- Know My Name wrap up
- Research partnership
- Open discussion
Region: National
Location: https://wikimedia.blindsidenetworks.net
Share link: https://wikimedia.org.au/wiki/WMAU_Community_Meeting_(Mar_2020) – or download calendar item (.ics)
Keywords: Community meetingsReport
Attendees
- Robert: Big announcement coming tomorrow about Wikimania. OLE2129 (the Wikipedia unit?) is moving to virtual lectures next week.
- Matt Moore: Future of digital workplaces. Spent today talking to Toby about future of Wikidata. Introducing him to concepts of selling(?).
- Margaret Donald: Using QuickStatements to put botanical data onto Wikidata. Also a bit on Know My Name.
- Kerry: (no audio)
- Gillian White: In Sydney. Recently went to SLNSW edit-a-thon and was helped by Robert. Trained a newbie instead of editing. A keen and large group.
- Caddie Brain: In Canberra now, to go to uni; not sure how much more of that there will be. Recently organised Know My Name; will talk about this later.
- Anne Reynolds: Chasing women artists and their biographies. Also got two new members to wikiwrite(?) group. Thinking of moving meetings online.
- Pru: the bigbluebutton is available to all members for online wiki events.
- Amanda Lawrence: Melbourne at RMIT. Enjoying being in a meeting and making dinner at the same time. PhD at the moment, and sometimes helps with grant writing. Bringing WMAU into a current grant application.
- Alex: vice-president of WMAU. Been supporting Know My Name in Hobart. Been in too many meetings.
- Aplogy from Peter Jeremy who's been in too many meetings today.
- Kerry again: (still no audio)
Know My Name: celebrating women artists
- Massive congrats to Caddie. 7 events last weekend, huge impact. Was a team effort, with Caddie the leader.
- Caddie: exceeded expecteations. Lesseons learned, mainly the power of working together. Almost one in the core WMAU community didn't turn up. Deep team effort and that's why it worked.
- Seven events over two days, only missing Adelaide and Darwin; Alice Spring liked to see their name next to captial cities. Stats: 125 editors, 68 articles created, 223 edited. Normal editathon you're happy to get one or two people just editing, but these are very solid articles and large nubmers of people.
- Huge thank you to the whole community.
- Conversation now needed about what we can learn.
- Inter-institution organisational politics exists, but we navigated it. Multiple branding (KMN, A+F, etc.), but everyone was willing to work within that.
- Did surveymonkey survey afterwards. 17 responses: 65% excellent event. 88% likely to keep editing. Lots of anecdotal feedback too, available to share on nrequest.
- Events were about 3 hours; was a good lenght. Good energy in the rooms, people liked being part of a feminist event.
- Lessons: hard and time consuming to work with institutions. Wifi and power is very important. Getting people to sign up for Wikimedia accounts beforehand is hard; lots turned up without accounts. Organisers need admin or similar priveliges: to move pages, and grant autoconfirmed group membership. Following-up with people is challenging, kudos to everyone who's been reaching out to new editors. Good to get people to do things themsves, but this can mean less editing.
- Around the cities:
- Brisbane (Kerry): 2 hours advertised, which was a bit short. Some attendees had been to other events at the library. Five librarians were there to assist with research.
- Sydney (Ann, Margaret & Gillian): About 5 wikipedians, 44 attendees. Power not in sutable places, but someone fixed up some of that. Library provided heaps of devices, and large number (dozen) of attendees didn't have a device. Library organised free coffee. User account is important to assist on, along with user page as first edits (good intro).
- Canberra (Caddie): biggest win was that this was the first time they'd opened the research library within the NGA to the public. They're thrilled, and send thanks to everyone. Excited about future things; this partnership is in a fantastic place.
- Melbourne (Amanda): told people they could drop in at any time, but actually it didn't work well like that; better to make it clear that it's good to be there for the beginning and probably to stay for the whole three hours. Challenge: not allowed to plug anything in, and no big screen provided. A dedicated staff member was there to help.
- Hobart (Alex): small compared to others, 8-9 and a few came and went. Chief librarian of UTas attended and was supportive.
- Perth (Tom): brilliant event. Caddie talking on the ABC in the morning resulted in 3 people turning up out of the blue. Ted Snell dropped in and was supportive. A few people wanted to come to the WikiClubWest Thursday night meetups (which have been cancelled for now unfortunately, due to corunavirus). A number of very experienced art historians attended. Very good to follow-up with people after events.
- Get people to join the facebook group.
- Matt: have stories of the events been written down? Everyone should send their stories to Caddie. We should send out a press release about this: it's a good-news story!
Heather Ford, UTS
Is approaching WMAU community with a research proposal. "Who do we think we are? Wikipedia and Australian biographies"
First systematic study of australian biographies on Wikipedia. First draft of grant proposal is due by Friday; deadline with ARC is a few weeks after that.
Collaboration between UTS, Jumbunna Institude for Indigenous Education and Research, and WMAU.
1. mapping coverage on Wikipedia and gaps; 2. identify reasons for gaps; 3. create methodological framework for evaluation; 4. develop tools and suggest policies to improve quality and scope of biographies; 5. collaborate to improve and create articles in most needed areas.
- Kerry has sent Pru some comments and questions on the proposal and is happy to talk to Heather.
- Tom has been involved in how WMAU approaches Indigenous issues, and which can manifest in very strange ways in Wikipedia. Would really appreciate a conversation with Heather and Gideon.
- Alex offered help with data and analytics from the Wikimedia API.
Amanda Lawrence, RMIT
LIEF Grant proposal
- Linkage Infrastructure and Equipment Facilities from Australian Research Council does research linkages
- Infrastructure is to support research in a particular area
- Augmented intelligence for public health using linked data, using entity extraction
- Interested in what we can do with grey literature around policy reports and data sources - not so much academic journals which already have a lot of this done already
- Amanda suggested collaboration with WMAU - the team has minimal awareness of the Wikimedia projects
- Other ideas include text mining other sources, entity extraction, and maybe round tripping back into Wikidata
- Collaboration between Swinburne, RMIT, Griffith, ANU, Melbourne
- WMAU involvement would be getting a topic, list of sources and content
- In the long run, would be looking to build a wealth of reference material about certain topics
- Could involve community members to peer review training of machine learning output
- Suggest a community liaison manager to work with the team
- Toby and Matt have been working on a proposal about promoting Wikidata to organisations
- Margaret pointed us to the soweego project (https://soweego.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) which has some interesting parallels using machine learning to match datasets to Wikidata
- Attendee count: 15
- Cost to Wikimedia Australia: no cost