Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Increasing the Representation of Women in STEM

Webinar – Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Increasing the Representation of Women in STEM

March 31, 2022

Amanda Sciandra:

Good afternoon and welcome to today's Wikipedia edit-a-thon. We're going to get started in just a few minutes. So settle yourself in, close out your extra browser tabs. Grab yourself some water and get ready to increase the representation of women in STEM on Wikipedia. If you want to let us know where you're tuning in from, go ahead and drop it in the chat box on your Zoom toolbar. Love to give you some shout outs. Our team is joining you from the... Oh, coming in already. Wisconsin, Corning, New York, Oregon, Texas, South Carolina. Our team is from the DC, Maryland, Virginia area, as well as LA. Fredericksburg, Virginia. Hello to everyone. Thank you so much for joining. All right, so let's get going. I'm DC, New York city. Geez. Way to go guys. Thanks for letting us know where you're coming in from.



I'm Amanda Sciandra, Adult Engagement Manager at the National Museum of Natural History, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to today's event, Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Increasing the Representation of Women in STEM. Today's program is produced in collaboration with the National Museum of National History, the Smithsonian American Women's History Initiative, and with support from the Lyda Hill foundation and the If/Then Initiative. And it's the last program this month in celebration of Smithsonian's Women's Futures month, a forward looking celebration of the power of women and girls in STEM.



Smithsonian kicked off the month with a weekend of events around the IfThenSheCan the exhibit in the Haupt Garden on the National Mall. If you didn't get a chance to see it was a collection of 120, orange, life size, 3D printed statues of the If/Then AAAS If/Then ambassadors you'll hear about more soon. All powerhouse women across all fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. The statues then made their way into Smithsonian galleries, including the National Museum of Natural History, serving as a physical reminder that if you can see it, then you can be it. Earlier this month, we featured one of those AAAS If/Then ambassadors in a program about cultural heritage preservation in Arctic communities, if you missed it, the recording will be available online shortly and the link is in the chat.



Speaking of recordings, yes, today's event will be recorded and archived on the Natural History webpage. Check back at the link in the chat in a few weeks, if you want to revisit it or send it to a friend who couldn't make it. Just a few other nuts and bolts items before I pass it over to Rese Cloyd from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Kelly Doyle from the American Women's History Initiative. First, thank you to Joyful Signing for providing live close captioning throughout today's event. You can turn on close captions by clicking the CC button on your toolbar. Also on the toolbar, you'll find that chat, if you haven't already. This is our main mode of communication with you throughout the program. That's where we'll be sharing links as well as where you can ask your questions for us to answer and after the opening remarks from Rese, Kelly Doyle Open Knowledge Coordinator for the American Women's History Initiative will explain how this edit-a-thon will work, provide the Wikipedia training tutorial and show you some demonstrations to get you going and answer your questions.



We're going to take a break about halfway through the editing so you can stretch, check your emails, whatever you need to do. So thank you again for joining us today with that it is my pleasure to welcome Rese Cloyd, the director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Center for Public Engagement. Reese oversees all center programming, including the AAAS If/Then ambassadors program, the AAAS how we respond climate communication Initiative and the communicating science program. Prior to joining AAAS she led engagement and outreach for the US global change research program and served as Knauss Marine Policy fellow at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Rese is here to share more about the If/Then Initiative and a bit about some of the amazing women who we are focusing on today. Rese, I turn it over to you.

Rese Cloyd:

Thank you, Amanda, and thank you to the Smithsonian for inviting me to be a part of this event. A little over three years ago, By the Hill philanthropies invited me and my organization, the American Association for the Advancement of Science to be part of a new Initiative to elevate women in STEM, as role models and illuminate the importance of STEM everywhere in order to inspire the next generation of innovators and world changers. The program that we designed became the AAAS If/Then ambassadors and is built on the premise that if she can see it, she can be it. We selected 125 women at every career stage from students to senior researchers and executives and across a wide range of fields, including research and development, sports and recreation, finance, fashion, gaming, engineering and manufacturing, entertainment, healthcare, conservation, aerospace, and more to serve as ambassadors for the different career pathways that girls might pursue.



Between 2019 and 2021, the ambassadors engaged girls, their friends and their families through original entertainment and media content, educational programs, activities with community groups, ComicCon, science festivals, museum exhibits and more. With each public service ad, coloring book page, dance performance, trading card, television show episode, girl scout badge activity, and classroom discussion ambassadors were showing that scientists and engineers are every race and ethnicity, that they use wheelchairs and communicate in American sign language, that they are contestants in Miss USA pageants and play professional hockey and perhaps most importantly, they were once middle schoolers wondering what they might grow up to be.



Over the course of their ambassadorship, thousands of people met an ambassador face to face or, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, through the magic of video conferencing. Millions more encountered ambassadors stories through print and digital media that were changing the ways we picture what a scientist looks like and what they do. At the beginning of March over 90 of our AAAS If/Then ambassadors came to Washington DC, to take part in the grand opening of IfThenSheCan the exhibit. The exhibit featured the 120 orange statues that we just heard about. Women in STEM that were displayed around the Smithsonian castle, the Haupt Garden, the Arts and Industries building, the Natural History Museum and the Air and Space museum. Over the course of that Saturday and Sunday, ambassadors give career talks, led hands on science and engineering activities and talked with literally thousands of visitors about their statues. I'd like to share a few stories from those ambassadors, some of whom you might be creating or editing articles about today illustrating the value of representation and the importance of sharing the many pathways to success in STEM.



First, Ana Maria Porras grew up in Columbia and came to the US for college and then graduate school, following her dream to become a biomedical engineer. She's passionate about multicultural and multilingual science communication and focused much of her time as an ambassador on engaging students in Columbia, through virtual science clubs. "My favorite memory was meeting Latin American families by my statue." Ana Maria said. "I was not expecting people of all ages to get so excited to see someone who spoke Spanish. I almost cried multiple times when Colombians approached me."



Greetchen Diaz is a microbiologist from Puerto Rico, and she told us about doing a Facebook live from her statue that garnered many messages of support and about a large group of colleagues from Puerto Rico who brought a big Puerto Rican flag to celebrate with her at her statue. Sarah Wilson, a robotics engineer who has worked on both skiing technology and agriculture, met a mom who told her that she brought her daughter expecting it to be all Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace but that meaning real live women was so much more fun, exciting, relatable, and inspiring to her daughter.



Wendy Bohon, a geologist who studies earthquakes, had a little girl come up to her statue and to Wendy who started pulling rocks out of her pockets. She and the girl worked together to identify the rocks and then the girl told Wendy that she wanted to be a geologist when she grows up. Wendy asked her what she learned at the exhibit and the girl said, "I learned that I am smart and brave, and I can be whatever I want to be." Nicole Jackson works on technology that makes an impact on how hospitals and physicians care for patients. She reflected on how she was shaped by interactions with visitors sharing how emotional it was to attend the statue exhibit with four generations of her family, her grandmother, who was a nurse, her mother, a software engineer, herself and her children, her nieces and nephews and how talking with an elderly black woman at the exhibit transformed her purpose for the day.



Jessica Esquivel, an Afro-Latina physicist who co-founded Black and Physics, tweeted about her experience at the exhibit, the support she's received from family and other women in STEM and the importance of girls, seeing someone who looks like them. "If you take anything away from my journey," she told her followers, "let it be to dream bigger than your wildest imagination, because everything is within reach." I can go on and on and on about the interactions I witnessed or that ambassadors told me about during the statutes exhibit and throughout their ambassadorships but I'll leave you with just one more.



Karina Popovich, an undergraduate at Cornell, a maker and an entrepreneur, who led an effort to 3D print 82,000 face shields during the COVID-19 pandemic, she noted that she and her friends were thrilled by the inspiration in the air as they walked around the exhibit. They overheard many positive comments, but the one that stuck with her most was, "This is a sea of awesomeness." The work that you are all going to be doing today as a part of this edit-a-thon will place many more landmarks within that sea of awesomeness, will help point children and adults that are looking for information and inspiration to articles about real women who are marine explorers, mathematicians, chemists, inventors, herpetologists, government officials, filmmakers, and other leaders in STEM. And with that, I will say thank you again for coming today. And I will pass things over to Kelly to get us started.

Kelly Doyle:

Thank you, Rese. I'm going to screen share my slides here. So if you'll just bear with me a second, hopefully everyone can see them. Okay. I'm Kelly Doyle. I am the open knowledge coordinator for the American Women's History Initiative, where I work to get our collections about American women onto Wikipedia, Wikipedia Commons and Wikidata.



During this edit-a-thon, I'll do some brief slides, just about the basics of Wiki and Wikipedia editing and the gender gap on Wikipedia. Then my colleague, Andrew Lih and I will screen share and live edit Wikipedia articles and show you how to do some basic Wiki tasks and we encourage you to use the chat to ask tons of questions about how to do Wiki tasks, because we can display and screen share and walk you through how to do those live. So please, please utilize the chat. The work list is also in the chat to our experienced editors. Please feel free to sign in with your username. If you're a brand new Wikipedia editor, don't worry at the end of this slideshow, we'll show you the link of where you need to go to create a new account and how to sign in on the page and I'll walk you through the work list of all of the amazing women who are on that list.



So without further ado we'll get started. This is what the event page looks like. There is a link in the chat and Andrew should be putting another link in shortly. Again, it has all of the names of the women whose articles that need editing or that need creating and this is sort of the hub of activity for where we'll be on Wiki today. Okay, so some Wikipedia basics and rules. We know that Wikipedia is free and that anyone can edit but we also know that it is one of the fifth most visited websites globally, almost in 300 different language versions with 75,000 active users a month. Lots of robust activity happening on Wikipedia and 32 million files on Wikimedia Commons which is the image repository, where all the images you see on Wikipedia live.



And Wikipedia does have rules. We have five pillars that helps to govern us. We are an encyclopedia that is written from a neutral point of view and anyone can use, edit, remix the content that is on Wikipedia or distribute rather. We're treating each other with respect as we edit alongside each other and communicate and talk via the talk pages, which I will show you, but also that Wikipedia has no firm rules. In a lot of ways, we're consensus driven. And as a community, we come to decisions about content and rules together.



And then we also have some policies. Neutral point of view, which I just briefly touched on just written so that all sides can agree. So you're not going onto Wikipedia and saying, "Charleston, South Carolina is the best city in the world." Because that's your opinion. And it's not neutral. Notability, we want to make sure we're using independent sources. So ones that have journalistic integrity, not someone's blog, using a published book, not someone's pamphlet, let's say. Verifiability that we're just using good reliable sources, again, no original research. So I'm not putting my own pamphlet about Charleston being the best city in the world onto Wikipedia.



Assuming good faith, again, when we chat with people on talk pages or on comment pages. And then conflict of interest is a big one. So we're not editing about people we know places that we worked for past or present, things like that. And that if we do have a conflict of interest that we're disclosing that. So on my user page, I disclose that I work for the Smithsonian and then I'm not editing any pages about the Smithsonian.



Okay. So the gender gap on Wikipedia. The gender gap is kind of two pieces. There's a participatory gender gap. So who edits Wikipedia and in this instance, we're talking about Wikipedia English language version. We know that roughly only one out of 10 Wikipedia editors identifies as female. Which leads us into our content based gender gap on Wikipedia, where roughly 19% of biographies are about women. We have been moving this needle steadily over the years, and there are lots of great groups on Wikipedia that worked to close the gender gap. A big one is Wiki project Women in Red. It's where I pull these statistics from and it is a great group, if you're interested in creating new articles about women on Wikipedia to get in touch with, and I can share their link, but there are lots of us working together to close this gender gap.



