Hello Bay Area Wikimedians!
I'm a fellow Wikimedian who spammed our list once to promote the Oakland Wiki Local History Editathonhttp://oaklandwiki.org/Local_History_Editathonsseries my fellow volunteers and I have been putting on. I had originally hoped to spam you once, catch the lot of you who swam into my Oakland Wiki listserv nethttps://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/oaklandwiki-announcements, and leave the rest of us alone to our own WMF-oriented endeavors.
Now that I've gotten a few of you involved, I realize that there is a lot of opportunity to get more good local history content onto Wikipedia and Commons. We have been meeting every other Sunday at the Oakland History Room, a special repository of the Oakland Public Library. The editathon this past Sunday lead to edits to the Idora Parkhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idora_ParkWikipedia article and the digitization of images that can potentially be uploaded to Commons (herehttp://oaklandwiki.org/Francis_Marion_%22Borax%22_Smith?&redirected_from=%22borax%22%20smith, here http://oaklandwiki.org/Mary_R._Smith, herehttp://oaklandwiki.org/Arbor_Villa). On the latter topic, a local historian began bringing his mounted camera to the library to create beautiful, digitized images. A large collection of what is available meets criteria for inclusion in Wikimedia Commons.
The spirit of WikiBUG really excites me around the possibility of greater communication amongst any networks of like-minded folk that may have previously been disconnected. I'd love to see how this will contribute to greater participation in outreach events such as Oakland Wiki's editathons and Pete Forsyth's WikiWomen editathons, and other types of wiki events. Please contribute your voice and the voices of your networks to the WikiBUG Meta-Wiki page https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_BUG!
Vicky/Eekiv
PS: I will spam you with event announcements again (no overkill) unless someone objects!