Grants talk:PEG/SMarks/Pollard Memorial Library and UMass Lowell Wikipedia Edit-A-Thons

GAC comments

Polimerek comments

Hi,

Nice workshop/edit-a-thon application. Some questions:

• Who is "Sara and Winifred"? You mention them several times but with no links to their userpages, so we could check if they are experienced wikipedians or not. I guess - "Sara" is User:Librarygurl ? If so - there is a question if you have enough wiki-experience to teach others how to edit Wikipedia and upload files, as your own contribution to the Wikipedia is just around 150 edits of which majority are minor one's and some discussions, and 0 uploads in English Wikipedia and 0 uploads on Commons...
• Are you about to teach how to upload files to Wikimedia Commons or English Wikipedia? You should expect that people may bring many pictures of which they are not authors - so there will be a case of resolving the copyright status before upload. Do you have any knowledge about the copyright issues?
• Regarding scanner - what do you want to do with it after edith-a-thons? In librares there are usually scanners. Why not to use one of the one's belonging to the library?

Polimerek (talk) 21:55, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

• Thanks for these questions. Our usernames are on the right navigation bar, but they are not linking to our accounts so I will fix that. We are planning on doing some instruction on the how-to on uploading photos. Winifred has done editing involving images in the past. We are encouraging people to take pictures of current monuments, buildings, and such before they attend the session. We have been discussing image copyright with local archivists. I, Sara, am comfortable talking about creative commons licensing/copyright regarding personal images. We are prepared to reject or hold-off on loading images that have questionable copyright and addressing the specifics of said case. Finally, the scanner is something we have gone back and forth about. While UMass Lowell has scanners available, Pollard Memorial Library does not. The plan after is to keep the scanner with Pollard Memorial Library for future programming uses. If we are successful with these edit-a-thons they will be the first of others. Please let me know if you would like some more detail regarding your questions. --Librarygurl (talk) 17:42, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Community comments

If the focus of the edit-a-thons is to gain and nurture new editors, I'm not sure if there will be time for scanning/uploading images during the edit-a-thons. Also, unless each event is running for several hours, you may not need donuts + cookies + pizza. Good luck! --Rosiestep (talk) 02:24, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

These will be running for a few hours. Each one starts at about 10am until 4pm. We want to make sure people don't need to leave to get food. As for photos scanning- a number of the people we expect to attend as local, amateur historians with large printed photo collections. We will have a campus archivist attending and we do want people to be able to add photos, especially to entries about monuments and historical places. Since we are running these for 6 hours each, our hope is that we will have time to teach people how to add photos. Thanks for the feedback! I hope this answers your questions. --Librarygurl (talk) 15:19, 29 October 2014 (UTC)

WMF comments

Hi Librarygurl. Thank you for this grant request and for your engagement in the discussion so far. We appreciate your efforts and enthusiasm for developing interest in the Wikimedia projects and supporting local historians to contribute content. We are happy to support your activities, but have a few additional questions/comments:

1. Considering your relatively limited experience hosting successful editathons and contributing to the wiki projects, we encourage you to add an experienced Wikimedian to your organizing team who can attend the events and support with the inevitable questions that arise (both technical and not). We belive this is key to your success. Please let us know if you need help identifying someone appropriate.
2. Our experience shows that new users who attend multiple events over a short period are more likely to continue editing than folks that attend just once. While the planned editathons are being hosted at different locations and focused on different topics, are you hoping to have repeat participants? Have you planned to provide support between events -- for example following up with participants on wiki?
3. We will not be able to provide funds to purchase a scanner. Is it possible to borrow or rent a scanner for the event at the Pollard Library or focus your activities there on writing?
4. What type of support will you have from each location's staff to prepare reference material before and during the event?
5. Do you have a list of suggested articles to work on/create for each event?
6. I don't see notification on the WikiProject Lowell, Mass page. Have you received feedback or interest from the WikiProject particpants?

Looking forward to your responses, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 11 November 2014 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay. Winifred and I both agree it is important to have experiences Wikimedians involved. We have specifically invited some to attend and are working on promoting to our local Meetup Group (New England). You can see the invite I created to add to talk pages (it is going on talk pages next week) and we are working to use GeoNotice to get the message out. I will ask a few if they would be willing to be a co-organizer as well. If you do have someone you think will be helpful, we would appreciate the suggestion. We are hoping to have primarily repeat participants. At each session, during wrap up, we are planning to talk about what to do between sessions. We understand about the scanner. If we are unable to borrow one, we will promote the UMass Lowell sessions as scanning sessions. One of our expected participants is one of the university archivists and he is very aware of the copyright laws and creative commons specifications. There will be little library staff at each event. We are pulling books from our collection ahead of time and have created a guide to help people identify sources for citation/research and entries to consider working on. We are using the MA: Lowell project page to select entries for people to work. On the previously linked guide we have begun identifying what type of work needs to be done on those entries. These are also the entries we will track to see how successful our efforts have been and to help people between sessions. We are just beginning promotion of the event this week. The project page doesn't seem very current, but we hope GeoNotice will help promote the event to people who haven't participated in the project officially. --Librarygurl (talk) 21:00, 13 November 2014 (UTC)

Hi Librarygurl. Have you reached out on the New England mailing list or their Facebok page? I'm pinging Maia, Chair of the New England Wikimedians, to see if either she can participate or suggest someone who can. We would like to have confirmation of an experienced Wikimedian on the team before approving the grant. Also, please update the budget and funding request minus the scanner. Thanks, Alex Wang (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 14 November 2014 (UTC)

Hey Alex- took care of the budget. I have reached out to Kevin from the NE group (he endorsed the grant). I will reach out to Maia as well. --Librarygurl (talk) 20:11, 17 November 2014 (UTC)

AmandaRR123 has agreed to act as advisor at the events. --Librarygurl (talk) 17:29, 24 November 2014 (UTC)