User:Kwinkunks/AGS Wikithon 2014

There's a proto-wikithon at the AGS Colloquium in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, on 9 February 2014.

Schedule
This is completely flexible, and some of these things will run in parallel:
 * What's a wiki? Why do we care? Are we just talking about Wikipedia?
 * Creating a user account and your user page.
 * How do you edit wikis? A 15 minute tutorial.
 * A bit about copyright and licensing.
 * Finding things to do.
 * Actually doing it!
 * Brainstorm some ways to improve geoscience articles related to Atlantic Canada.

Common editing tasks

 * General gardening: typos, language, adding links, adding categories, adding relevant external links, etc.
 * Refining or adding references to increase credibility.
 * Adding photographs, which requires them to be openly licensed or public domain.
 * Improve figures and diagrams, especially by creating SVG versions.
 * Improving stubs.
 * Substantial editing, or adding substantial new material.

Some editing activities tend to attract attention (not necessarily bad) and are perhaps not for noobs:
 * Adding new articles. (See this handy template)
 * Merging or splitting articles is hard work.

Relevant WikiProjects and Portals
WikiProjects are for editors, Portals are for readers. Here are some regionally focused ones:
 * The list of all Canadian projects and portals: WikiProject Canada/List of Canadian WikiProjects
 * WikiProject Geography of Canada — Geography of Canada
 * WikiProject New Brunswick — Portal:New Brunswick
 * WikiProject Nova Scotia — Portal:Nova Scotia

And some thematic ones:
 * WikiProject Geology — Portal:Earth sciences
 * WikiProject Palaeontology

Relevant categories

 * Category:Geology of Canada
 * Category:Geology of Canada by province or territory, e.g. Category:Geology of Nova Scotia, Category:Geology of New Brunswick
 * Category:Geology
 * Category:Landforms of Canada by province or territory, e.g. Category:Landforms of Nova Scotia, Category:Landforms of New Brunswick
 * Category:Paleontology in Canada
 * Category:Canadian geologists

Articles that may need editing
Start somewhere like Category:Geology of Canada by province or territory and follow links; look for stubs and red links.

More:
 * Blomidon Formation
 * Chignecto Basin
 * Hastings Formation

Articles that could be expanded or created
A good place to start: Category:Canadian geology stubs

Several Canadian geoscience organizations are missing from the list, List of geoscience organizations.

Examples of existing articles

 * McCoy Brook Formation
 * Caribou_zinc_mine
 * Joggins
 * John William Dawson

Other types of articles from regions around the world:
 * Siccar Point
 * Geology of Great Britain
 * Paleontology in Maine
 * Frank Slide
 * Book Cliffs, Devil's Slide (Utah)

Handy templates

 * Ma — for geological ages
 * Coord — for locations
 * DOI — for digital object identifiers
 * NovaScotia-geo-stub or geology-stub

Other geoscience wikis

 * SubSurfWiki — mainly around subsurface geoscience
 * SEG Wiki — petroleum geophysics
 * Coming soon: AAPG Wiki — petroleum geology

Help

 * Tutorial/Editing — nice tutorial
 * Cheatsheet — handy editing cheatsheet
 * Editing — general help

Resources and ideas

 * 44 Geologically Significant Sites in Nova Scotia

Two posts by Tim Sherry (PhD candidate at McGill) about improving Wikipedia as part of a classroom exercise:
 * Wikipedia articles of geology
 * A noble cause, repairing Wikipedia's geology articles