For the benefit of anyone (like me) who doesn’t know what public domain day is, read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain_Day
If you have newbie attending, remember that newbies face a huge learning curve in terms of both “how to do it” (the mechanics of editing) and “where to do it” (not familiar with the article space) and “what to do” (don’t know policies), so this all has to be risk-managed. You need to provide instructions on creating their account (tell them it is important to provide an email address, that we don’t spam them and it’s needed for password recovery) and setting preferences to keep the VE enabled (or at least not disabled). This one-page cheat sheet produced by Wikimedia Nederlands is useful for “how to”
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cheat_sheet_Visual_editing_on_Wikipedia.pdf (this is the English version, but it is available in a couple of other languages too, and if anyone out there is multilingual, it would be a great resource to translate into other languages)
For newbies, you need to make the tasks very well-structured. I find list-type resources very good for this: “Use this resource to add this kind of information to this set of articles and here is a worked example showing how to do it”. By repeating this task, they will learn the skills, and, as there tends to be natural variation even among articles of a similar topic kind, they start to have to make judgements about how best to do the task. “You said to add it to the section on Amenities but I don’t see an Amenities section but there is a Facilities section that seems to providing that sort of information, will that do or should I create a new Amenities section?” “Is it too much detail to add the opening hours in 1923?” (Probably yes!) Answering such questions by talking to the group can be helpful, as others are probably encountering or likely to encounter similar situations so a discussion helps all of them.
You simply can’t teach all the policies newbies need to know at an event, but you should always mention copyright violation and biographies of living people if applicable (as they are instant-revert situation) but if this is new-to-public-domain material from 1923, I am guessing copyvio and BLP aren’t likely to be an issue. Make sure the tasks given to newbies is likely to be highly conformant with policy or of a nature not particularly constrained by policy (e.g. don’t get them to add external links), and your worked example should always be MoS-perfect in every way J (some will slavishly copy it down to the unwanted extra punctuation you overlooked, while Others WILL Use Their Normal Writing Style regardless)
You need the set of articles that the newbies are likely to work on to be low-risk. By this, I mean two things:
· low engagement with other editors, e.g. not known to be real-world- or Wikipedia-controversial, not a lot of recent edit activity, low number of page watchers, in order to minimise bad experiences at the hands of “gatekeepers” and other over-zealous rule enforcers with the article on their watchlist
· low daily readership so any serious errors made by the newbies have least impact on the readers
Do not suggest or encourage newbies to start articles. Even if you provide a list of topics (which you know to be notable) and provide them with some “reliable sources”, and confirm their accounts so they can avoid Article for Creation, the risk is that straight after the event, they will use their new-found article creation skills to create articles on topics of their own choosing, with the risk of speedy deletion or Articles for Deletion for failing notability due to unreliable sources. We know many newbies drop out due to bad experiences, which is why I try to structure their early contributions to minimise bad experiences. While you cannot protect them against everything and, while we have automated bots and regular contributors who thinks it is OK to bite the newbies, keeping your newbies working out in the “long tail” of articles certainly minimises the risk. If the articles you are suggesting for the newbies are likely to be within a WikiProject, it can sometimes be helpful to let that WikiProject know about the event in advance, asking them to “thank”, “welcome” and generally assist the newbies. I say “sometimes” because this does run the risk of alerting the gatekeepers and rabid rule-enforcers in that WikiProject to be hyper-vigilant. For this reason, I often try to structure my newbie engagements into WikiProjects where I am a regular or semi-regular member as that means I tend to know the community’s level of tolerance for newbies (and hopefully have some respect within that community) so my request don’t fall on deaf ears or actively-hostile ears.
For the regular “come to events but don’t do much in-between” contributors (aka occasional contributors), they still will benefit from some introduction to Visual Editor (if they haven’t previously seen it). And also, some pointers to some of the resources that you think have high potential to contribute to certain types of article, but the task won’t need it to be expressed quite as specifically as for the newbies. E.g. you might point to some books with biographies and suggest they expand or create an article on those people (a biography written in 1923 is unlikely to involve anyone still living today unless they were famous as a young child!)
With regular contributors, many will just grab the content and do their own thing with topics that interest them in most cases, but still might like to be pointed at resources that you see as real jewels in your 1923 collection in order to make the most of the new collection.
I hope you have great success with the event.
Kerry
From: Libraries [mailto:libraries-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of phoebe ayers
Sent: Thursday, 3 January 2019 7:40 AM
To: Wikimedia & Libraries <libraries@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: [libraries] public domain day & wikipedia
Hi all!
Is anyone doing anything with public domain day and Wikipedia? We are running an edit-a-thon on Wikipedia Day centered around 1923 books we digitized here at MIT libraries:
but I am struggling with what kinds of articles to work on or activities to do.
Any ideas? Is anyone doing something similar in their libraries? I think it would be fun to go through the Hathitrust 1923 collection, which is now open, to see what would be good for Wikipedia: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ls?c=149827760;a=srchls;q1=*
cheers,