Wikipedia:Meetup/Atlanta/Atlanta 4

Event

Wikipedia Loves Libraries 2012

Date

11/17/2012

Time

2:30 pm to 6 pm

Description

Wikipedia Loves Libraries

Venue:

Atlanta-Fulton Library System - Central Library
One Margaret Mitchell Square
Atlanta, GA 30303

Facebook event:

https://www.facebook.com/events/491701047518453/

Intended Audience

Anyone interested in Wikipedia (user, contributor or curious about it). Meetup is open to members of all Wikimedia projects and Wikipedians from all languages. All are welcome, and we are especially interested in seeing newcomers to join the experienced Wikipedians/Wikimedians. If you are interested in coming, please add your name below.

Updates

• I have reached out to library staff and have received confirmation for the event. — Ganeshk (talk) 23:16, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Participants

Add your name as " # ~~~ " if you have an username or else add " # Name"

Agenda

• Meet and greet: 30 min
  • Mainly a buffer time for people to arrive, meet newcomers, and get caught up. We can also put the banner somewhere to try and recruit passers-by in the library.

• Updates: 20 min
  • Some time to talk with the group about things you have been working on or problems you've encountered.

• Discussions/Talks: 60 min
  • I think it would be worthwhile to go over some sections of the Editor Survey as a group. I think the funding allocation part is a great lead-in to discussing our future visions for Wikimedia. In the small group setting we might even be able to achieve consensus, and it ties in very well with our conversation from the Wiknic about ways that government should be influenced by Wikipedia. We can also pre-identify issues that we want to be sure to endorse or oppose when we see them on the site during the next year.
  • We can review the new funding requests from international chapters to see if they have any good ideas we want to use.
  • Some specific questions I'd like to discuss are: What is the value-add of Wikispecies now that taxonomy template boxes have become ubiquitous on Wikipedia? What is Wikiversity's role in the growing marketplace of well-funded, online education initiatives from physical universities?

• Edit-a-thon: 100 min
  • I'll bring some notecards we can use to gather content and citations from books, but of course people are free to bring laptops and tablets for doing editing at the meeting.
  • Expand stubs in Category:Atlanta, Georgia_stubs or anything else you find that is interesting.
  • I think our goal should be that everyone contributes at least a paragraph of content to an article during the edit-a-thon or leaves with a notecard they can use to add a paragraph to an article at home.

• Dinner
  • We were all too tired to get dinner after the photo hunt, so we can try again this time.

Planning

• Need to get permission from the library
• Need to order Wikipedia branding freebies for distribution.

Notes

• Conference room on the reference floor with a projector
• Easy access to reference materials, library databases, and a librarian if you had any questions.
• There is a listserv (an email based subscription list) for those who wish to subscribe to the mailing list.

Minutes and remarks

• Small turnout but interesting and productive
• I pitched building a large, custom watchlist as a good way to ease into getting more involved.
• Ganesh gave a compelling demonstration of AutoWikiBrowser to do batch edits for sets of articles in WikiProjects.
• We decided that the value of Wikispecies has been subsumed by Wikipedia taxonomic template boxes. We compared some examples, including the state bird of Georgia, and the Wikipedia content includes everything on the respective entry in Wikispecies and much more. We decided the automatic taxobox template is better than the regular taxobox template, and we'd like to push for its universal adoption. Paleontology has already done this, but they are the only project that has done so.
• We brainstormed ideas for future events. There was interest in having another photography event that isn't related to architecture because we are behind on writing articles to go with the pictures we took of the historic buildings in Atlanta. We think it could be fun to do a photography event at a botanical garden to improve articles on native flora of Georgia.
• We also discussed trying to get a booth at a job fair at Georgia Tech or UGA. Some students might scoff at the volunteer nature of Wikipedia, but we could tell them that the Hungarian chapter has 9 active members and just got approved for $80,000 for next year to follow through with their ideas.
• The next event opportunity is the anniversary on January 15th, so we can plan to do a fun group activity. I've played games based on the link structure and statistics of Wikipedia, but I don't know if they are actually fun or if I just use them to make studying slightly more fun.
• Happy holidays and see you next year! Encourage people you know to respect Wikipedia, donate, and get involved!

—Wakebrdkid (talk) 03:47, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

WBK, Thanks for the summary. Happy Holidays! — Ganeshk (talk) 14:44, 23 November 2012 (UTC)