization in place and be there to facilitate anything we want to do in the summer (e.g. have a summer intern).

See meta:Wikimedia_United_States_Chapters_Council for brainstorming ideas (everything is totally a draft and just ideas at this point) but please discuss!

GLAM-Wiki DC symposium

User:Edsu suggests (and we agree) there is enough interest in DC area for collaboration between cultural institutions and Wikipedia. It could be worthwhile to organize meetups focused on this, and perhaps a day or so as a conference or symposium where people from various organizations can talk, learn, and share ideas. He might be willing to host us for something (also for meetups!!!). This could be in the Spring.

Wikipedia Takes Baltimore event

In the Spring or summer, we have people in Baltimore (w/ historical society) who would like to support us to have a Wikipedia Takes Baltimore event. This would be similar to Wikipedia Takes Manhattan, to get volunteers to take and contribute photographs of historic places around Baltimore. Such an event would help perhaps to engage new (e.g not been to a meetup before) Wikipedians, and spread our focus outside of DC proper.

Next steps

Summer internship possibilities:

Smithsonian Archive of American Art
Holocaust Museum
National Archives

The interns could be hired through the institutions, rather than by Wikimedia DC, but we can provide mentorship, be ambassadors and help out.

We need volunteers to help with things:

outreach to Smithsonian, we may do more workshops, article collaborations or help them with images (various type of help needed)
someone who can connect people / wikipedians and outreach in area of visual arts (e.g. maybe a campus ambassador type person or maybe we will have a wikipedian in residence)
someone who can outreach to Wikipedians in area of WWII, history and the Holocaust (same sort of role as above)
lead discussion about Wikimedia DC and a US chapters council, and figure out next steps (need multiple people, we need consensus and involve enough people in discussions, yet not discuss forever and not achieve anything!)
someone to lead organization of Wikipedia 10 anniversary event
people to help with organizing meetups & events
more help...

Ideas

suggest we work w/ National Museum of Women in the Arts (database - clara)
we (wikipedians) are being treated more seriously by the media, etc. nowadays
work on african art / with the museum!
want more outreach and build involvement in africa, etc. topics