But 19% of bios is still fairly low. We have a lot of work to do, and there are a lot of notable women out there that aren't included on Wikipedia. And so if you're like me, and the statistic maybe doesn't tell the whole story or this percentage I've broken it down a little bit further. That 19% relates to, out of 1.8 million biographies on Wikipedia, only about 350,000 of them are about women and we know that there are varying length, varying levels of completeness. So we want to make sure that all of the articles about women on Wikipedia are strong, have lots of great sources in them and that we're also creating those new articles as well about notable women who deserve to be included.



Okay. And this is just something I wanted to show you. Featured articles on Wikipedia are really the best of the best. So I just went through and took A through H of featured history articles on Wikipedia to pull out how many were about men and women and we can see that not a lot. Something else that really speaks to me in this sort of back and forth is that I know at least a couple of lines about all of these women that are here in this list versus over here, I don't know who all of these men are, and that speaks to a lot of different issues. Notability. It also speaks to the sources that are out there about men, especially historical men, and speaks to how together we can work to continue to change and push this needle to get more notable women onto Wikipedia.



And thinking through why Wikipedia? Why are we focused on Wikipedia? Why is this the mechanism? Wikipedia, as we know, is one of the most viewed tertiary source websites online. And so not being included in Wikipedia means where can we find information about you then online? Wikipedia really is the way, but then the other piece is if you ask Siri, Alexa, anyone, any robot, a question nine times out of 10, Wiki is going to come up first or be used first. And so being included in Wikipedia is really important, if you meet the Notability threshold to be included, we want to make sure that everyone is included that should be. And so we can see here this image of Sojourner Truth that we added from the National Portrait Gallery. Now, when you type into your phone, a question about Sojourner Truth, her Wikipedia articles coming up first and so too is the image.



And so images are also important in this gender gap on Wikipedia. We want articles of women on Wikipedia, but we also don't want them to be faceless. So as much as possible, as much as we can get rights free images, we want to put those on Wikipedia too. So that Siri, Alexa, whatever Google knowledge panel can bring up images of the women as well.



Okay. Wikipedia itself and the article anatomy. This helped me greatly when I first started editing Wikipedia, pulling out all of these different buttons and tabs and where to click to navigate Wikipedia. So I'm just going to start at the very top left, where it says article and talk. Talk is where there are conversations happening on every single Wikipedia page about the content of the article. Whoops. And it looks like this, sorry, my slides got a little out of order there. It looks like this. This is where editors go to have a conversation about what is in the article, as I said, and to engage in a discussion of, should this be included, should this be taken out or maybe it's I found these great sources, but I don't have time to add them to the article. I'm adding them here. Things like that.



If we continue on the top page and move more towards the right, we see the edit button, it's what you would click to make this an editable interface. We'll talk about that in much more detail, but there are two ways to edit, a visual editor and a source editor. I encourage visual editor and I'll show you what that looks like. And then right next to it, we have view history. Every edit on every Wikipedia page is recorded forever, which is wonderful. And it looks like this.



So it's going to show you the date, the editor's name or IP address, the bytes that they changed, whether they added or deleted things, and then a summary that they generated about what they changed on the page during that edit. So maybe it's they added an image, or maybe they deleted texts that they thought shouldn't be there. The other thing that you can do, if you look on the far left next to the date, you can always hit previous to see exactly what they changed, which was really nice to see especially if the edit summary doesn't tell the whole story. You can go through and see exactly what was changed in the page. This is just the bottom of the page, all of the references at, at, at the bottom collate here. The nice thing when you add sources to Wikipedia is that this is going to automatically add itself in the list for you. You're not going to have to mess with the numbers or anything like that in the visual editor, which is great, but I just love pointing out the references and the notes down here, especially to students. It's always good to check the references or if you're doing a report on something evaluating what was used here and to go off of Wikipedia as it's relevant and necessary to do so.



Okay. And then, below the references, can be things like external links, categories, related media, and some authority control. Adding categories is a really easy task for new editors. It basically just connects like articles on Wikipedia with each other. External links are also great for adding links to things like where the archives are held or oral histories. So you'll mostly see lots of good extra information like this in longer pages, but please feel free to add links to things that are relevant here, like a video appearance or an oral history.



Okay. Editing Wikipedia. The first thing that you're going to want to do is to create an account on Wikipedia. If you don't already have one, the link to do that is on the meetup page, and I'll share it with you when I stop screen sharing as well. Some things to think about when you create an account is that you'll want it to be an individual only account, not an institutional account. So for example, I work for the Smithsonian, but I have my own account and so too, does Andrew. There is no Smithsonian editing account, but individual employees might have their own Wikipedia accounts where they don't edit about the Smithsonian though. And some of the advantages to creating your account is that it signals membership. That you're a part of this Wikimedia community. It makes having discussions on those talk pages a lot easier and you can set up some cool preferences as well, that we can show you if you're interested and then privacy settings as well.



When you go in to create your account, it does say that your email address is optional. I would absolutely encourage you to add it. I've never gotten spammy emails associated with my Wikipedia account, but it does allow you to get pinged if someone sends you a message, which is really nice if you're not watching your Wikipedia account all the time.



Okay. So this is the visual editor that I was referring to when I mentioned that there are two ways to edit Wikipedia. Source editing and visual editing. I would definitely encourage you, especially if you're a new editor to try visual editor first. It basically just makes Wikipedia, as you view it all the time, an editable interface, it looks very similar. It drops down with sort of this navigation toolbar that allows you to do different tasks, but it makes it a lot easier. And we will demo how to switch between these, but I just wanted to alert you to the fact that these two do exist. There are some pages you can only edit in source editing, but it's really rare and visual editing is definitely the way to go.



And so the way you would do it, once you hit edit, it will drop down with this toolbar in both editing versions and you would hit this pencil icon and toggle between the editing interfaces. One thing I will say is that before you toggle between editing interfaces to save any content that you did, let's say in visual editor before you switched to source editing, so you don't lose it.



Okay. So creating Wikilinks between Wikipedia articles is one of my favorite things to do on Wikipedia as an editor. It's really easy to do and it's also how we get down those amazing Wikipedia rabbit holes. So I'm just going to pull out how to do that. When you're in visual editor and you've already hit edit, and you have this toolbar here, you would hit the link button. You would highlight the text that you want to link, and then you would hit search pages here on the left. You could also toggle to external link if you want to add an external link, but it would search for, in this instance, Howard University. You would click the Howard University Wikipedia page from the dropdown. You would hit done. Then an edit summary, it would prompt you to put in an edit summary and you could just say Wiki linking and hit publish, and your edit has been saved. And we'll demo this as we go through how to Wikilink, but this is a really great, easy task for you to do today, if you are a new editor, once you get your username all set up.



And then citing your sources is another big one. Any new information that you bring into a Wikipedia article, you're going to have to back up with a reliable source. Our work list has a lot of reliable sources that I've pulled in next to each woman's name that you can use. I've also made sure that those articles don't already exist in any of those women's articles, Wikipedia articles already. So those are a great, easy way to start looking for new information to add to any of the Wikipedia articles. And so once you've got a source from the work list that has information that you want to add to the Wikipedia article and you've reworded it, you've added in a new sentence with a new piece of information, you would just hit cite, again from that editing dropdown toolbar. If it's a website you would hit website, you would copy and paste it in. It would most of the time automatically format for you and pull in the information. You would put in your edit summary, like added X, Y, Z. Publish. And then that looks like this. So you hit cite, automatic, copy and paste, and then it's going to pull up the link format perfectly for you.



Sometimes this works better than others, but 90% of the time, this is going to work really well for you. And again, it's formatting all of the numbers and the reference list for you, which is really nice. You don't have to think about it. You can just hit save and know that it's been formatted in the list.Okay. Publish changes. This is what that looks like and where the button is. It's in big blue on the top right. Again, you'll add that brief edit summary, like added new information about degree, let's say, and hit publish, and it will automatically be saved and live.



So some additional tips you can copy and paste between Wikipedia articles, as long as there's some relevance to what you're adding in. But for new editors, I suggest that you start with existing Wikipedia articles versus jumping right in creating a new Wikipedia article. Play around in some existing articles. Make some small micro edits, like maybe copy edit, maybe edit the lead paragraph and make sure it's reflective of what's in the rest of the article. Make sure that all the commas look good, just make lots of little tiny changes and get the hang of how Wikipedia works before creating a brand new article.



And when you do create a new article, just create a short one, a couple of sentences with lots of good references, three to five is kind of a good rule of thumb, of really strong references that back up the notability of the person or the place or the thing, why they should be included in the encyclopedia and we'll walk you through all of that. But definitely a short article is worth publishing. Three sentences with good sources is great for Wikipedia and other editors will come along and make it better over time.



Okay. So again, some tips using visual editor, looking at the lead paragraphs. That first paragraph or few sentences in any Wikipedia article to make sure that it is reflective of what's in the rest of the article. An example of this is sometimes I'll see Wikipedia articles that don't list really prominent awards that the individual has won right up front and center. So just making sure that the thing that makes the individual the most notable, the most important, like let's say they've won an academy award, making sure that's in the lead paragraph is very important and you can add that without a source if it's already sourced further down in their article. Adding some new categories, adding new references and editing existing small articles where you can kind of see the gaps and where you can add new information easily.



Again, here's our event page. This is where our work list is for the day where you'll be able to see all of the articles that you can edit or create along with all of the references that we've pulled in that are new, that aren't in their Wikipedia articles yet that you can use to add those new bits of information. Okay. So some tasks to start is to create a username, if you haven't done so already. To add your username to the "sign up" heading on the list, and I'll navigate there and show you how to do that in just a second. Editing those articles from our work list and to lean heavily on the chat if you have any questions or you feel like you don't know how to do a task, Andrew, and I can show you how to do that live.

PART 1 OF 5 ENDS [00:30:04]



... do a task. Andrew and I can show you how to do that live. So, again, this is the work list. This is where you would create a Wikipedia account. It's right here in the "get started" section. And it looks just like that screen grab I had where you would fill in all of those fields and hit create account. And then you could come down here and sign up. And Andrew actually enabled Visual Editor for our page today. So, I'm going to let him take over on his screen share and show us how to sign in. But again, here are articles to edit here with a short description of who each woman is and what makes her notable. Some really great, independent, reliable sources for you to add to the article. And then also some sources about the exhibit that they're featured in itself, and then the same for any articles that you might want to create. Okay. Andrew, do you want to take over screen share and show us how to sign in?

Andrew Lih:

Sounds good. Thanks, Kelly. Hi, everyone. I'm Andrew Lih, the Wikimedian at Large at the Smithsonian. So, thank you so much for joining us. We have more than 80 participants here, which is just amazing. So, thank you for joining us today on the last day of Women's History Month. As Kelly mentioned, we work around the clock or around the year on women's content at Smithsonian, and we're so happy to see you folks here helping us celebrate the end of the month for this. So, let me go ahead and take a look at the page here. Hold on a second.

Kelly Doyle:

Okay. It looks like Andrew had to step away for a second. Oh, there you are, Andrew.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah, I'm back. Sorry. Just making sure we have the right lighting here. All right. So this is the meetup page. Is everyone seeing? Hopefully. As Kelly said, we have enabled the Visual Editor. So, it's actually a lot easier to interact with this page. If you click on this page, I'm sorry, this link here, you'll notice that you can edit the content here. And hopefully after you're done with making an account, we ask that you add your name here, which looks like a lot of folks have done that already. With the Visual Editor, it should look pretty much like the same page you saw without hitting the edit button. But now you can actually put your pointer here and hit return, and we have this nice way of adding your signature here. If you go to the insert menu right here, you can say... And there's a long list of things you can insert.



