Hi all -
I announced this on the list a couple weeks ago, but figured I'd make a second announcement now. I'll be hosting an editathon at Hoyt Hall, one of the Berkeley Student Cooperative's all-women houses. It'll be at 2519 Ridge Road in Berkeley from 3-6pm, with a primary audience of co-opers and Berkeley students, although anyone is welcome to attend. The event will generally be themed around women's history and our gendergap, with an especial focus on improving Wikipedia's coverage of prominent women in the history of the cooperative movement.
The attendance of a few extra experienced Wikipedians would be especially appreciated (I do realize that, unfortunately, I cross-scheduled with the iconathon at WMF :).) We had originally intended for this to be a 15-20 person event which I would be comfortably able to facilitate myself, but it's looking like we may have as many as 70 or 80 people show up - so having a few extra experienced Wikipedians beyond what we already have floating to help make sure everything is running smoothly would be awesome.
Most of the participants will be students, and many of them will never have edited Wikipedia before. From talking to some of them, many of them haven't even previously realized that Wikipedia is something that can be edited. In other words, they are pretty much our target outreach demographic :)
If you're interested in helping out on the administrative side, please feel free to drop me a note tonight or to show up an hour or so early tomorrow so we'll be able to hammer out the last details of a gameplan. I'll definitely have a list of target articles for improvement and intro to Wikipedia resources present, but don't have an as thoroughly laid out plan as I'd like to handle an event of this size - I ended up spending half this week just fixing Hoyt's network problems and installing extra capacity so that we'd actually be able to have this many extra laptops on the wireless without everything going kaboom.
Regardless of how well the event tomorrow goes, there will likely be a number of themed editathons at BSC house in the future. I'll ensure that none of those wind up being cross-scheduled :)
Thanks,
Kevin Gorman