Wikimedia chapters/Reports/Wikimedia Australia/2011-11
Australian Paralympic Committee
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The work done by Paralympians and others involved with disabled sport in Queensland at the 31 October Brisbane workshop continued after the event. Participants continued to improve their articles and were supported by other, more established contributors from Australia.
Project space was created for the project on Outreach Wiki as History of the Paralympic Movement in Australia . The purpose of the space was to provide an easy way to access HOPAU related efforts across multiple Wikimedia projects include Wikipedia, Commons and Wikiversity.
The Australian Paralympic Committee hired Nick Gregory Roberts to help with scanning of images, and uploading of sound and videos related to the Paralympic movement in Australia. There were 94 images donated in the original batch. The APC, with Nick's help, is in the process of compiling media related to the 1992 Games for sharing on Commons.
After the 31 October 2011 workshop and in relation to our GLAM newsletter blurb, there were several conversations about writing about Paralympians and best writing practices. Are people who competed at the Paralympics Paralympians or former Paralympians? How should the Paralympic Games be described in article text? What does the Australian Paralympic Committee capitalise these nouns? Does this differ from how English Wikipedia treats Paralympic related nouns? To answer these questions, a lot of work was put into working on a style guide to help contributors to the project understand the difference between Wikipedia suggested wording practices and Australian Paralympic suggested wording practices when it came to names related to the Paralympic Games and describing disability sport and sportspeople. The plan is to create a one to two page worksheet with this information that can be distributed at future Wiki Workshops, or to include it in existing training materials like Editing sport biographies on Wikipedia.
There was a bit of a push to create a number of Did You Knows, including one nomination which featured 8 expanded articles: Bradley Ness • Justin Eveson • Shaun Norris • Michael Hartnett • Brett Stibners • Brendan Dowler • Benjamin James Ettridge. Other articles nominated for or that appeared as Did You Knows during November include Troy Sachs, Ashley Adams, Steve Graham, Casey Redford, Evan O'Hanlon, Brendan Burkett, Jessica Gallagher , Cobi Crispin and Julianne Adams. The DYK about Gerry Hewson that appeared on 8 November had 11,900 views on the day.
On 8 November, John Vandenberg did a meta data analysis of female Australian Paralympians on Wikipedia. 46 of the articles were identified as lacking date of birth information or were not classified in a living person category. There are roughly 250 total articles about Australian Paralympians on English Wikipedia. This represents a large percentage of missing metadata. To give a frame of reference, amongst non-Paralympic female Australian sportspeople, only six out of a thousand women lacked date of birth information or were not classified in a living person category. A request was put on the project's mailing list for help providing this missing data. Within a few hours, many of the articles had birthday data included on the articles and was properly cited.
One of the goals of the HOPAU project is to improve Australian Paralympic content, with the belief that as Australian content improves, other Paralympic content will be improved. As of November 10, 10% of all Australian Paralympic content was assessed better than Stub. This compares to 13% of all articles that are part of the Paralympic Taskforce. We're hoping that we can get the Australian number closer to 50% by mid-2012.
On 11 November 2011, LauraHale conducted a wiki workshop for Nick Gregory Roberts , attended by Tony Naar, a staff member of the National Sport Information and several people from the APC who dropped in. The focus of was to demonstrate how to upload media to Commons, add references to Wikipedia articles and add media to Wikipedia. Beyond that, there was a discussion regarding conflict of interest editing, writing articles neutrally and otherwise complying with Wikipedia policies.
One of the exciting things that the HOPAU project has been working on is trying to contribute to Spoken Wikipedia. The first article was done when Chris Nunn recorded a spoken word version of the article about himself. Spoken word versions of articles by their subjects is important to the project for two reasons: First, the Australian Paralympic Committee is contributing to Wikipedia by making articles related to Paralympians more accessible to people with disabilities. Second, it is pretty cool and adds another dimension to the article by giving listeners another idea about the article's subject.
The project's Wikipedian in Resident, LauraHale will be attending a GLAMCamp held in the Netherlands from 2 December to 4 December.
Wikipedia Takes Fremantle
editAustralia has yet to embrace Wiki Takes Monuments movement in its current form. Instead, members have focused on general picture taking events like Wikipedia Takes Fremantle, with plans to expand these into Wikipedia loves… my town events. Two member run events run in November included one in Fremantle on 19 November 2011, and Joondalup, Western Australia on 26 November 2011.
State Library of Queensland
editThe State Library of Queensland is starting to use QR Codes. While they may not be linking to Wikipedia and other WMF Projects using their Codes, they have provided some insight that might be of interest to other GLAMs. Elli Torres wrote a paper titled "What's black and white and read all over? QR Code initiatives at SLQ" that looks at their efforts. Michelle Swales, State Library of Queensland Chris Bermingham, Western Downs Regional Council published a paper in September 2011 titled Getting Queensland Out There, Building local content on Wikipedia in partnership with public libraries that also exams library practices in regards to Wikipedia. The State Library of Queensland has previously donated a large collection of images to Commons.
National Library of Australia
editThe National Library of Australia's work with Wikipedia was mentioned in The Culture Quarter on ABC24. Wikimedia Liam Wyatt, who pushed and helped create WMF's GLAM project, was interviewed for and apepared in the segment that aired on 20 October 2011.
National Library of New Zealand
editNew Zealand is not in Australia, but as there isn't a New Zealand chapter and Wikimedia Australia is trying to do greater outreach in the region we're happy to include them in Australia. Stuartyeates is a New Zealander active in the GLAM sector. He will be doing a demonstration at the National Digital Forum sponsored by the National Library of New Zealand at Te Papa Tongarewa (the national Museum of New Zealand), Wellington around 29 November 2011 where he will mention Wikimedia's contributions to the GLAM sector.
Wikimedia Indonesia
editThe President of Wikimedia will be in Australia in mid to late November, and will discuss GLAM efforts in Indonesia at the Sydney and Canberra meetups.