Wikimedians in Residence Exchange Network/minutes 2019 04

This meeting

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2nd Wednesday of the month at 12 noon New York time.
Wed Apr 10 12pm – 1pm Eastern Time - New York
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https://zoom.us/j/590979735

Attendees

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  1. Hilary Thorsten - new Wikimedian in Residence at Stanford Library as part of the Linked Data for Production project. The goal is to share linked data from the library. This is a collaboration between Library of Congress, Program for Cooperative Cataloging, Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, and University of Iowa School of Libary and Information Science.
  2. Richard Knipel - Wikimedian in Residence at the Met. Now has a colleague, Andrew Lih, who is wiki-strategist at the museum.
  3. John Sadowski - NIOSH, in the midst of a second cohort of a webinar series for NIOSH staff to write a new article or existing article with a few paragraphs. Asked who has done something similar? Recently played a mouse in an opera about Trump's wig.
    I'm interested in the Webinar thing because webinars tend to be well-attended by staff/faculty in our library; more popular than my in-person trainings <-- who? -Rachel Helps :)
  4. Rachel Helps - Wikimedian in Residence at Harold Brigley Library at Brigham Young University. A couple of years ago Rachel uploaded lots of public domain images and recently a university photography curator complained about the sharing.
  5. Lane Rasberry - I am taking note
  6. John Cummings - Wikipedian in Residence at UNESCO, help them share knowledge and do pilot projects for other UN agencies. The FNO, a food organization, just shared a collection of content.
  7. Esther Jackson - Wikimedian at the New York Botanical Garden and the public services librarian there. Mostly interested in Wikidata.
  8. Luca Martinelli / Sannita -offered to help anyone with OpenRefine and QuickStatements
  9. Mary Mark Ockerbloom - Wikimedian in Residence at the Chemical Heritage Society in Philadelphia
  10. Jeffrey Keefer - Wikimedian in Residence at PCORI -

Agenda and notes

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Items for every meeting
  • etherpad
    • Take notes here during meeting
    • Transfer notes from etherpad to this page after meeting
    • Anyone can take notes and format them here!
  • Note - anyone can add to this agenda or the agenda of any future meeting!
    • At start of meeting, we will move items around
    • Quick items first!
    • Confirm agenda at the start of the meeting!
  • New attendee introductions
    • What do you do as a Wikimedian in Residence?
    • What organizational support do you want?
  • Media featuring Wikimedians in Residence
New items
  • Hilary presents!
    Linked Data for Libraries Wikidata Affinity Group 1st meeting 23 April 12pm EST
    Harvard and Cornell have a range of projects which interest them. Some of these are about mapping identities of people in library databases to Wikidata.
    In all these talks, there was interest in a biweekly meeting to discuss things like Wikidata policy, Wikidata scope, considering where library data could be added, best practices, provenance of data
    meeting is open to anyone interested in libraries and Wikidata, already advertising on Wikidata lists and talk pages
    other projects - doing a "knowledge panel" in their library catalog at Stanford to get ready for the Linked Data For Production conference coming up in May in Boston

question: is this only for the organizers in their projects, or is anyone who is interested in libraries + wiki able to join? answer: anyone can join, hopefully others will contribute

  • Rachel shared that she has presented on Mix n Match in libraries
  • reports from Wikimedia Summit 2019
    29–31 March 2019
    Focus was on Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20
    reports from anyone who participated?
    John Cummings reports!
    John shared that this is a 3-4 day conference focused on strategy.
    Attendeess are Wikimedia Foundation staff people and representatives of community affiliates.
    John is in the "partnerships" strategy group. This was an opportunity for working groups to collaborate for a few days.
    John said that in joining, the organizers had suggested ideas to discuss. Almost immediately many groups diverged from that suggestion and felt that the conference was productive.
    John Sadowski asked about rumors of changes to how the Wikimedia affiliates work. What was said?
    John Cummings replied that he was not in a group which was discussing that and did not know any solid details about changes, although he was aware of soliciting ideas for all kinds of partners.
    Esther asked about the composition of working groups.
    John Cummings said that many working groups have 12 groups, but partnerships has 8 people. He solicited for more people to join. There are 1-2 staff members and a foundation board member in every group. May Hachem who does lots of project with UN Women and wiki outreach in Egypt is another member.
    Rachel asked if there was discussion about conflict of interest guidelines.
    Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2018-20/2019_Community_Conversations/Partnerships
    John Cummings said that the schedule was to finish discussion by end of year but he thought there might be comments after.
    Jeffrey said that there was lots of interest in getting community feedback on the working group feedback
    the next step is transitioning from scoping documents into a workplan
    an insight from the summit is that to now, the strategy working groups are small but serving the role of representatives. Soon they will need broad community conversation
    Jeffrey said that in-person talks at the Wikimedia summit were helpful for building relationships
  • Education conference
    Wikimedia:Education_Conference_2019
    5-7 April 2019
    John said that many countries were represented
  • upcoming conferences
  • Elections
    Affiliate-selected Board seats/2019
    2 of the 10 seats on the Board of Trustees are elected by the 140 affiliate organizations
    this time user groups/thematic groups get to vote for the first time
    board members have input into who gets grant money
    wiki-community organizers/collaborators tend to get elected
    We get 1 vote as an organization
    let's discuss who we should vote for in the next few months
    encourage your favorite wikipeople to campaign
    Richard mentioned that he knows Shani Evenstein who will be running and is familiar with WiR stuff
  • New York Botanical Garden is presenting Science Conservation and the Humanities, a conference series
    if anyone knows a speaker then please suggest them
    in the past we have focused on speakers who have done things in botany but this is broad and they want to promote citizen science in general
    John Cummings recommended contacting Mozilla Open Science
    Dario Taberelli joined a Zuckerberg foundation and is their directer of science now
    500 women
  • Wikidata talk
    Luca shared that there is a new Wikidata constraint feature coming
    Richard shared a dashboard from the Met
    Wikidata:WikiProject_sum_of_all_paintings/Property_statistics
    this is used to track progress of a project
  • structured data on commons
    supposedly "depicts" property coming soon
    John Sadowski has been tagging Wikidata with depicts statements
    soon this will come to Commons
  • Events
    Mary shared that they are still doing Art+Feminism
    Philadelphia also hosted a Black Lunch Table event
    Philly still hosts its monthly wiki science salon
  • Interns, getting funding for them, how to work with them etc
    Laurie Bridges at a library in Oregon worked with a student intern to translate articles from Spanish to English (https://www.facebook.com/groups/WikiLibrary/permalink/1290708197756829/)
    we (at Rachel Helps's library) have an unpaid intern position who samples archivist-related jobs; I worked with an intern to get them editing a page one week
  • John Cummings talked about working with existing Wikipedia contributors--it can be hard to know when/how to integrate them into the Wikimedia professional (?) community
    it takes effort to train people from Wikipedia how to interact with the wider community and vice versa

relatedly, Mary suggests getting experts to review articles and look for gaps to avoid having to train them on Wikipedia

  • keeping track of a "sausage machine" of what material has gone into Wikipedia (for example, if you've already cited an article or added freely licensed text?)
    John sadowski related that he chats with scientists about engaging in the Wikipedia process.
    He tells them to surf Wikipedia and find anything wrong or outdated, which they always can do if they try. When they find a problem John asks them for a source. After getting a source John corrects the problem then asks them for feedback on his edits. If they like the process then sometimes the staff scientist will actually write.