You've got you see Your Signature right there. So if you say insert your signature, you'll notice it puts four little tildes or squiggles there, but it hopefully automatically populates your name there and hit publish changes like what Kelly had before. And you can just say, "Sign my name" like that as the edit history. And that can be your first edit or one of your first edits here. Now, you can see I have double signature there, but that's okay. Hopefully that'll work very easily for you to add your name to the signup list there. So that could be your first edit.



Now, as Kelly said, we have a bunch of tasks here. Don't let this make you nervous. I know there's a lot of numbers. There's a lot of names, a lot of descriptions. Really it's meant to just give you as many opportunities to contribute as you'd like, but what Kelly and I are going to do is demonstrate some of the most basic things you can do with an article. And then we'll give you five or 10 minutes to try these things on your own as a little sprint and then we'll kind of reassemble and see what you've done. But at any time, you can feel free to add a question to the chat and we can answer them right away in the chat there for you.



So as you can see here, we have basically three different type of things. The other two are a little bit more visual. Working with what we call Wiki data, but most of you probably want to try out the Wikipedia article improvement. And that's what we're going to show you first today. But we'll also later on the edit-a-thon show you some things that work with what we call Wiki data, which is our newest project. And actually in many ways, this is easier to do than Wikipedia, and definitely more visual. And we'll show you that later on as we get to those things. So, Kelly, what do we want to try first to improve on when we look at these articles to edit?

Kelly Doyle:

Well, maybe we can edit an article that just needs a couple of things done at the same time. Maybe let's try Rae Wynn-Grant's article.

Andrew Lih:

Great.

Kelly Doyle:

What do you think?

Andrew Lih:

Yeah, that sounds great. So, as folks can see that these are articles that already exist, but they may not have a lot of references or they may be small or could use improvement. And then these down here are the ones that are red-linked. These are the ones that don't exist yet, but certainly have enough notability that you could add things. And in fact, I see some people who've actually already improved these while we're talking. Actually, we didn't have information for all these folks, but someone has filled in all that information, which is amazing. Thank you folks for doing that.



So, we're going to go first to Rae Wynn-Grant and we're going to open up her page here. And let's just... As Kelly said, always just kind of read the first sentence. We'd like to have what we call the inverted pyramid style. If you could only read one sentence, have you gotten the most important information about this person right away? And I think most of you have read enough Wikipedia articles that you know that this is the style that we have in Wikipedia. So, right now it says, "Rae Wynn-Grant is a large carnivore ecologist and a fellow with the National Geographic Society. She is best known for her research of the human impact on the behavior of black bears in Montana, and is an advocate for women and people of color in the sciences." Pretty good. What do you think, Kelly?

Kelly Doyle:

Sorry, Andrew. I Was answering a question in the chat about-

Andrew Lih:

No, no. No worries.

Kelly Doyle:

conflicts of interest. Do you want to pop on? We're getting a couple of questions about that. You should not under any circumstance edit an article about someone you know or about an organization with you that you are somehow involved in past or present.

Andrew Lih:

Right. It's definitely the safest to... If it's a relative, a close friend, those type of things, you're best to avoid editing those things, especially if there's that conflict of interest issue right there. If it's something that's purely factual that you can link to a source saying, "This person is no longer working here, but is working there," you can suggest that on the talk page or something else, but best not to have those direct conflicts of interests.

So, I love that people are already putting their names in or putting their dibs in on things. That's great. In general, it's best Wikipedia to not have too many people working on one thing, but it's possible to have multiple folks working on something. And Wikipedia does have a way to automatically resolve some two or three people working on the same page. It doesn't always work, but most of the time it works as long as you're editing different parts of the page. So, that's great to see folks. Putting in already saying they want to work on specific pages.



All right. And so, don't worry Todd and other folks. We're just demoing some basic stuff here. We're going to give you time to work on specific articles later on, and you can ask specific questions. So we're going to demo some basic things on what we think the average person would want to do to improve articles.



So, this is the page on Rae Wynn-Grant. So, the first thing I could see is that you'll notice that there's a few words here that are not linked to other parts of Wikipedia. And in general, we like to make sure that content that is maybe not obvious to everyone is linked to the relevant Wikipedia article. This is one of the simplest things you can do, but super useful for Wikipedia. So, I would say the very beginning is Montana, right. Not everyone knows what Montana is. If you're reading from outside the US, you may not know what that is, right? It's the state of the United States.



So, one thing we can do right away is edit this page. So, right here, I have the "edit this page" button right there. And now I'm in Visual Editor. Now, someone in the chat had asked, "How do you toggle between the two different ways of editing?" So, actually, there's this pencil icon right now. And you can go to source editing, which gets you in kind of more the expert mode here. Now, I'm an expert in Wikipedia and I actually don't even like this mode. I actually like the Visual Editor mode. So, I'm going to go back to visual editing right here. And it's much more friendly to edit in this mode, but either way is fine.



So, if we're here and we want a Wiki link, as we call it, Montana, I'm going to go ahead and select Montana there. And I can actually go in here and hit the chain button. I know this might be confusing because there's no label on it, but you hit the chain button that links to something else and you can see automatically it's going to search for Wikipedia and say, "Oh, you probably mean Montana, the US state." That's exactly what we want. So, we choose Montana there and that's it.



And I'm a fan of doing small incremental changes and saving your work because I'd rather not work for 10, 15 minutes and maybe I lose that work, right. So, I'm going to go ahead and select "publish changes" right up here and choose Wiki link Montana state in the U.S.

So, again, this is just a mini message to folks browsing the changes, so they get a very useful summary of what I've done here. And I can say whether it's a minor or not minor edit. I think Wiki linking is a significant edit. So I'm just going to leave that unchecked and hit publish changes. Okay. And that's it. I have now made an edit to this and you can see now that Montana, by clicking on it, gets to the Montana page in Wikipedia. So, the very basic level. Any of you can do this very simply and it's super useful because a lot of these articles for these women were written relatively recently and they might not have the full linking in. So, if you... Go ahead, Kelly.

Kelly Doyle:

Could we just slowly show folks how to find the Visual Editor pencil icon again? We're getting a couple questions about that as well as how to sign in on the event page again. Just take a little step back for folks who are catching up.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah, no worries. So, whatever edit button you have, it really depends on when you signed up, but if you hit the edit source button, let's say, and you're in this mode, you can choose the pencil icon up here to go to either mode, right? So the pencil icon gets you to either visual editing or source editing. I'm in the source editing here. If you see something like this, that's the source editor mode, and this is the Visual Editor mode. And because we're doing mostly biographies today, you will see extra warnings around editing the biographies of living people. And that's just Wikipedia trying to be responsible and warning you these people have lives. They could really be affected by incorrect information, so be extra careful about what you do, right.



Okay. So, that is the editing part. And then if we go back to the Wikipedia meetup page, which is right here. If we go here, you can go down to "Edit this page with Visual Editor" right there. So, these pages here won't necessarily have the edit button up here. So, we've added a special button right here that says, "Edit this page with Visual Editor." And looks great. A lot of people have been signing in. That's wonderful. You can see multiple folks there. Don't worry if your name is in red. That means it's a new account. That means you haven't add anything to your user page yet, but that's okay. So, you're going to hit return. And then you're going to say "insert". And you can see we have lots of stuff here, including chemical formulas, your signature. And that's where it's going to automatically populate that with your signature.



Okay. And I do recognize that some folks, depending on the browser you have, there might be some variations on what you see in the interface, but Jim and some other experience Wikipedia editors can give folks advice in the chat. So thank you for that. Okay. Any other questions that we can immediately answer? Otherwise, we'll do some more demoing. And folks who are experienced, you can go ahead and start editing some articles if you want, but we're going to demo some basic stuff here in the Rae Wynn-Grant article. Okay. Anything else in the chat? I think we're in pretty good shape here. Okay. Let me just do one... I'm sorry. Go ahead, Kelly.

Kelly Doyle:

We're still getting questions about the Visual Editor not showing up in Chrome. I don't think that that should have an impact. So, do you just want to go through how to walk through the steps again and just make sure everyone can find it?

Andrew Lih:

Yeah, no matter what you're seeing, whether it's edit source or edit button, whatever you get to, you should have some kind of pencil icon, right? So, at that point, you choose the editing that you want. So, there should at least be an edit button on every single page that we're showing you from here. So, go to edit source or edit this page or edit. Regardless of which mode you're in, you can always go to the pencil icon right here and choose one of the modes there, which I recommend visual editing as much as possible. Okay. So, hopefully, you'll see that.



So, we're going to go on and then do one more Wiki link. An example of one that might be a little bit different. And then we'll go on to add some more things like references to things. So, let's go ahead and try this again. So, in Rae Wynn-Grant, we're going to hit the edit source button or edit page button. Going to go to the pencil icon and choose visual editing. And one thing that might be interesting is to say people of color. That might be a very American term. So, I think there's a good argument for saying, "Hey, if people aren't familiar with the term people of color, do we have a Wikipedia article linked that to?" In fact, we do. So let's go ahead and choose people of color and click on the Wiki link. And you can see here, this is kind of interesting that although it says people of color, it's recommending person of color, which is kind of nice because that means that we have people of color Wikipedia, but it's just a redirect to person of color, which is the main name for that article.



So, we're going to go ahead and choose person of color. Term for a person considered non-white. And we can go ahead and add that again. Add link to person of color. Published changes. And now we have made a second edit to this page. And just to reinforce what Kelly showed before. If you want to see the changes, you can click on the view history button right up here. If I click on view history, you'll see the reverse chronological log and you can see exactly what we've edited right there on the screen. And the reason why that edit summary is important is because without even needing to inspect the edit, you can actually get a summary here saying, "I Wiki linked Montana, and I added a link to person of color," right. So that's really nice to be able to see that.



And then if you really want to inspect it, you can actually click on this button that says "prev", which means show me the difference between the previous version and this version. If I click on that previous button, you will see it shows me the difference between the previous one and the current one. You can see person of color or people of color was added there. Okay. So, that is just the easy way to inspect what people have done. And this might be useful if you're editing an article and you realize, "Oh, someone might be working on the same article." You can click on the view history button to see what things other people have done to the article.



All right. So, very simple, easy to do things right away. And we'll look at some of the things in the chat and we'll show you how to add a reference to an article. All right. Anything else?

Kelly Doyle:

Andrew, is there a reason why the pencil icon wouldn't be showing up for people if they have a brand new account or if they're looking an old Wikipedia account or a beta feature? We're getting a lot of questions about just folks not being able to find it, which I haven't encountered before. So, I want to make sure-

Andrew Lih:

I haven't encountered that either unless you're looking at an article that is protected. So, make sure you're looking at one of the articles we're looking at here. If you're looking at article like Oprah Winfrey or Barack Obama, those are not going to be editable by the average person because they're so high traffic that they've been protected. So, make sure you're looking at one of these articles we're looking at on the screen to make sure you're looking at one that can be edited. Otherwise, if you are not seeing the pencil icon, I'll show you one other way. If you're seeing the edit source button like this... Yeah. And then you are... Let me go ahead and take a look at this. So if you're editing the page here and you don't see the pencil icon, you can always go to the URL up here. I don't know if you're seeing on the screen there and just put VE action equals edit, and you will get to the Visual Editor this way. That's kind of a weird secret, but really should not be missing the pencil icon on your screen. If so, then let us know in the free editing time, and we'll try to diagnose that for you right there. Okay.

Kelly Doyle:

And I will say that it does change if you are on mobile or an iPad.

