A little over a week after Wikimania, where I participated in the “10 women
in 10 minutes” session Sarah led, I have gotten the article my group worked on,
[[Adrienne Bolland]], through DYK to the Main Page queue, with two other editors
who worked on it sharing in the credit. It is currently scheduled to run on July
25, in the evening rotation in Europe, afternoon here in North American Eastern
time where I live and morning on the West Coast, and early morning July 26 in
Oceania/Asia.
I have two takeaways from the experience to offer anyone else participating
in, or running, one of these events.
- Cast a wide net for sources when looking to expand a stubby
article. I was attracted to this one because the Francophone Wikipedia has a
longer article on her; unfortunately it’s tagged as lacking sources. But at
least I can read French well enough to figure out what should have been
included in the English article, and that helped to guide us. Reflecting the
multilingual group we were, the final article has sources from not only French
and English (Monash University in Australia has a nice set of pages on
aviation pioneers) but German and Spanish as well (The German book we cited
actually seems like a good source; it seems to be meant for younger readers
and thus was at about the right level for me to read—somehow, when I looked at
it, German (which I’ve never formally studied) came through clearer than it
ever has. Unfortunately the Google preview ends right when the story starts
getting good. Perhaps some German reader can find the hardcover book and see
if there’s anything else worth adding). Other sources tapped include the Air
France inflight magazine, a school website in France and the World Postal
Union website (which would seem to be a good, reliable, authoritative source
for stamp information).
- Not all the work done by editors physically collaborating shows up in
the history. Sitting there putting our heads together, we were able to
come to a consensus on whether a particular source was reliable and, when two
of our sources conflicted as to a particular fact, which to include.
I hope you like the final result as much as I liked writing it (Mme.
Bolland makes a nice feminist role model—after her aviation career, she was in
the French women’s-suffrage movement, then supported the Republicans during the
Spanish Civil War and was active in the resistance during the war. The more I
researched, the more I liked her and felt honored to be improving her Wikipedia
article.
Now, I hope, the French article can be properly referenced and the other
articles expanded. User:Maire, who was in our group, promised she would get
around to doing a Polish translation, which left me with Russian among the
languages I’d feel comfortable editing in that aren’t represented yet among the
interwiki links. Which I’ll do when I can figure out how to properly
transliterate her first name and which of four possible pronunciations I can
think of for her last name is the right one.
Or someone else here can take up the challenge. It’s worth it.
Daniel Case