Tag Archives: dc

wikixdc

Leave a reply

Wikipedia’s 10th Birthday Party at the National Archives in Washington DC on Saturday was a lot of fun. Far and away, the most astonishing moment for me came early in the opening remarks by David Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, when he stated (in no uncertain terms) that he was a big fan of Wikipedia, and that it was often his first go-to for information. Not only that, but when discussion about a bid for a DC WikiMania (the Wikipedia Annual Conference) came up later in the morning, Ferriero suggested that the National Archives would be willing to host it if it came to pass. I’m not sure if anything actually came of this later in the day–a WikiMania in DC would be incredible. It was just amazing to hear the Archivist of the United States be supportive of Wikipedia as a reference source…especially as stories of schools, colleges and universities rejecting Wikipedia as a source are still common. Ferriero’s point was even more poignant with several high schoolers in attendance. Now we all can say:

If Wikipedia is good enough for the Archivist of the United States, maybe it should be good enough for you.

Another highlight for me was meeting Phoebe Ayers, who is a reference librarian at UC Davis, member of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, and author of How Wikipedia Works. I strong armed Phoebe into signing my copy (I bought this copy on Amazon after it was de-accessioned from Cuyahoga County Public Library in Parma, Ohio ). Phoebe has some exciting ideas for creating collaborations between libraries and Wikipedia, which I think fit quite well into the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museuems (GLAM) effort within Wikipedia. I think she is still working on how to organize the effort.

Later in the day we heard how the National Archives is thinking of following the lead of the British Museum and establishing a Wikipedian in Residence. Liam Wyatt, the first Wikipedian in Residence, put a human face on Wikipedia for the British Museum, and familiarized museum staff with editing Wikipedia, through activities like the Hoxne Challenge. Having a Wikipedia in Residence at the National Archives (and who knows maybe the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress) would be extremely useful I think.

In a similar vein, Sage Ross spoke at length about the Wikipedia Ambassador Program. The Ambassador Program is a formal way for folks to represent Wikipedia in academic settings (universities, high schools, etc). Ambassadors can get training in how to engage with Wikipedia (editing, etc) and can help professors and teachers who want to integrate Wikipedia into their curriculum, and scholarly activities.

I got to meet Peter Benjamin Meyer of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who has some interesting ideas for aggregating statistical information from federal statistical sources, and writing some bots that will update article info-boxes for places in the United States. The impending release of the 2010 US Census Data has the Wikipedia community discussing the best way to update the information that was added by a bot for the 2000 census. It seemed like Peter might be able to piggy back some of his efforts on this work that is going on at Wikipedia for the 2010 Census.

Jyothis Edthoot an Oracle employee and Wikipedia Steward gave me a behind the scenes look at the tools he and others in Counter Vandalism Unit use to keep Wikipedia open for edits from anyone in the world. I also got to meet Harihar Shankar from Herbert van de Sompel’s team at Los Alamos National Lab, and to learn more about the latest developments with Memento, which he gave a lightning talk about. I also ran into Jeanne Kramer-Smyth of the World Bank, and got to hear about their efforts to provide meaningful access to their document collections to web crawlers using their metadata.

I did end up giving a lightning talk about Linkypedia (slides on the left). I was kind of rushed, and I wasn’t sure that this was exactly the right audience for the talk (being mainly Wikipedians instead of folks from the GLAM sector). But it helped me think through some of the challenges in expressing what Linkypedia is about, and who it is for. All in all it was a really fun day, with a lot of friendly folks interested in the Wikipedia community. There must’ve been at least 70 people there on a very cold Saturday–a promising sign of good things to come for collaborations between Wikipedia and the DC area.

Wikipedia 10

Leave a reply

Wikipedia is turning ten years old on January 15th, and celebratory gatherings are going around the globe, including one in my area (Washington DC) on January 22 at the National Archives.

Like you, I’ve been an accidental user of Wikipedia when searching for a topic to learn more about. Over time I have started actively searching on Wikipedia for things, linking to Wikipedia articles (in email and HTML), and even saying thank you with a small donation. I’ve only attended one of the local DC chapter events before, but am definitely planning on attending the DC event to meet other people who value Wikipedia as a resource.

Perhaps also like you (since you are reading this blog) I also work in a cultural heritage organization, well a library to be precise. I wasn’t able to attend the recent Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums & Wikimedia conference at the British Museum last November. But I have been listening to the audio that they kindly provided recently with great interest. If you are interested in the role that cultural heritage organizations can play on Wikipedia, and the Web in general definitely check it out if you’ve got a long commute (or time to kill) and a audio device of some kind. There are lots of museums, galleries, archives and libraries in the DC area, so I’m hoping that this event on the 22nd will be an opportunity for folks to get together across institutional lines to talk about how they are engaging with the Wikipedia community. Who knows maybe it could be a precursor to a similar to GLAM-WIKI here in DC?

I’m planning on doing a lightning talk about this side/experimental project I’ve been working on called linkypedia. The basic idea is to give web publishers (and specifically cultural heritage organizations like libraries, museums, archives, etc) an idea of how their content is being used as primary resource material on Wikipedia. The goal is to validate the work that these institutions have done to make this content available, and for them to do more…and also to engage with the Wikipedia community. Version 1 of the (opensource) software is running at here on my minimal Linode VPS. But I’m also working on version 2, which will hopefully scale a bit better, and provide a more global (not just English Wikipedia) and real time picture of how your stuff is being used on Wikipedia. Part of the challenge is figuring out how to pay for it, given the volume of external links in the major language Wikipedias. I’m hoping a tip-jar and thoughtful use of Amazon EC2 will be enough.

If you are interested in learning more about the event on the 22nd check out Katie Filbert’s recent post to the Sunlight Labs Discussion List, and the (ahem) wiki page to sign up! Thanks Mark for letting me know about the birthday celebration last week in IRC. Sometimes with all the discussion lists, tweets, and blogs things like this slip by without me noticing them. So a direct prod in IRC helps :-)

iswc2009, DC and vocamp

Leave a reply

I just learned from Tom Heath that The International Semantic Web Conference is coming to Washington DC next year. This is pretty cool news to me, since traveling to conferences isn’t always the easiest thing to navigate. Also, Tom suggested that it might be fun to organize a VoCamp around the conference, to provide an informal collaboration space for vocabulary demos, development, q/a, etc. If you want to help out please join the mailing list.