Andrew Lih:

Correct. That's true. So that's a great point. Let me show you what happens is when you go to this on a mobile... So this is your normal page, but when you go on a mobile, Wikipedia tries to be nice and puts in an "M" in the URL and you might see this. And this is a very different interface. If you hit the edit button here, then this looks very different, but you should still see something like that. Source editor and Visual Editor, but that's a great point, Kelly, that the mobile experience is quite different on Wikipedia versus the desktop experience.

Kelly Doyle:

And then Andrew, we should also talk about how to sign in again, but also resolving the edit conflicts. That's been happening with people trying to sign up on the edit page. They're getting an edit conflict.

Andrew Lih:

Right.

Kelly Doyle:

I mean, if you have an edit conflict, the easiest thing to do is just to go back in and just try it again. I mean, that's the simplest approach, but if you do have an edit conflict, it'll try to show you the old one and the new one and say, "Hey, I can't figure out how to automatically resolve this." For signing your name, it's as easy as just trying again. If you're editing an article, then it might be like one sentence that kind of clashes with another person. So, you might want to just copy the sentence that you were trying to add and try to re-add it a second time to the newest version. During the free work time, we can address specific instances of that. But the easiest thing to do, especially for something just adding a name to a list, is just to try again because that will usually do the trick of just putting your name at the bottom of the list. Yeah.



So, Tara and other folks, just try it again now and see because I don't think there's a high traffic right now. It might have been when you were trying to add it during a high traffic time. Okay. So someone said they had to temporarily disable the Visual Editor while it's in beta. Oh, that's interesting. So, maybe you have to go to preferences to go to that.



Yeah. Sometimes we find that people who sign up for accounts at different times have different default settings, which is kind of weird. So, you might have to go to the preferences for your account and change that. So, under preferences. So, thank you for that, Anne Marie, if you have to go to that. So we're not going to dwell too much on this, but we can do some troubleshooting when we have... We give you about five or 10 minutes to work on an article before we reassemble and we can work on some of those bugs during that time. Although it looks like someone [inaudible 00:49:46] their name at the top here, we can help you resolve that. It's really easy to get your name in the wrong place on these pages.



Okay. But it looks like most of you are getting your name in there just fine. In fact, I think JM Gum92, you did successfully sign your name down there. Great. All right. So let's go on to do-



Sorry to interrupt, Andrew. We're just getting a couple questions for us to slow down a little bit and walk through things a little bit more slowly and to circle our cursor before we click on some something so everyone can see where we're clicking, which I think is a good tip.

Andrew Lih:

Okay. Yeah. I'll try to highlight exactly where we're working because I know it can be kind of small on the screen there. In fact, I will make the screen a little bit bigger for you folks there. So, hopefully you'll see more stuff there. Okay. Great.



So, let us go with another edit. Let me see if we can bring up Rae Wynn-Grant. Okay. So, let's go look at the references section down here. So, if you've never looked at them before, and believe it or not, we've had a lot of people who are many, many years that have been using Wikipedia who've never checked out the references section, but as editors today, you'll want to pay attention to this so that when you see these no numbers there, you click on it. You'll get down to the reference there and you can see that they're using national geographic expeditions as a source, national geographic site. But if you have other sources, we should use those because you don't want to depend too much on one of those sources for things.



So, in this case, Rae Wynn-Grant, we see that we have other sources here like LA Times. We have National Geographic, we've got Vogue. So there's actually a lot of other sources we could use here.



Okay. So, you can see here Rae Wynn-Grant is there from LA Times. So, this is just some good advice to try to use other types of sources as much as possible. And in case you didn't see it, we actually have real articles from Science magazine, which is recognized as a reliable source to Wikipedia.



All right. So let's go in and we're going to try to add some more information here. So, Kelly, we're going to try to add an info box and which one are we going to work on here? I think it's this one, Joyonna Gamble-George.

Kelly Doyle:

Yep.

Andrew Lih:

Great. So this is a great example of how we even have a great photo of Dr. Gamble-George here, but you'll notice that we like to see articles with what we call the information box here, right. This is more structured. It's more easily readable and it's actually similar to what you might see on Google, right? So it's more digestible to search engines if we have things format like that. So, we actually know a lot about Dr. Gamble-George, but we just want to put it an info box. And we even have a photo ready to use. So, let's go ahead and do that.



So the way that we do the info box is we are just going to go ahead and edit the article as normal. So go to edit source or any edit option that you want, and we're going to go to the Visual Editor. So I'm going to go to visual editing here. You can do this by hand if you want in the source editor, but it's much easier to do it this way. And what we're going to do is go to the front of the article. So, I'm putting my pointer right here at the beginning of the article before the first word. And we're going to go ahead and insert what we call an info box, right.



So, we're going to go in here and say insert template. All right. And the template we're going to add is called an info box. And we actually have lots of different info boxes we can add. And the one we're going to use is person. An info box for articles about people right there. Right.



And the easiest thing we want to do here is just at least put the name in. So, I like to do things in small bites, right. So, we're going to go ahead and copy her full name right here and we're going to go ahead and put in the name and say insert. So, hopefully everyone sees that. Very simple. Not much beyond that right there. Right. So that's the beginning of it. I can go ahead and hit edit, and I can say add more information, right. So, the basic thing we need is the name right there. We can say add more information and we have lots of different things we can add for them. I can show more fields here. And the next thing I'm just going to add is education. Okay. And the education part is where we add the degree institution grad year.



So, let's go ahead and bring up her article here in another tab. And we can see that she got her PhD from Vanderbilt University. So let's just go ahead and just put that very basic information here. We can say Vanderbilt University and the way we do it here is we say PhD like that. Very simple, right? Vanderbilt University, PhD. But to make a link to this, we can actually put the double brackets around here like that, right. That's just the Wiki markup for that. Hit apply changes. And look at that. We've got a more built out info box, which is great. Let me go ahead and hit publish changes. And I'm going to say added info box to start. Okay. Hit publish changes. And we wait a second and now we have the beginnings of info box.



Now, we're going to try to get rid of this information here. We're going to move the image into the information box here, right. So, what we can do is go back to edit the page and we're going to go to the Visual Editor. And what we're going to do is grab the image name right there. So, there's the name of the image. And we're going to go in here to the information box. Hit edit, and we can actually add the image here, right. So we're going to go down here and say, "Here's the image." And here's the image name. And hopefully it'll give you a preview. There we are. Good. Hit apply changes, and look at that. Now we have an info box with the image there, right.



Now, what we could also do is copy the caption and add it to the information box here as well. So, we're going to go in there and look for the caption. Right there. Caption for image. So, we're just going to go at that. Apply changes. And now you can see we have that caption down there.



And now that we've got all this information, we actually don't need this at all anymore, this whole box, right. But let's go ahead and hit publish changes to start with and say, "Add more info," and hit publish changes.



All right. So, I like to just kind of keep them both there just to make sure we've moved over all the information. So, doesn't that look much better? That's kind of more what you'd expect from a Wikipedia article. Once we're satisfied that this information box has all the information we want, I'm not sure we need to stay in there. We can edit that later on, but we can now get rid of this bare image because it's now all captured in the information box.



So, this is where we can either go to the edit source field. I'm sorry. Edit source function and just remove this entire file image content there. Right there. We can get rid of that whole thing there or I think most of you probably want to use the Visual Editor. So, let's go ahead and hit visual editing. Okay. So, there we are. Get rid of that and that's it. We've gotten rid of that old image and I say, "Remove old image now that we are satisfied with the info box." And there we are. A very nice article with an image and info box. And from here, we can go back in and add more fields. We know that she went to University of South Florida. She went to Xavier University. So we can keep adding those things if you want. I'll leave that as something that maybe one of you want to try there. So, let's see if you want to try those types of things. So, that's just very basic stuff that we can do with article improvement. So Kelly, any other questions we should try to address right now?

Kelly Doyle:

I think that those are the big ones. Maybe just showing how to sign up on the page again.

Andrew Lih:

Okay. We'll get people working on some tasks and then we can show some demos. So, typically, what we do, folks, is we'll set the timer, which is now two o'clock, which is good. We'll give you about five or 10 minutes. We'll reconvene at 2:10. So, go ahead and choose something to work on down here. You can choose one of the articles that's here to add sources to improve them. I know that some people in the chat had said they wanted to have dibs on certain articles. So, you might want to choose one that hasn't been addressed already. And then we'll reconvene at 2:10 while we keep on answering questions. So, don't worry if you still hear us talking for the next 10 minutes. We're going to try to address questions, but you're free to keep working until 2:10, and we'll ask you to put into the chat links to what you've been working on. And we'll try to give you feedback on what you've been doing. Does that sound good? Okay. So let's go ahead and have you do the sprint until 2:10 PM and we'll reconvene then as a group.

Kelly Doyle:

Perfect. And Andrew, do you want to stop your screen share?

Andrew Lih:

Yeah, unless we want to demo the sign up again.

Kelly Doyle:

Oh, if you want to demo it real quick, that'd be great.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. So, we'll demo the screen... Sorry.

PART 2 OF 5 ENDS [01:00:04]

Kelly Doyle:

Quick. That'd be great.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. So we'll demo the screen. Sorry. We'll demo the sign up again for folks. Looks like someone has fixed the extra one there. So again, for folks who came in late, you have an account now, hopefully. Hopefully, you're logged in, so it shows your username up here. So that's important. Make sure your username is displayed at the top. It might be in red, if you're a new user. But what we're going to do is go down here to the sign up section. Looks like many of you have signed in, which is great.



And what you're going to do is click on this, Edit this page with Visual Editor. That's the easiest way to do things. So click on Edit this page with Visual Editor. And what you're going to do is scroll down until the last line there. Click on that or hit return. Make sure you're on the next line there. And then, you're going to go in here and say, Insert your signature. So right there, it says, Insert your Signature. Click on Signature and you should see your name pop up. If you're a new account, it should show up in red. And then, just hit Publish changes at that point. So there.

Kelly Doyle:

Can we also demo it in source editing, for those of that can't get Visual Editor to work?

Andrew Lih:

Yes, we can do that too. And that's true. Some of you coming from a workplace or a shared internet address might get a problem with your IP address being blocked, which is possible, depending on whether you're coming from a university or a company that might have had some block. So if that's the case, we can, maybe, help you get an account there or just try to edit without logging in and see if that works first. All right. So if you are here and you're in the source editor, you can also sign your name pretty easily, right?



So don't worry if all of this doesn't make sense to you right here, but just going to scroll down, until you see your massive list of folks right there. So what you can do is click here at the bottom of the list. And you can actually just click on the Signature button right there. Hopefully, people see it there. If you click on that, it's going to add this to the bottom list, which is the four tildes. And you can replace the double dashes with asterisks. And then, go ahead and publish your changes right there. So that's another way to add your signature to the list of attendees. So that's how you do it in the source editing mode. So that's source editor.

Kelly Doyle:

Looks good.

Andrew Lih:

All right. So folks keep on working. We're got about seven minutes left before we check in at 2:10. So it wasn't clear before that the field is editable. So yeah, the thing is, depending on the browser and whether you're on a tablet or a mobile, the user experience could look quite different for folks. So we apologize, if we can't always show you every single possible way that you'll see the interface. But I think most folks can get to something where you can edit content. So that's good. So let's just make sure we re-paste this page for folks who may not have a link to it.



So here's a good question from Tara. Sometimes the article or the sources you consult may not be clear, whether it's a Bachelors of Science or Bachelors of the Arts. So sometimes in the pros of an article, you'll see a "Bachelor's Degree in" or a Bachelor of Science or a Bachelor's of the Arts. And that's good question. Sometimes it's not clear and sometimes sources can conflict about whether it's a BS or a BA. And you're absolutely right about that. So we will try to try to resolve those things. Let's take a look at this one. Kelly, any questions so far that...?

