Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle/archive/Pre-2012 Seattle meetups

Tuesday 6 December 2011
Tour of Wikipedia! Wikipedia does many things. At this meeting we will take a tour of many of the work areas on Wikipedia and assess interest for future meetings.

Planning to attend: Regrets:
 * , Pioneer Square
 * , Kirkland
 * , Ballard
 * , Kirkland
 * , Skyway
 * , Skyway
 * , Renton (car troubles)

Meeting summary - We toured the site with new users and reviewed each others' work. We talked about how to get access to copyrighted journal articles by using community resources such as libraries.

Wikipedia Loves Libraries - October 2011
Meetup/seattleWLL

Tuesday October 25, 7-9pm Allegro Coffee in University District

A Google map of Allegro Coffee is here.

Wikipedia is encouraging local communities to organize Wikipedia Loves Libraries events this October. The primary topic for discussion is creating or improving the Wikipedia articles about local library resources so that researchers can use Wikipedia as a tool by means through which they can find reference materials.

Seventh meetup
Saturday, June 25, 2011 - Meetup/Seattle7

You ought to be outside picnicking anyway, so why not go to a place with other Wikipedians doing the same thing? Wikipedia is promoting June 25 as an international Wikipedia picnic day, the Wiknic!

Reddit, another popular information website, has an active Seattle community which was already organizing a picnic at Golden Gardens Park on this day. Their organizers have asked Wikipedians to join in and share common interests in information sharing, the beach, and barbecue.

The link to the Reddit picnic can be found here. Please join!

Sixth meetup
Sessions: April 8 and April 18, 2009 See Meetup/Seattle6 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Note that this is to gather Wikipedians, but not in the traditional style of a meetup. Our research group, from the University of Washington (Seattle campus), is looking for user input to help design an application that will eventually be released to the Wikipedia community. Please see Meetup/Seattle6 for more information.

Fifth meetup
tentative: June 19, 2008 See Meetup/Seattle5 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Still in the planning phases. Some researchers at the University of Washington have expressed interest in helping organize this meetup.

Fourth meetup
September 9, 2006. See Meetup/Seattle4 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Topics of conversation included:
 * Linkspam, paid editing, and public relations flacks. There was a general sense the Wikipedia is attempting a "Just Say No" policy and that, like the U.S. government War on Drugs, it isn't working.
 * A broad conversation about original research, Verifiability, intellectual honesty as the "missing pillar", overcitation, civility and admin behavior (including "Jimbo dropping in out of the blue to ban somebody"), the "gap between written and actual policy".
 * Further work on articles about the Pacific Northwest.

Third meetup
14 January 2006 See Meetup/Seattle3 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Topics of conversation included:
 * Librarian and library sciences attitudes toward Wikipedia
 * A suggestion that we should supplement Researching with Wikipedia with some more related project pages:
 * How a Wikipedia article is built, which would explain the various mechanisms that facilitate collaboration and the policies (No original research, Verifiability, etc.) that support reliable content.
 * How to read an article history, about what to look at in an article history to help evaluate an article.
 * A researcher's guide to discussion pages: how to read discussion pages as part of determining reliability, and how to use them if you have doubts.
 * Contrasts to Encarta
 * Stable versions, semi-protection, etc.
 * Original research, verifiability and all that, especially the original intent of the policy against original research.

Second meetup
15 January 2005 See Meetup/Seattle2 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Topics of conversation included:
 * Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia's new internal newspaper, started by Michael Snow.
 * SeattleWiki, started by Matiasp.
 * Possible contact with small, local history museums; DanKeshet and Jmabel followed up to the point of writing Museum projects, though there has not yet been systematic outreach.
 * Whether some (maybe 1%?) of articles are either sufficiently controversial or sufficient "vandal magnets" that our normal, open way of free-for-all editing may just not work for these; suggestion of starting dialogue on alternatives. Jmabel will probably try to start discussion on this.
 * Larry Sanger's recent criticisms of Wikipedia, and the issues of elitism/anti-elitism
 * ... and we pretty much all seem to think Seattle is ready to be a featured article.

First meetup
6 November 2004 See Meetup/Seattle1 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

The first Seattle Meetup took place Saturday, 6 November 2004 at the Seattle Central Library and was a great success. Decumanus says it was "fantastic". Participants came from a geographic area ranging from Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Topics of discussion included:
 * How to get librarians to understand Wikipedia so they might consider it worthy of being an authorative source. (Within days after the meeting, this led to a pretty good start on a document at Researching with Wikipedia.)
 * Licensing issues
 * Possible software changes that might allow POV-type overlays
 * Wikipedia war stories about POV warriors, trolls, etc.
 * BryceHarrington regaled us with tales of the wild and wooly early days of GNUPedia and Nupedia, and how he made the leap to Wikipedia.
 * User:Jwrosenzweig earned our sympathy with his stories about being on the arbitration committee, a thankless task for which none of us seemed to envy him.
 * We came to a quasi-agreement, mostly through a nodding of heads, that a system of committees that might judge the worthiness of questionable content (rather than just violation of Wikipedia rules per se), might save everyone lots of pain and heartache. As of November 12, however, no one has begun fleshing this into a concrete proposal.

After initially gathering at the coffee cart we moved to the 10th floor, under the slanted roof designed by Rem Koolhaas We also tried our hands at Michael Snow's Wikipedia quiz.

At six o'clock most of us adjourned to have dinner in Seattle's International District, at a Chinese restaurant, Hing Loon.