#wikipedia editathon

[oberlincollegelibraries]

Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon!

This Saturday, March 25th, Oberlin College Libraries and the Allen Memorial Art Museum are co-hosting a Wikipedia edit-a-thon!

Oberlin joins groups worldwide in participating in a massive mobilization to revise and expand upon Wikipedia pages about women and non-binary people, paying special attention to people who have made significant contributions to the arts.

The Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon is the brainchild of Art + Feminism, a organization founded in 2014 that has been described as “a massive multinational effort to correct a persistent bias in Wikipedia, which is disproportionately written by and about men"

According to Art + Feminism, around 90% of Wikipedia editors are men. It is essential that women and non-binary people are given the ability to tell our own stories. Wikipedia, which has over 40 million articles, is one of the most widely read reference materials. Increasing the representation of women and non-binary people on Wikipedia is a crucial step in liberation from patriarchy, which seeks to hide, destroy, and ignore the achievements of women and non-binary people-- particularly those who aren’t cis, white, wealthy, or able bodied.

So, please, join the Allen Memorial Art Museum and Oberlin College Libraries this Saturday, March 2nd from 12PM-4PM. If you don’t have experience editing Wikipedia pages, don’t worry! There will be people there to guide you through the process.

Need some inspiration on who to write about? Check out this Muddslinger from last fall, which prompted Terrell Main Library users to give the name of their favorite non-dude artists. Certainly all of them could benefit from an updated or revised Wikipedia entry. 

[allthingslinguistic]

Lingwiki at Lingstitute - July 2017 Report

There were 15 participants at the institute editathon in Kentucky, and another 8 participants who joined us remotely from three locations, for a total of 23 people. Collectively, this group created or worked on 34 articles - 13 about people, 8 about languages, and 13 about topics and organizations in linguistics, and also sorted over 85 linguistics-related articles for stub status.  

Thanks to the institute organizers at Kentucky for putting the editathon on the schedule and arranging the room, as well as Kristen Syrett and Claire Bowern for organizing local lingwiki events at Rutgers and Yale. 

Here’s a detailed “How do I decide what to edit?” guide that I put on the whiteboard. 

Do you work on an understudied language or dialect? --> Edit that!

Are you a native speaker of a language other than English? -->  Edit its Wikipedia! (Maybe translate an article from English)

Do you want to get to know the field better? --> Find a notable linguist who doesn’t have a biographical article yet and make one, especially of a female linguist, linguist of colour, or other underrepresented linguist. Make sure that your article includes how this person meets Wikipedia’s notability criteria for academics with a citation before you hit “save” the first time!

Looking for tiny, unloved articles to edit? --> Google “linguistics stubs” 

Feel like you don’t know enough linguistics to help? --> Try stub sorting using the guide at bit.ly/lingwikistub 

If you participated in any of the editathons but don’t see your article on here, just put it in bit.ly/lingwikisurvey and I’ll update the list. You can also check out the slides at bit.ly/lingwiki if you want advice on how to edit for linguists, or go to wikiedu.org if you’re thinking of assigning Wikipedia editing as a class assignment.

Here’s a list of articles edited. Feel free to check them out and see what else you can add!

People (13)

Ingeborg_Hoff

Kelly_Berkson

Draft:Kathryn_Campbell-Kibler

Judith_Aissen

Emily_M._Bender

Terttu_Nevalainen

Moira_Yip 

Anne_H._Charity_Hudley

Category:Linguists_of_the_Australian_aboriginal_languages

Peter_Austin_(linguist)

Pierre_Delattre

Laurence_R._Horn

Felicity_Meakins

Languages (8)

Bungandidj_language

Australian_Aboriginal_languages

Chadic_languages

Biu–Mandara_languages

Afroasiatic_languages

Austronesian_languages

Constructed_language

Dravidian_languages

Topics (13)

Babel_(magazine)

Ultrasound_tongue_imaging

Valleyspeak

Q-Principle

R-Principle

Q-based_narrowing

Mouthing

Fronting_(phonetics)

Coercion_(linguistics)

Hindi_kinship_terms

Prosodie (French) 

Laboratoire_de_Phonétique_et_Phonologie

Subcategorización (Spanish) 

[allthingslinguistic]

Report on Lingwiki editathons at ICLDC in Honolulu, Hawai’i

I organized several Lingwiki editathons in conjunction with the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation at the University of Hawaii Manoa. We had a total of 37 participants who edited at least 29 articles, including 15 about languages, 5 about topics and organizations, and 9 about people. 