Kelly Doyle:

No, I just saw that this one had been created, but I don't see any references. So we might just want to talk about creating and how we go about creating new articles and where to put the references in, so that they stay up on Wiki.

Andrew Lih:

That's a good question. So I'm glad someone has started this. That's great. I actually saw Olivia's foreign statue in person, so it's really thrilling to see someone make that article, which is great. If you haven't seen, I put in one picture I took, at Air and Space Museum. And you can actually see them in their real life. And that might be... Is that Olivia there? I can't tell who's who there, actually, in this picture. So I'll have to see. So let's go ahead and take a look at how we add a reference to these articles. Any ones that we want to work on, specifically, Kelly?

Kelly Doyle:

There's a couple images we could add. Or we could add the source. Let's see. There was a woman who wrote a book and won an award, but it's not in her article. Let me find it. Sarah Parcak.

Andrew Lih:

Yes, we could do that one. That's a good one. So here's Sarah's page. And one thing that you might have noticed that Wikipedia, we usually don't have too many or any references in the first paragraph just to make it cleaner looking. And then, the subsequent paragraphs, we want to make sure we have a lot of info and a lot of references for them. So you can see down here, this is pretty well documented. Lots of references, but we could add more here. So there was a new award, I think, that she got, that has not been added. Is that right?

Kelly Doyle:

Yes. Let me add the link in the chat, just so everyone can see what we're referring to.

Andrew Lih:

So I think she won an award for the Archeological Institute of America. So you're putting that link into the chat, I think. And I'll put it up on the screen.

Kelly Doyle:

And the book, the information that the book was published is in her article, but not that the book has just won an award. That's the distinction.

Andrew Lih:

Oh, okay. So the award is for her book, right?

Kelly Doyle:

So the information on the book is in the article, but we should enhance the article just to say, "This is now an award winning book and it's been acknowledged by her peers."

Andrew Lih:

Great, great. That's great. So here it is. The information on the page and this page being, just kind of, an announcement page. It's not really going to have an author or publication date. We'll just fill in as much as we can, but let's go back to Sarah's article here. And she published Archeology from Space. And then, we want to add the award information. So let's go ahead and hit the edit button. So we're going to go either edit this page or edit source. I'll go to edit source and show you the pencil icon again. So let's go to Visual Editing, which I'm a big fan of. And let's go down here and say... So that source is still good, 26, but we're going keep adding to that.



She published this book, which won the... Let's see what we call this. Archaeological Institute of America. So I like copying and pasting names, so I don't get a typo. So we're going to go in here. "Won the Archaeological Institute of America's..." What award is that? It is the Felicia A. Holton Book Award. Again, copying pasting things like this is absolutely fine, because you want to get the name right? Oops. Not bold. "In 2022." And then, we want to copy the URL for this. And then, this is where Kelly showed you before. We're going to hopefully see the magic work here and say Cite. All right. So we're going to hit the Cite button right here and we're going to paste in the URL and hit Generate. And we cross our fingers here, because most of the time it does the right thing. Let's go ahead and see what does. Pretty good. All right. So there's no author and things. So as long as we have the retrieve date and we even picked up the right publication date, which is 11-12, November 12th, 2021. We're going to hit Insert and lo and behold, we now have a nice citation. And we're going to add the, say, "add the award from the," and I have this in my past history.



Hit Publish changes. All right. So hopefully we see down here. "Which won the duh duh duh." Okay, good. So I like to do things in increments, right? So we make sure we get that basic information in. We click on 28 and now, you'll see that the reference looks like this down at the bottom, which is great.

Kelly Doyle:

Yeah. Perfect. And that is a great contribution. It's enriching her article and it was relatively easy to do, to find a new news article about her, to add one sentence and the source. And you could be done. You could just make one small edit and it really does enrich the article.

Andrew Lih:

And thank you, someone in the chat. I think, as Rese mentioned, that you can go to the ifthencollection.org site to look for information, to help on researching these folks. Some of those links have been added here in this column, where it says Exhibit Sources. So it's important to show you that this is a great starting point for figuring out more information, but just being listed on the IF/THEN site is not enough to prove that information. So that's why we like this Independent Sources column where these are new sources or websites that have more reliable information. And these are good for using as sources in the article. This is good for kind of background research here. So we encourage you to use the sources here or what you might find on Google, rather than depending on the exhibit listing for the sourcing.



So we've got... Oh, actually, we passed our 10 minute sprint. So we're going to go back to talking to folks and then, we'll do another 10 minute sprint, where we can talk about image rights and how to use them, which is not the simplest thing in the world. So we'll leave that for a deeper discussion. So we invite everyone, send us your links, tell us what you've been working on. We love to see what you have been changing and what you've been editing. So go ahead and paste that in there, into the chat, if you don't mind us seeing what you've been working on. So I'll wait a minute or so for you folks to paste in your links on what you've been working on. Another neat feature. This is kind of a secret of Wikipedia. If you know that a page has lots of articles being mentioned. Look at all these women here and you want to say, "Well, I'd like to see the changes made to these articles."



We have a secret button, which is not so secret, but just never noticed it. You can click on Related Changes here, which is kind of cool. And says, "Let me look at the changes to all the articles that are mentioned on this page." So when I click on Related Changes, it's going to take some time, but you can see, hopefully. Wow, look. So looks like someone's been working on Xyla, on Becca, on Erika, on Sarah. That was me. But this is great to see so many folks working on these articles. And hopefully, you see your name out here. You can see that Rosiestep here, who's one of our founders of the Women in Red project for Wikipedia, has been working on this. You can see three different people, at least, have been working on Lataisia Jones. That's awesome. So this is kind of neat to be able to click on the Related Changes button, kind of get an overview of the different things that people have been editing. But we encourage you to put into the chat, the type of things that you've been working on. So let's take a look at Victoria Herrmann.



This is great to see the changes here. We're going to click on View history to see what kind of things been edited. So jmgum92, thank you for all those changes. So another thing you can do is you can see that these four edits have been made. You can actually click on this cur button, which is really confusing. But it actually just means, "Tell me everything that's changed between now and the current version." So if you're saying, "Take this revision and show me all the changes." And this is great. Look, someone has put in an infobox, which is awesome. Great work. So they did something very similar to what we did before. Added a new infobox and someone else had added Lataisia Jones right here. We can go to the View history button and take a look at the View history and you can see many folks have been working on this.



It's great. Again, we look at the one that was changed last, before today, and we click on the cur button. And you can see the stuff that people have been doing. They've added a Wiki link to Washington, D.C., which is great. We've added to Suffolk, Virginia. So Wiki linking, absolutely a great thing you can do. It helps get more of Wikipedia linked together and useful for these types of things. Some copy editing there. That's great to see. So keep doing those types of things. It's great to see the types of edits people are making here, and you can always go to the Related Changes.



I will actually put a link to this into our chat. So if anyone wants to reproduce what I've been doing on the screen here, you can actually click on that really long link I just put in there. And you can go ahead and see the related changes. And if we refresh this, you'll hopefully see even more changes that have been made, since we last talked. Yes, you can see more changes made right there, since we had checked last. Now, as for a recordings, several people have asked for recordings of this. I think, Kelly, you're going to check into that, right? In terms of what we can do?

Kelly Doyle:

Oh yeah. I've already put in the chat where the recording will eventually live, but I will do it again.

Andrew Lih:

Great. All right. So let's look at one more edit and then, we'll give you another 10 minute sprint at 2:20, so you can work on more stuff. But we love this kind of interactive situation here, where we can give you feedback on the types of edits you're making. And hopefully, you'll inspire other folks to make edits as well. So this is Becca and we can actually go to the history here and it looks like lots of edits have been made to this. This is great. So we can see the last time it was edited, before today, was February 15th. We can click on the cur button to show all the changes, since then, to the current version. And this is great. You can see folks have been adding things to the infobox, including degrees, which isn't really useful. Doctoral advisor, really good.



This is a good one as well. This is her formal name, but if she's always being referred to as Becca in the field, put that in there. That is absolutely valid. So really nice that it's made here to Becca's article. And then, Early Life is a new section being added. You can tell that by the double equal signs there in the article. "Becca was a Girl Scouts of the USA." Really good. And external links. Nicely done. So this is just great examples of what we can keep adding to the articles. Oh, and let's take a look at Xyla, which is really interesting here. Now, you'll notice that her infobox looks extra special. Believe it or not, we actually have a special infobox for a YouTuber. Now this was quite interesting in the early days of YouTube, but now, it's just accepted as completely valid. But this was not always the case to Wikipedia.



Is being a YouTuber famous enough to have its own intro box? And today, absolutely. You've got YouTubers that are more famous than Hollywood stars, in fact. So let's say, "Xyla Foxlin is an American engineer, entrepreneur, and YouTuber." You can see that right there. So let's go ahead and take a look at what has been changed for Xyla. And we can see here. Hit cur, all the changes to the current version. So Boston was Wikilinked. There's a whole new section here "named one of Crain's Cleveland's most Notable Women in Technology." That's quite a distinction there. And a source for that. That's great. So you can see that this comparison function in Wikipedia is something you may not have known about, but we use it all the time as editors. It's really nice to be able to inspect what has changed between any two versions there. Great. So good job, [Deanne 01:17:45]. Nice additions to this article.

Kelly Doyle:

Andrew, do we want to give everyone just a 10 minute kind of silent break to edit or go get a glass of water? And we can put up some images? I think the team from Natural History Museum can put up some images in the background while you work.

Andrew Lih:

That sounds great. So I'm going to go ahead and stop the screen share, and then, we will give folks a 10 minute either stretch or sprint. So until 2:30, keep working on the articles that you're working on. And then, we'll reassemble at 2:30.

Kelly Doyle:

And feel free to ask questions in the chat, in the meantime. Yes. Okay. Andrew, are we ready to get started again and show everyone how to maybe sign up at the top?

Andrew Lih:

Yeah, that sounds great. So thanks folks for hanging in there. Feel free to keep working. We're going to go over some of the signing in and basics for those who might have come late. And then, we will switch gears to show you some of the stuff that might have been asked in the chat, including inserting a source and making up for some shortcomings, if that doesn't come through. All right. So let's go ahead and share my screen again. Kelly, is everything looking okay there?

Kelly Doyle:

Looks good.

Andrew Lih:

Okay, great.

PART 3 OF 5 ENDS [01:30:04]

Andrew Lih:

Looking. Okay. There

Kelly Doyle:

Looks good.

Andrew Lih:

Okay, great. So let us go back to our page. So here's our meetup page and just make sure everyone is signed in. I know we have more editors than this, so please do remember to sign up there. If you're here, you can hit the edit source button, or you can click down here on the edit this page with Visual Editor button. I prefer the Visual Editors. We're going to go ahead and click on that, and then we're going to scroll down. The last line, put your pointer at the end right there, hit return, and then say, insert, pull this down your signature. Click on that and your name should pop up right down there. And then hit publish changes, and that's all there is to it.

Kelly Doyle:

Thanks Andrew.

Andrew Lih:

If all fails you can just send your name in the chat and we can add it for you. If all else fails.

Kelly Doyle:

Exactly. We were going to focus, now that we started back up on images, but we got one question in the chat about YouTube videos as sources. What do you think Andrew?

Andrew Lih:

Repeat that? I'm sorry. The images for?

Kelly Doyle:

Oh, well, we're going to dive into images in just a second, but we have a question that I thought we should address if YouTube videos should be used as sources.

