User:PatHadley/EdinburghArchaeologists

This spontaneous, informal event was a chance for Edinburgh's archaeologists to get their head round Wikipedia.

Attendees
Add your user details by putting a *~ at the bottom of this list. Say a bit about yourself too!
 * PatHadley (talk) 12:20, 19 April 2014 (UTC) - Wikipedian-in-Residence at York Museums Trust
 * Doug Rocks-Macqueen - First time Wiki user.
 * Leigh84 (talk) 14:07, 19 April 2014 (UTC) - First time Wiki user
 * ACrockford (talk) 14:11, 19 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Jeffrsanders1 (talk) 18:20, 20 May 2014 (UTC)


 * CJ82 (talk) 18:31, 20 May 2014 (UTC)Cara Jones CJ82

Resources
Check out WikiProject Archaeology and all of it's subpages

Aims and Objectives
Main Aim: improving archaeology content on Wikipedia through getting more people involved with editing How to do this? In order for the edit-a-thon to work, we would need a number of things in place:
 * A Scottish and 2015 focus
 * Two-day edit-a-thon event, targeting students and commercial unit employees (50 people?)
 * Possibly comprising a brief training session, followed by more intensive editing in groups and with a social event between the sessions
 * More experienced editors could be used to target particular topics
 * Possibly involve Adopt-a-Monument and SCAPE groups as well
 * Potential tie-ins with 2015 Glasgow European Association of Archaeologists Annual Conference
 * Have a Wikimedia presence at the conference, Festival Fringe, and IFA conferences
 * Tie in with Wikimedia loves monuments and run a photo competition
 * Wikimedia takes Edinburgh - releasing archive photos and people taking the same shot now
 * This would be a great idea for a website!
 * Explore getting a Wikimedian-in-residence in archaeology-oriented organisations in Scotland
 * We need to build a keen audience through meet-ups.
 * We need to organise a venue: a University or possibly a pub with a private function room
 * We need to have a think about what topics could be covered (see below)
 * We need to put a bit of work into making it easier for institutions to support if we need them.
 * I think this should be quite straightforward: it offers CPD for the units and knowledge transfer generally (as well as getting students and volunteers rubbing shoulder with commercial archaeologists). Also, if we promote through Dig It! it provides good PR to those organisations hosting/taking part. It would be good from a Society of Antiquaries perspective to get people discussing how to take elements of ScARF forward as a spin-off. We can use the stats Pat mentioned – e.g. people looking at the Viking pages as the exhibition begins, or the real time additions stream, to help make the case.
 * We need to have an idea of (any) costs associated with the venue, food and drink, and possibly travel.

Some next steps to consider
 * Organise a calendar of meetings
 * Keep a list of people who might be keen to be involved (potential mailing list?)
 * Think about where when to have the edit-a-thon
 * Keep a checklist of aims to work towards

Further Thoughts and Spin-off Projects

Instead of small groups of people focusing on an article each, it may be interesting to look more at connective stuff such as categories and templates. For example, rather than working on the article: Broch, we could look at Category: Brochs. The aim would be to ensure each Broch article was reasonably consistent, inter-linked, used suitable templates such as Infobox ancient site and didn't have any glaring mistakes. They could also check the Brochs category on Wikimedia Commons and illustrate the articles as well as possible. The potential advantages of this approach is that it means new people learn more Wiki-markup, policy and structure without spending a lot of time on skills they already have (researching and writing archaeology). This might mean that edit-a-thons result in fewer new articles or dramatic improvements to individual articles, but I think this would be worth a try as a way of getting people further into editing skills. Create a public document with advance targets so that if we come to the point of inviting other Wikipedians to participate (virtually or in person) we can point them to a public document.
 * Consider putting together a teaching guide using Wikipedia

Useful links
 * 10 things you did not know about Wikipedia
 * 10 things you did not know about images on Wikipedia
 * WikiProject Archaeology - A place where (frustratingly few) editors gather to coordinate content on archaeology.
 * List of resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:PatHadley/TalkResources