One participant commented, “I am one of about 3 people in the world who knows enough about the grammar of this language to edit its Wikipedia article.”

Thanks to the University of Hawaii Manoa, the organizers of ICLDC and especially Andrea Berez-Kroeker and the student volunteers who assisted with organizing the editathons. 

Here’s a list of articles edited. Feel free to check them out and see what else you can add! 

If you participated in any of the editathons but don’t see your article on here, just put it in bit.ly/lingwikisurvey and I’ll update the list. You can also check out the slides at bit.ly/lingwiki if you want advice on how to edit for linguists, or wikiedu.org if you’re thinking of assigning Wikipedia editing as a class assignment. 

Languages (15)

Yurok_language Igbo_language Anii_language Vurës_language Vera'a language Nivaclé_language Mlabri_language Yasa_language Kala_language Shor_language Awetï_language Gyele_people Kwasio_language Iau_language Sikaritai_language

Topics and organizations (5)

Ka_Haka_‘Ula_O_Ke‘elikōlani,_College_of_Hawaiian_Language Language_nest Tepehua_de_huehuetla  (on Spanish Wikipedia) Kaipuleohone University_of_Hawaii_at_Hilo

People (9)

Juliette_Blevins  Ulrike_Mosel Florence_M._Voegelin Muriel_Fisher Siri_Tuttle Donca_Steriade Nan_Bernstein_Ratner Keiki_Kawaiʻaeʻa Helen_Aristar-Dry

[allthingslinguistic]

Report on the third LSA #lingwiki editathon, January 2017

For the third consecutive year, I organized a lingwiki editathon at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, which this year was in Austin, Texas. We had 23 participants who together created or edited 20 articles (listed below) -- 5 about linguists, 8 about languages, and 7 about other topics in linguistics. 

This year I was very pleased to see again several participants from previous years. Thanks especially to Lauren Collister, Moti Lieberman, and User:Babbage for helping out other participants in addition to their own edits, as well as to Lauren Gawne for supporting people in the #lingwiki hashtag on twitter. Thanks also to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wiki Education Foundation, and the LSA for their support.

I also gave a talk on a panel about linguistics outreach to high school students, which I co-organized with Moti Lieberman, about stumbling into linguistics online via blogs and Wikipedia, what’s been done so far and how to get involved. There were about 120 people in the audience and the slides for my talk are CC-BY and available at bit.ly/lingwiki-lsa2017.

I’m also pleased to report the beginnings of a collaboration with Wiki Ed and the LSA Committee on the Status for Women in Linguistics (COSWL) and Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL). Wiki Ed has been working with many linguistics classes on editing Wikipedia as a class assignment, but it can be hard to fit biographies of linguists into more topics-oriented classes. However, graduate seminars often want to each students about an academic career trajectory, how to read an academic website/CV, and so on, so editing biographical articles is a natural fit. But since Wiki Ed doesn’t have as much linguistics-specific knowledge, COSWL and CEDL are working on putting together lists of notable linguists who don’t have articles or whose articles need improvement, so that Wiki Ed can direct classes to them. If you’re interested in potentially having a class edit Wikipedia, check out wikiedu.org for ideas. 

Here are the articles edited in this editathon. Feel free to check them out and see what else you can add!