Andrew Lih:

Oh yes. So YouTube, it depends. In general, no but it can be. The use of non-text sources in Wikipedia is mixed. I would say if you are going to use a YouTube video, make sure it's reputable, like either a news site or it is a podcast. Just make sure it's being used in the right context. It doesn't mean it proves anything, but it should be something that is directly referred to by the YouTube video. Even if it's something like John Doe claims they were inspired by the first time they saw Star Wars to become a rocket scientist. Make sure the YouTube video actually has that firmly in there and it has the actual time code or something like that. That helps a lot more because it's harder to check a YouTube video for verification than it is, let's say, a blog or something that's a tech source. I think there's no blanket policy for YouTube, but in general, it should have direct applicability to what is being asserted in the article. Does that make sense?

Kelly Doyle:

So in the chat here, Dean is clarified and he wants to add a link from the woman's YouTube page to her YouTube article. I don't know about that.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. So it depends on who created that YouTube article. Right?

Kelly Doyle:

I think it's her own. It's a video of her, but it's hosted on her personal YouTube channel. So I would want to say no in that instance.

Andrew Lih:

Right. Or in some cases in those situations, sometimes you might say she claims, or she said, or according to her, those are some ways to couch that fact or frame that fact in a certain way. But ideally we do a secondary search to find, as Jim said, an additional link to verify that. Although Greater Miss Cleveland might sound like it might not be an organization that might have up to date web stuff, but you never know. It might be in the local paper or something like that. I would do more searching to make sure that's verifiable. Yes.



Yes, Kelly said there's an external links section. That's a good point. I don't know if this one has it, but a lot of times... Oh, this perfect example. A lot of YouTube links make it down here. There's less scrutiny because when you put something in the external links section of an article... We're looking at the one for Rae Wynn-Grant. If you look at external links, these are almost like additional reading, things you might be interested in, but they don't necessarily assert factual information. They might be an interview with the person, they might be that person dialoguing about something. So I think that's not a bad place to put YouTube links. It's often where you'll see YouTube being applied in Wikipedia. Okay. Yeah. Dean, I hope you find the better link, but oftentimes most people won't won't lie about something like that because it's easily findable, but good to have verification. Any other question?

Kelly Doyle:

I think that... Let's see, I missed seeing the insert link and the list dropping down.

Andrew Lih:

Oh, insert a link or insert a signature? Insert a link?

Kelly Doyle:

Valerie if you're talking about the signup page, you can always just put the username you created in the chat and we can add it for you if you're having some difficulty.

Andrew Lih:

I will say, if Valerie's talking about links, it can be confusing, so let me show you one more time. Oh, okay. Well Lauren, we can add your name manually, I think, to the list. Sometimes you just get another conflict based on some stale information in the editor. I don't know why that is sometimes. But let me show you why sometimes Wikipedia can be confusing even as veterans, Wikipedia... I get this confused sometimes. So if I go to Visual Editor, let's say I'm editing this page, there might be three things you want to do on Wikipedia articles. You might want to link to an article like this, like molecular biology, you might want to add a reference to New York times to prove something is right, and you might want to insert an image or something else.



Now, believe it or not there are three completely different buttons in Wikipedia. That's not great. So what happens is if I want to go in here and say African American, I want to link to that, I would click on the chain icon to link to African Americans here. If I want to cite something or reference something, I would have to click on the site button right there. If I want to insert an image, I would go in here and say insert. That's kind of confusing. You might want to say, I want to insert a link to something in Wikipedia. You don't go to the insert button. You go to the chain button.



You might want to go in here and say, "I want to insert a reference. Let me go to insert." You don't use that button, use the site button. That can be a little bit confusing. Just make sure you know, that we've got a link button, a site button, and an insert everything else button. They are not always obvious. Even after decade of editing, I sometimes need to remind myself we've got three different types of buttons up here in Wikipedia.



Okay. Anyone who's still having problems signing your name, just send your username in the chat and we'll add it for you. Sometimes when you're editing that list, your editor on Wikipedia gets stale information that gives you a conflict when there really isn't a conflict, so we can go ahead and do that for you. Okay? So that is hopefully giving you a overview of the different things you can insert into an article. Okay. So Valerie just send us... Oh, I think Valerie did send us... No, Lauren sent us the username.

Kelly Doyle:

Valerie, you can use four tildes as your shortcut to your signature on a new line.

Andrew Lih:

Or just do what I'm doing here. Just grab your username like that, copy it and just paste it into our chat and we can add it for you. Right. So my username is, Fuzzheado. Just type in your name there and we'll just add it for you. I'm sure everything else will work fine other than that one bug about adding your signature.

Kelly Doyle:

It's a high traffic page so there might be a conflict happening with someone saving at the same time.

Andrew Lih:

Exactly.

Kelly Doyle:

But let's dig into images. We do have two articles that we've found. Free youth images for already on Wikimedia Commons, so we can show you how to add those and talk a little bit about image rights. So we found two images, one for Lataisia Jones who I think you just had her article pulled up Andrew.

Andrew Lih:

Yes. So let's go to Lataisia Jones right there. Okay. So we have a really nice info box. But you're saying Kelly, we have a free image of her. Is that right?

Kelly Doyle:

I did. Let me put it in the chat so everyone can see it.

Andrew Lih:

Great. So the most important thing to understand is that images in Wikipedia have to be free images. There's a little bit of an exception for that. But for now that is a truism that they have to be free. So we're looking on Wikimedia Commons, which is the partner site of Wikipedia. This is the multimedia repository that we have and they have to be free. If you scroll down here, you can see here that because the IF/THEN Initiative had emailed the Wikimedia Foundation that said, "Here's an image it's ours and you can use it for free." That is proof or it's on the record that it's free which is great.



This is nice. It is a photo from 2020 and here she is. It's great. Nice portrait. So what we can do is come here and just copy the name of the file here. This has to be on Commons. You can't just copy the URL of an image on New York Times or any other site. We have to copy the image name here. We're going to come back here to this page. We're going to say, edit source or edit this page. I want to go edit this page. Here's our info box. We showed you before how to edit that. We're going to go hit the edit button right here.



Unfortunately, one of the primary fields that they want is an image. So it's already here, but if it wasn't here, you could always go down here and say, add more information, right there. But we're going to say image. The nice thing is once you paste in the name of the image, it should verify it's there. There she is. Power pose. I like that. Click on that and let's see... I'm just going to go and start with this. I don't want people to stress too much. Let's go and put the image first. Look at that. That's great. Hit publish changes, say, "Added image from Wikimedia Commons," publish changes. Look how much more lively that page is now that we have that image. I think that's great.



Now, if you want to go and enhance it, you could say, get the caption information here, whether it's at this place and add that. You can even put the date, which might be useful. Let's go ahead and do that just to be nice. All right. So we're going to go in here and add that. We're going to go in here and hit the edit button again, click on this info box, hit edit and caption right there. Now I'm going to try to clean this up. I'm going to say Lataisia Jones, here we go. Oops, sorry. Caption right here.



Now this is a small thing, but it's actually kind of interesting. You're probably wondering, "What date format do we use in Wikipedia?" Any ideas in the chat or did anyone notice a pattern? It's kind of interesting seeing what people think. "Do I put June 5th? Do I put 2020-06-05?" Any ideas? So yeah. Thanks Rese. She is no longer at that place. I think we can still use this because that's where it was taken, but you're right. As long as we make sure the caption doesn't assert she's still working there. We should make sure that we don't make that mistake. Oh, she's now at NIH. I hope we have that in the article. We can double check that. Well the...

Kelly Doyle:

I don't think...

Andrew Lih:

Go ahead.

Kelly Doyle:

We need a reliable source other than LinkedIn. We need a published source to be able to add it to her article.

Andrew Lih:

Oh, okay. That's a good point.

Kelly Doyle:

The LinkedIn is something that she controls about herself and so we'll need another external source verifying it.

Andrew Lih:

Well, I am so glad you said that. Also, someone mentioned... You know what, I need to read carefully because it says that she is a neuroscientist at this, but it doesn't necessarily say the picture was taken at there. So I should edit myself. So I will get rid of that. That's a good point. I will say June 5th, 2020. All I know is the date. I don't know where that picture's actually at that location. Right? So the way that we do this is that if she's an American, we typically go with American dates. If she's British, we probably go with British dates, et cetera. We typically do that as our style. Okay. That's great. Hit publish, added basic caption. There we go. Yeah. Thank you folks. I love the collaborative editing. It's great. We have people as double sets of eyes and ears to make sure we put in the right information.

Kelly Doyle:

And we have a link now to update her where she's at if we want to do that really quickly.

Andrew Lih:

Good point. Although do we have a date to make sure this is current? You never know, but let's see. We'll have to double check that. Sometimes it's hard to prove when the start and stop date was for any of these types of things based on bio pages like this. So maybe during our sprint, we can work on that. Good idea. And orchid, yeah Jim has a good point. You could look up the orchid information. Maybe they have a more firm log of her employment or positions held. Orchid is pretty good for that. Okay. So we'll double check on that maybe during our sprint. We're going to reload this page real quick, just to see, make sure people are still making progress. That's great.

Kelly Doyle:

Do you have another image that we could add and talk a little bit more about images and how we add things on Wikimedia Commons? How we find things on Wikimedia Commons and what should or shouldn't be included there?

Andrew Lih:

Great.

Kelly Doyle:

So I was digging before the event, I found this image on Wikimedia Commons of Debbie Sterling. I just put it into the chat.

Andrew Lih:

Oh nice.

Kelly Doyle:

And so we know that this image just like the other one is safe because it came from Flickr to Commons and was reviewed in 2020. So it looks like the rights have already been reviewed and it's good to go. What do you think Andrew?

Andrew Lih:

That's great. I mean, this is a great way to demo to folks that Flickr, which some of you might remember, it's not the best site in the world, but Flickr is one of the largest repositories of images. Some photographers are nice enough to say, "Hey, you can actually use this if you attribute me," which is this attribution license. This is one of the licenses compatible with Wikimedia Commons, which means that we can actually take this image and bring it over to Wikimedia Commons, and it's fully legal, which is great. So that means that someone has imported it from Flickr and we're now ready to use it. So we have Debbie Sterling. Let's go ahead and copy that name.

Kelly Doyle:

And actually someone already added it to her Wikipedia page today.

Andrew Lih:

Oh, that's even better. Let's just double check that. All right. Debbie Sterling. So someone did the research. They cut us off with a pass which is good. All right. So there she is in the info box. The cool thing is everything is transparent and fully inspectable. We can see here, added education, added... So let's go ahead and click on... Actually this is a nice way to say, "We've got Rosie, we've got Tara, we've got Skylar." We can actually inspect this first one by saying, "Okay, what did Rosie do?" We hit this previous button and Rosie added California and a link to it, which is good.



Now the cool thing is that's Rosie's contribution. We can actually say, "Well what's the next contribution?" You can actually say next edit right here. Does everyone see that? Next edit says, "Okay, show me the next edit." This is where Tara did some copy editing on the infobox here including education, which is great. Next edit is New York Knicks. That's a good one. Next edit is an image and caption. This is where we can see she was added and the caption. Really nice. So you have now unlocked a second secret of Wikipedia. You can actually step through the history like this.

Kelly Doyle:

So we do have some questions. Can we upload our own photos and share Creative Commons rights for them? Or does it have to be a path through Flickr, et cetera? You can directly upload photos to Wikimedia Commons and put a Creative Commons lace on it, release your rights to it. If I took a photo of my backyard and I'm on my iPhone and wanted to put that photo onto Creative Commons, I could. I would put it under Creative Commons license, and it could sit on Wikimedia Commons for years. Or if someone wanted a picture of trees, they could take that and put it onto a Wikipedia article at that point.

