User:Wiki at Royal Society John/February and March 14 Report

February
February was a relatively quiet month for events, when a lot of planning work was done. The last training session for RS staff was held, with Jonathan Cardy and User:Serindipitous (again) very kindly helping in the workshop session.

I had a short spot addressing the 70-odd new Research Fellows at their induction day. This was followed by a table at the “Opportunities Fayre” where they passed round various RS stands promoting different parts of the Society’s work. Research Fellows are “early career” researchers, in their late 20s or 30s, whose projects are funded by the RS, mostly with the teams they lead.

At both I was seeking expressions of interest in Wikimedia training, offering three options: a “traditional” editing-training workshop, a new approach aimed at those unlikely to have the time to edit much, and a combination of the two. The new approach was to describe how experts could maintain a presence on Wikipedia at a low time cost by mainly using talk pages, being available to offer expertise, and performing and offering reviews, either in the FA or GA processes or not. I haven’t seen a similar approach offered as training, and have come to believe that this is an effective alternative for this type of very busy person, based on feedback at the RS and previous experiences with groups of academics and museum curators.

Later in the month I had a longer spot with a smaller group of Research Fellows doing media and communication training, describing this approach and offering training. The level of interest was pretty positive, and the training will now be held in early June. The “combination” option was the most popular, so we will be doing that in a three-hour session. My first “drop-in” session for RS staff unfortunately was in the late afternoon on a day with a tube strike, so it was not very surprising that nobody came!

March
March was dominated by the two big editathons, both ambitious “double-sitting” events with a capacity of 40 people each, in two seesion, afternoon and evening. The first was for IWD and Eventbrite bookings went extremely well, using the RS e-mailing lists and Twitter. Books were ordered from the library, and I researched a long list of women scientists who needed articles or longer articles. Eventbrite worked very well, and two days before the event I had short waiting lists for both sessions and was feeling pretty happy that things were going well.

Then cancellations started coming in; in all there were 14 from the 40, which is higher than I’d expected for an event like this, several coming on the day itself. Unfortunately I’d set up two different tickets on the same account for afternoon and evening, and the Eventbrite system did not cope very well with this, leaving me to do a lot of hectic emailing.

There was also considerable media interest. I’d done a 20 minute phone interview with Dr Nicola Davies of ‘’The Observer’’ a couple of days before, and had three further interviews on the day, including a very long one with German Radio, which rather threw my timetable.

The group were very good, with a mix of ages and some very senior people. The great majority were women. The afternoon group had a short talk by Dame Athene Donald FRS, and also Keith Moore, the RS Librarian. With hindsight the programme should have spread the talks through the session, rather than having them all at the start; this was done in the next event and worked better. I was extremely lucky to have an exceptional group of Wikimedia helpers. The output in terms of articles was extremely good, and there were no fewer than seven articles that appeared on “Did You Know” on the main page from the event, which I think may be a record. The feedback was done via Survey Monkey, which unfortunately only slightly under half completed; the full results are on the event page. Three weeks later we repeated a similar timetable for our “Diversity” editathon. This was much harder to research in terms of biographies, but I was in any case keen to widen the range of coverage to include more general articles, especially on science in Africa, where Wikipedia, not to mention the internet and published media in general, are really very weak. We had increased the number of places for booking to allow “overbooking” to anticipate cancellations, and filled rather over half the places very quickly, but then booking slowed down. We were able to fill all the places by Katherine Bavage doing an email-shot to Wikimedia UK donors. We changed the programme to break up the talks more, which the feedback suggested was more successful. Rupert Baker from the library held an open house between the sessions, and had brought up a display of items from the library stores; the session was much enjoyed by those who went. The group was much less scientific and very varied, with one 11 year-old girl with her mother – she edited a number of articles on the Simple English Wikipedia. The output was certainly less than earlier in the month, but the feedback actually slightly better in most respects.

I also had a table for part of the Research Fellows Conference, once again looking for expressions of interest in the RF training, and talked to a Cambridge scientist spending a period as an intern at the RS.

I helped the training session at the Institute of Chemistry led by Doug Taylor.