Topics

Alveolo-palatal_fricative Alphabet_soup_(linguistics) Semantic_overload Online_discussion Idealized_cognitive_model FrameNet Anglicism

Languages

Chatino_language File:Chatino-map-wikipedia.svg Chickasaw_language Tz’utujil_language K’iche’_language Xavante_language Wichí_languages Mapuche_language

People

Lisa_Green Megan_Crowhurst Anne_H._Charity_Hudley Julie_Anne_Legate Lisa_Cheng

[womenintranslation]

WiT Wikipedians en español! An Editatón traductoras 2021 is happening on Tuesday March 9 from 11am-2pm, Spanish peninsular time, to help make visible on Wikipedia en español and on Wikidata the work of women translators who translate into several languages (English, Italian, French and more) and women scholars who write about translation. Great idea for a future WiT Wikipedia editathon in English..... (h/t Olga Castro for sending us the notice)

[thelingspace]

Lingwiki Round 2 - Results

We had a great time over the weekend taking part in the second linguistics Wikipedia editathon organized by Gretchen of All Things Linguistic! We hosted Gretchen and another local linguist, James Tanner, for an enjoyable evening of creating and improving linguistics content on Wikipedia. And there was a nice community feeling out there on the hashtag in Twitter, too, with Superlinguo and Rosey Billington! Here’s the Montreal contingent at the end of the evening:

Adèle and I edited fewer pages than last time, but they’re better cited this time around, so they’ll stand up without us defending them, we hope:

Generative second language acquisition

Lyn Frazier

Manchester Phonology Meeting

Glyne Piggott

We’re looking forward to doing more of this in the future! We’ve already got some stuff scoped out for next time. ^_^

[thelingspace]

Lingwiki Round 2

It can be easy to underestimate the effect word choice has when we talk about things, especially when it comes to large-scale social biases. Really subtle patterns in communication often reflect and even perpetuate disparities that exist between people or social groups, whether or not they’re even intended to.

For example, some criticism has been leveraged at Wikipedia for underrepresenting women, particularly in the sciences. New research in computational linguistics shows that this actually isn’t generally the case: overall, in terms of sheer numbers, women turn out to be as present in the Wikipedia corpus as men. However, one of the really interesting findings here is in the vocabulary used in articles about women. They’re much more likely to use words like ‘woman’ or ‘lady’ than articles about men are to say ‘man’ or ‘gentleman’, and they’re also more likely to talk about the subject’s family and marital status.

Through this overuse of gendered language and relationship terms, the researchers conclude that the Wikipedia corpus seems to be treating male as the default. If a person is not male, this needs to be highlighted, and her connections to males should be pointed out! As it happens, articles about women are much more likely to link to articles about men than vice versa, as well.

Male being treated as the default gender even if it applies to no more than half the population is a larger-scale issue, one that’s been reflected in linguistic biases in English and many other languages for centuries. But just because we’ve been chugging forward with these biases for a long time doesn’t mean we can’t change course! If we want to move on from them, making sure our written corpora treat all genders with parity is a good start.

If you want to help, why not contribute to the second edition of #lingwiki? The linguistics Wikipedia editathon is on March 28th and 29th, and one of the goals put forth by All Things Linguistic is writing or improving pages about notable female linguists. More information about how and why to participate can be found here. And if you’d prefer to work on other linguistics topics, like endangered languages or improving pages on topics you know well, that’s of course also welcome.

We’ve got three people from our team participating this time, but when we participated in the last one, we noticed that a lot of really amazing women didn’t have articles about them! So there’s still a lot of work to do. Let’s get even more people involved in this next one, and see what we can get done!

[thelingspace]

LSA Wikipedia Editathon

So I was reminded by this post by Humans Who Read Grammars about the upcoming linguistics Wikipedia editathon at the Linguistics Society of America meeting. It's being organized by Gretchen McCulloch of All Things Linguistic, and it should be a lot of fun!

If you're not following those links, it's going to be taking place at 8-10 PM Pacific Standard Time on January 10, 2015, which would be next Saturday. I'm not going to be there in person, since there was enough traveling about without going to Portland, but I'll be there editing away from here! So will our director, Adèle-Elise.

I know some people aren't fans of Wikipedia, but it is the first place a lot of people will look for information, so actually having good and reliable information up there is a big boon. And a lot of the info up there is good already! We just need to keep working at it and get more up. ^_^