Andrew Lih:

Yes. It's weird. There's a big asterisk on that, and Kelly's absolutely right. Especially for nature, that is completely kosher, right? In terms of, "Here's a picture of this tree of this canyon, of this river, of this plant, of this insect of this animal." That is so nice to contribute because there's no copyright issues whatsoever. Once you start getting to manmade objects, and when was it made, is it public domain? Then it gets much more complicated. Now the specific question you had is a great question, because there's a reason why I'm showing you this photo I uploaded.



The way and why is because a full-on head to toe picture of just the statue probably cannot be uploaded to Commons because there's still copyright on the full statue. But why can this photo be uploaded? I will defer this to Jim who's actually in the chat here who's a big expert on this. The reason why this one is kind of skirting the rules is because the bulk of this picture that I'm looking at right here... let me get a bigger version, is actually of the Air and Space Museum and these rockets, and I just happen to have these statues in the foreground.



This is... Exactly what Dean said, "De minimus," which means that the statue is a part of the image. It's not primarily the image so I can use this image as free because it's a small part of the image, right? It's a weird subtlety of copyright law. But if I had just a straight on image of any of these statues, that's not really free, or you need to have some kind of special permission to do that. So it's weird.



It's a real thicket of policy around copyright. I'm just talking about American copyright, we're not even talking about international and other countries yet. We're not going to get into too much of the weeds there, but know that there's a whole community on Wikimedia Commons that discusses any... The only thing they talk about is copyright and whether an image is okay or not. So that's really interesting space to volunteer in on a movement. So yeah, no problem. It's really interesting to talk about copyright of images on Wikipedia. All right. So we actually could give folks another five or 10 minute sprint before three o'clock Kelly. How's that sound? And then we can come back and maybe talk a little bit about the Wiki data stuff that we have down here.

Kelly Doyle:

Sure, yeah. Let's have a little eight minute break.

Andrew Lih:

Sounds good. So we're going to take a eight minute sprint, keep working on stuff. We're happy to answer questions in the chat. This will also give our closed caption folks a little bit of a break until three o'clock and then we'll talk about some of the new neat things that we are seeing in Wiki data. All right?

Kelly Doyle:

Do you want to pull down your screen share, Andrew?

Andrew Lih:

Yeah, I'm going to stop the screen share. All right, folks. So it is the top of the hour we have about 30 minutes left. So if anyone wants to paste into the chat, anything they've been working on, we're happy to take a look at that. We'll also demo some of the stuff that is in the meetup page that gives you a glimpse at the new things we're working on in the Wikipedia side of things. There's a question in the chat about dead links, and you will see that. You'll see that references added to Wikipedia may not exist anymore and we actually have a internet archive bot that helps us save those dead links.

PART 4 OF 5 ENDS [02:00:04]

Andrew Lih:

And we actually have a internet archive bot that helps us save those dead links. So look at the chat if you want more information about that because you can actually summon the bot to help fix a page with a special tool. So that is in the chat. All right. Let me go ahead and share my screen again, so we can see what's going on. So hopefully you're seeing that related changes page again. It's great to see all the stuff folks have been working on. We even have some new pages that created like Jess Cramp. If we have time, we can take a look at that later on. Olivia's page. So thanks for all the great work you folks have been doing. And looks like some people have gotten a welcome. So a lot of folks have created articles, I mean, sorry, accounts recently got a welcome from some of our volunteers there. That's good to see.



Wow. Lots of welcomes. All right. So let's go back to our meetup page. We'll show you two things related to what we call Wiki data. So the one minute summary of Wiki data is it's the structured database that we're making that is in parallel to Wikipedia that allows us to do some really interesting things. And for anyone who works with museum data or with records, this is basically turning Wikipedia articles and concepts into records that we can work with, which is pretty cool. And I thought the most interesting example of this is this, which is a knowledge graph. So what if we took what we know about these women in terms of their occupation and tried to visualize what we know about them in Wiki data. And the cool thing is this is what we can see. So this is like taking the stuff we know about them and bringing it to life.



Now what's really cool is that if we have an image of them, it shows up as their picture here. If we don't, that's okay. Their name still shows up here, but it would be nice to populate it, but you can see some of the images here are familiar because they are also drawing from Wikimedia commons. And the neat thing is that if we've actually entered stuff into Wiki data about them, about their occupation, physicist, engineer, director, they all show up here and they link to them. And what is happening here is if it's a yellow circle here, that means that we have their entry in Wiki data, but we don't have any information about their occupation. So in an ideal world, we would try to populate all the occupation information, at least one entry about them so that these yellow circles go away. And we actually have orange circles that pop up instead.



So how might we do this easily? Let me show you what a Wiki data entry looks like for someone that we've already edited. So we've actually gone in and looked at Sarah, right, for example. So we double click on Sarah. This is a knowledge graph that is generated from Wiki data. And if it looks really cool and interesting, it is. It's really slick that we can do stuff like this. So if we double click on Sarah here, this is what a Wiki data entry looks like. And you can see it almost looks like the info box that we saw for these people. And it basically is a unique number for that person, kind of like an ORCID iD or some kind of unique identifier. And then we have all this information about her that she's a human. Here's her image. And we have all this basic information that hopefully has references.



No, hopefully it's not from Wikipedia. It's actually from a reliable source out there. Well, we like to put more stuff here, but you can see that occupation, Egyptologist, anthropologist, archeologist. That's what shows up here, but in a graphical way, which is really nice. It shows us connections. We can now see, oh, we've got two nuclear engineers. We've got a bunch of engineers and physicists. We've got researchers. We've got academics. So the visual graph here is really nice to be able to see all these types of relationships. Now, how do we edit these things nicely? Well, you could kind of go individually and add things to them, but a much nicer way is the other thing that we've put in here, which is what we call a Wiki data table. So we can actually go in here to do a tabernacle edit, right? So this is a tool for live browsing a table of Wiki data items.



So we can actually go in here and this is the link right there. And this is almost like Excel. So if anyone here's ever used Microsoft Excel or any spreadsheet or Google sheets, this is exactly what it looks like. Right? So the nice thing is anything you've changed here gets edited to Wiki data, which is really cool. So I'm already logged in here. This is a tool that one of our esteemed Wikipedia folks have created. And you can actually come here and say, "If you haven't seen this story about Roselin Rosario Meléndez, it's really fascinating. She's a polymer chemist who's made long wear lipstick, which is a really fascinating story. So we have no occupation for her. We have a description. We don't know anything in these two fields. So what we can go and do here is say, "She's a chemist," of course. So we say chemist, and we can actually see that these are the things that match chemist. So I just added chemist to her. So we can go in here and say, "This person's an educator," teacher educator. We can say educator teacher. I'm going to say educator.



Okay. And I can go in here and say scientist. And we really should be going to reliable sources to make sure these are true, but I did check these before. So yeah. And then we can go in here and put in a few more. I'm going to say marine scientist. And these are actually checking against our database of occupations we have in Wiki data, right? So it's not just letting you type in anything. These have to match the controlled vocabulary that we have in Wiki data, which actually makes editing Wiki data a lot simpler in many ways than Wikipedia, because we're kind of structured by what we can add here. And then just add a few more here and just say software engineer. Right.



And in theory, ideally after we add these, we go into the entry and add references for these, but I'm just adding these right now. Dance, I love this, dance technologist. I'm not sure we have that as an occupation right now, but let's say, Ooh, we have dance technology as a concept, but we don't have it as an occupation. So let's say let's add this as a field of work, dance. Okay. So we add as a field of work, which is not bad. Let's go and add a few more and then we'll go ahead and refresh our knowledge graph to see what we have. Technology, mechanical engineer. Okay. So here we have mechanical engineer as a occupation and you can see that we already have them filled in for here, right? So this is nice. We added some more occupations here. Now the interesting thing is I'm going to go ahead and refresh this graph.



So I'm going to come back here and reload that graph. It usually happens within a minute or so that the edits we made take place in Wiki data. So let's go back in here and let's inspect to see if those things have been added to our graph. Who did we edit now? Let's just double check. We added Roselin Rosario. Let's go ahead and take a look. Look at this. Here she is. And she's pointing to chemist. Does everyone see that? And that's because the edit we just made. So Roselin Rosario Meléndez was a yellow circle saying we don't know anything about her, and now she's linked in to be a chemist on our graph, which is really cool. Yeah.



So that's just an example of how Wiki data is this kind of a next generation project of ours, but it's actually been around for many years now, but you might not have heard of it, but this is a really great way to see connections and to see the types of things that may not be so visible with Wikipedia. All right. So I just want to make sure you folks saw that, and that's an invitation for you to actually go in and click on the tabernacle link and try your hand at adding these things.



We have multiple pages here. So for folks who are coming at this, we are completely missing the occupation of these folks. And a lot of times, all you need to do is just look at the description that we have and just map it over to an occupation. Of course, I want you to go ahead and look up the sources to make sure that's true, but it would be doing us a huge service by adding those occupations because now we have a fuller view of why these women are famous and why these women are notable in STEM. So happy to answer any questions about this or anything that you're working on. Kelly, what do you think? Should we look at some articles or some other things?

Kelly Doyle:

Yeah. Especially if anyone in the call has an article they've been working on that they want us to take a look at, we can screen share it and see the edits you've made, especially if you're unsure if you updated something correctly, we're happy to take a look.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. And we can go back to our work list and click on the related changes just to see what folks have been working on.

Kelly Doyle:

It looks like the Cordovo article has been getting a lot of edits today.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. Look at that, 17 changes, which is great to see.

Kelly Doyle:

Look, it'd be interesting to see what her article looked like yesterday versus what it looks like now. All of these edits.

Andrew Lih:

That's a great idea. So this is a great idea, Kelly. So we're seeing here that look at the numerous edits being made by folks here, which is great. But what we can do is if we click on the date here, that shows us a snapshot of what that looks like then, and we just click on this. It shows us a snapshot of what we're looking at now. So let's take a look at this is the version we had before today. And then now that we go to the next one, we can see other things that have been added here probably down near the bottom here. Yeah. Or we could just go right to the view history and scroll down here and say, cur, right, the difference between this one and the current version.



And you can see extra sentences being added, more details, Wiki links, retitling of this section, which is great. Now this is a much more standard section heading. And we typically use lowercase for the second or third words there and more reference information, which is great. And another accolade. So good work folks. All right. So let's take a look at some of the questions we might have here. And we can take a look at one of the ones that Dean sent about the draft. Yeah. We didn't even talk about the draft space yet, Kelly. We could quickly go over that in a second.

Kelly Doyle:

Oh, yeah. Draft and sandbox.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. That's a good point. Let me show you first the sandbox. Now, when you're learning to edit Wikipedia, you might be nervous like saying, "Well, if I make a change, is anyone going to be upset?" Well, the nice thing is we have what we call sandbox. So if you go to your user account, you pull down this menu, there's a sandbox. And nothing you put in here is going to upset anyone. This is just a play space for you. Right? So if I go in here and say, the fox jumped out with a lazy dog and I want to say, how do I insert a reference? So I can actually go in here and say, edit this page. And I can play around here and test things out and not have people be upset at what I'm doing.



So let's say I'm going in here and say, "Well, if I use the LA Times as a reference, does it work correctly? I don't know." So I can go into my sandbox and just put my pointer here at the end. And then what we can do is choose cite and just test out whether something is cited correctly. There's my LA Times thing. I hit generate. I always cross my fingers. Please work. Okay. Not bad. It got most of the stuff here. It got the title, got the publication, and it got the date, which is not bad. I hit insert and publish changes and I say, tested a citation.



