A campaign to increase the coverage and diversity of coverage of New Zealand academics in wikipedia
Stuart Yeates
Public
Seen by 21
I have an idea for a campaign to grow the coverage and diversity of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:New_Zealand_academics (it’s a bit ambiguous but that includes pure researchers as well as researcher-teachers). There is an implicit secondary goal for this campaign, attract new local editors to wikipedia.
My plan has four stages:
- limited call for nominations / suggestions / ideas for listings. These can either be individuals or groups / classes of people (‘all PIs of current contestable science investment round winners’ / ‘all Hector Medal recipients’ / ‘Fellows of the RSNZ for whom the RSNZ has published obits’ ). This needs to be done by people who are familiar with the NZ science landscape (in the first iteration, this group).
- search for sources on these individuals (needed both for writing the articles and to prove them ‘notable’ (= eligible for inclusion in wikipedia)). This needs to be done by people who understand what an independent secondary source is in the wikipedia sense (in the first iteration, probably me, unless there are any other wikipedia editors wishing to step forward?).
- a broadcast / amplified call for people to write articles based on sources.
- rinse and repeat.
A condition of my participation would be that we'd be moving the gender and ethnic balances in the right direction.
Tim McNamara Tue 20 May 2014 9:20AM
This is a really neat idea Stuart. How do we recruit?
Stuart Yeates Tue 20 May 2014 10:01PM
I'm thinking that once I'm happy with the list (probably a couple of days) I'll move it to the public part of wikipedia, post here and probably on facebook and twitter. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/belle-beth-cooper/a-scientific-guide-to-pos_b_4262571.html suggests that Thursday, Friday and the weekend are good for running social media campaigns. If might be this week, but more likely to be next week, i think.
Once we start posting, we just try and get everyone to amplify, in the hopes of reaching as many potential new wikipedia editors as possible.
BTW: I'm still looking for: explicit out LGBTI academics; pacifica academics; and education academics. High h-index on google scholar and/or lots of media coverage essential.
Poll Created Wed 21 May 2014 4:05AM
Submit a talk proposal for National Digital Forum Closed Wed 21 May 2014 9:45AM
Oops, wrong Loomio thread!
NDF is the national conference of the library sector in NZ for discussing technology. We would need to make a decision fairly quickly, as submissions close 30 May.
Results
| Results | Option | % of points | Voters | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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Agree | 100.0% | 2 |
|
| Abstain | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Disagree | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Block | 0.0% | 0 | ||
| Undecided | 0% | 13 |
|
2 of 15 people have participated (13%)
Stuart Yeates Wed 21 May 2014 10:36AM
Back to the main topic of this conversation: I was meant to be working on the list I discussed above this evening, but ended up creating https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Honorary_Doctors_of_the_University_of_Waikato instead. I find editing wikipedia to be a very anarchic activity with many interesting side trips.
Tim McNamara Fri 23 May 2014 12:29AM
One of the things we should do is think about growing the base of contributors.. otherwise we'll end up with people getting swamped.
Stuart Yeates Fri 23 May 2014 12:54AM
I have just received a number of archival histories of FUW, which contain details of suitable female academics. I plan to do them and a sampling of polytech and wananga academics over the weekend.
Stuart Yeates Mon 2 Jun 2014 7:39PM
This is live at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_Zealand/Requested_articles/New_Zealand_academic_biographies as of last Thursday. The response hasn't been overwhelming, but they'll all get written, even if I have to do them myself.
Tim McNamara Mon 2 Jun 2014 11:32PM
Have contributed one over the weekend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicola_Gaston.
I forgot how hard it is to write even a "Start" quality article.
Stuart Yeates Mon 9 Jun 2014 9:33AM
Great work Tim! I added some more categories.
I'm currently for a 1-3 biographies a day from the work list; I also made some lists of Honoury Doctorates awarded, these seem to be relatively female heavy and Māori heavy and will make good worklists going forward.
Stuart Yeates · Mon 19 May 2014 8:14PM
In the spirit of doing something rather than talking about it, I've started work on a list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Stuartyeates/Scratchpad#New_Zealand_academic_biographies based on the RSNZ obits, the Hector medal (both very white male) and then some I've found through googling (much less white male). It's still very much a work in progress and the URL will have to change.