And that's nice. That's what it looks like. Surprisingly, that's what it looks like. So feel free to use this space to play with whatever you want before you put it into the main space. So let's take a quick look at the draft space. Again, this is one step up from the sandbox. Some people will draft an article about someone they're not sure belongs yet in the sandbox, which is fine. There's another space called the draft space that you could actually propose an article, but you do have this problem that some folks will not approve an article based on the person's accomplishments or their notability. So we do have some strict folks in the Wikipedia community that need to see a lot more evidence before they see something as being notable. But I'll try to give you the 30 second evaluation here on whether that is asserted in the first paragraph here, which is normally what you want to try to do for any person.



So Alissa Walker is a writer, podcaster and critic currently serves the first ever urbanism editor for Curbed. Okay. So right off the bat, I'm like, I think there's a pretty good chance, but you probably need one or two more elements to be highly enough notability, right. Just being a editor of a section of a very notable website may not pass the bar for notability, but let's see what else. She co-hosts a podcast. Okay. That's good. Former associate producer of KCRW. Okay. I am a fan of KCRW. I just happen to have lived in LA. So I kind of know that, but associate producer may not rise to the level of being super notable. Co-founder's good, but the organization may not be terribly notable. Let's go back down here. Now, I think this is pretty significant, being an AIGA prize winner

Kelly Doyle:

That should be in the lead. The first sentence.

Andrew Lih:

I think you may be right, Kelly. I think if you put this in the lead by framing it as a she won this thing, and then you maybe provide some context on how exclusive this prize is.

Kelly Doyle:

Agreed.

Andrew Lih:

Then I think you have a very good chance.

Kelly Doyle:

The other thing too, I looked at this a little bit while you were talking, Andrew, is that as a source or as a reference rather are a couple articles she has written, which really shouldn't be in the ref list. They should be in external sources. And I think that could be creating some conflict as well, that those should be removed from the ref list and any text that is in the article that is coming from an article she wrote should be removed completely.

Andrew Lih:

Right. Yeah, that's a good point, just sorting out where things go into and not, yeah.

Kelly Doyle:

Anything that she wrote, anything on a personal website, anything that's not an external source that is about her, those things shouldn't be in the ref list. They should be in external sources.

Andrew Lih:

Right. I think that's good. And I think there, it's not a slam dunk, not to use a sports metaphor out of context here, but I think it is a strong point if you just rearrange some of the elements here.

Kelly Doyle:

Yeah.

Andrew Lih:

But then you also have to always guard against sounding too much like a press release, right? You want to make sure you're fact based and not she's a multiple award winning journalist. That can also raise some alarm bells with some editors Wikipedia saying, "It's over the top language," but I think here saying, AIG, it doesn't get any bigger than AIG, right, which is the professional society for architects and graphic arts. Graphic arts. I'm sorry. Not architects. So that's something that is prominent. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. So I'm glad you brought that to our attention because this draft space is this kind of different community of folks where you propose something and you might get push back, but sometimes it's good for sharpening your writing skills. But a lot of times it can be frustrating. So I will not mince words. It can be frustrating to deal with the draft process in Wikipedia, but especially your folks affiliated with Smithsonian, feel free to ping Kelly myself. We're happy to give you advice on how to make the case stronger for these things in a transparent way.

Great. A question from Ann, do we need a separate login for tabernacle? That's a great question. Nope. You just use your same login for a Wikipedia, right? So if you're logged off, you should be able to go in there. If you have a very new account, I'm going to have to think about whether it might say, oh, you need another day or two before your account is valid to edit tabernacle. So super new accounts may need a few more days before they're allowed to use tabernacle, but I need to look into that. I can't remember if that's the case or not for that. Any other question? COI issue.

Kelly Doyle:

Yeah. I was confused. Is there a COI issue on the Alissa Walker article? Dean, do you know Alissa Walker? That might be part of the problem too. Okay. He said, no.

Andrew Lih:

Okay.

Kelly Doyle:

I can't see the top page message he's referencing where he explains it, but he doesn't look like COI is referenced.

Andrew Lih:

Right. Yeah. So normally... Oh, it might be something like this. It might be written from a fan's point of view rather than a neutral point of view. Yeah. That might be a complaint. And that usually is a very mild warning, meaning that you could probably just change a few sentences and I'll fix this problem. That's good. I like how the name that we have is called Fancruft in Wikipedia. It's a really weird term, but that's kind of interesting. Okay. Any other questions we can address for folks?

Kelly Doyle:

Or any articles you've started or edited that you want us to take a look at, drop those links in the chat and we can take a look.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. Give a little bit of pause to make sure that captioner gets a little bit of a break.

Kelly Doyle:

Ooh. What was added to Becca's article, Andrew? Ooh. A lot. Wow.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. It looks like multiple folks have added things here. Info boxes are really great things to edit folks. So yeah, it has very high impact. This stuff gets onto Google and other places very quickly. So that's a great thing to keep working on. That's great. And just adding more references and publications is a really useful thing to do.



And categories, we didn't even really talk about categories, but yes, absolutely adding categories based on usually looking at similar women's bios in Wikipedia is a great thing to do. Just there's a lot of mimicking the things you see in well done articles in the one you're working on is really useful to see oh, by the way, the most famous person in this field is this. Look up their article and then use the same type of categories that are relevant. Use the same type of info box items that are relevant. That's a really great way of learning Wikipedia too.



Yeah. And Dean that's a... Dean was saying in the chat, we will often have Wikipedia editors that don't assume good faith. And even though Kelly was very, very, very much in the right by saying one of the tenets of Wikipedia is to assume good faith that hey, it's not every day someone hits that edit button. Try to assume that they're trying to do good here. We do have a lot of folks who are on the grumpier side and will try to jump to a conclusion that there's a COI when there isn't. So we appreciate you hanging in there, but we're happy to help jump in and assist when there's something that's falsely being claimed by maybe a Wikipedia editor that's being too aggressive, which is not unusual sometimes when we're doing edit-a-thons.



Yeah. And there's a question about, can we use images from a site like this? So in general, no. I hate to be so definitive, but the answer almost always is can I use photo from website X is no. And you have to prove in the affirmative that it's either public domain or that the organization has released it under a free license or in the case that we had before, remind me Kelly, where we actually got a specific release. This one. Yeah. We got a specific release with a ticket number, then we can use it. But until that happens, no, is the answer, right?

Kelly Doyle:

Yeah. Always assume no with sites like this or university websites or place of employment websites. Assume no on the front end and then do some digging. It also doesn't hurt to go to Wikimedia Commons and type in the name of the thing you're looking for and poke around. I found a couple as I was preparing for the event that way. Sometimes they're on there and they just haven't been put on the page yet. So that's a possibility as well.

Andrew Lih:

Right. Yeah. And we hate to... It sounds like it's not very inclusive, but in this area of copyright, that is one of the interesting, the default is no, answers that we have because Wikipedia is actually really serious about respecting the copyright of creators. In that sense, we should be thankful, but it can lead to us not having information or not having images when they're plainly visible on the internet. Right. That is one of the things that is an oddity of Wikipedia. It's highly inclusive, except when it comes to copyright, it's very exclusive.

Kelly Doyle:

And Jim made a good point that our open access policy at the Smithsonian is an exception. And you'll see on some of our finding aids that it will say very clearly CC zero, and that you can download the image and put it on something like Wikipedia, which is really great. And so we've added a lot of our own images from our collections to Wikipedia that way. Andrew is showing you our open access landing page, and maybe you could pull up one of the images and just show what it does look like when it is rights-free and can be downloaded.

Andrew Lih:

Yeah. That is a great point. And I could not have paid Jim enough to prompt us because I completely forgot about that, which is bizarre because Kelly and I do this all the time. So until two years ago, believe it or not, everything by default off of Smithsonian's website was not free even if it was an old photo and things like that. So anything where you see CC zero, like this at the bottom right there. I'm not sure if you're seeing this. It means that you're absolutely free to copy it, use it, whatever you want upload to Wikimedia Commons. And that's the beauty of now the Smithsonian having this open access policy. So there's an FAQ here. Just go to si.edu/openaccess and you have all the information. And you can even search. Sorry, go ahead, Kelly.

Kelly Doyle:

Sorry. I just was saying the link is in the chat now.

Andrew Lih:

Oh, great. Thank you. Yeah. Link is in the chat. If you go to collection search, so this is collections.si.edu, you can go in here, let's say wagon. This will search all of the 17 million records. But the cool thing is you can actually come down here and say, "Return results with CC zero media." So this is great because what comes back, you are very much welcome to use on Wikipedia by uploading them. So a lot of these are natural specimens, which is great, right, because there's no inherent copyright on these out of nature, but then we have old paintings. We've got posters. We've got all kinds of things here. And any time you see the CC zero, you're in good shape. First look to see if we have it on Wikimedia Commons. If not, you're absolutely welcome and encouraged to download and upload that to Wikimedia Commons. And so what a treasure trove we have here of content that you can search.

Kelly Doyle:

Good visual cue with the CC zero logo right there.

Andrew Lih:

Right.

Kelly Doyle:

Well, as we're winding down, Andrew, do you mind if I screen share and just show some Wiki resources, if you want to edit Wiki in the future? Okay. So this is the Wikipedia Teahouse. This is a great place to ask questions about Wikipedia and kind of like you were asking us, how do I do X, Y, Z? What about images? The nice thing about the Teahouse is that you can see all of the questions that have been asked in the archives. And nine times out of 10, your question has already been asked multiple times and you might not even have to post it. You can just search through the archives and kind of find it. And you can always search right here as well in this search bar. So I'm going to share that in the chat with you. Duh, duh, duh, I'll find the chat. Here it is.



Okay. Teahouse. If you want to join other Smithsonian edit-a-thons about American women's history, this is our landing page. You can see upcoming programs as well as our past programs, as well as some stats of what we've added. Here is that link. If you want to join the Smithsonian American women's history initiative, mailing list newsletter, you will find out about our events from there as well. It's just one email a month. So I'll drop that in if you would like to join. And then I would also like to shout out Wikimedia DC. A lot of our great Wikipedians in the chat are associated with Wikimedia DC. They host lots of virtual events and in person events in the DC area in non-COVID times. And so you can always see upcoming events here. And if you or your organization would like to host an event, you can reach out to them.



Also, I wanted to let you know that if you wanted to look for more National Museum of Natural History events, you can find those here. And if you would like to be added to the National Museum of Natural History's newsletter, you can find the link for that here. And then for this program, if you would like to view this recording in a couple of weeks, watch this page that I'm putting in the chat now, and that you can see on your screen. It will be added up here in a couple of weeks and you can go back and kind of look at some of the tasks and how we explained them. And then I do want to remind everyone that at the end of this Zoom, a survey will pop up about the event that you can fill out. But I'll also share a link to that in the chat.



And it's through Survey Monkey. It'll just take three minutes at the most for you to fill out. And we thank you so much for joining and learning about Wikipedia. And we thank our speaker Rese for coming on and talking about the exhibit and the women who are featured in the exhibit. And I'd also like to just say in our last second here, that our work list isn't going anywhere, the page on Wiki for today. You can always go back and reference that and see the names and all of the links that we've added in for you to enrich the articles or create the articles. So just because our event is ending, that page will stay up there. You can go back and reference it and especially reference it if you watch the video back in a few weeks. Thank you so much for joining and we hope you have a great day.

Andrew Lih:

Thanks everyone. Take care.

Kelly Doyle:

Bye.

PART 5 OF 5 ENDS [02:29:39]