Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/February 2006/Minutes

Agenda review

 * Decide what how to aproach Melbourne Wikipedian's proposal regarding incorporation.
 * Decide the time and venue of the next Sydney Wikipedian meetup.
 * Discuss article ideas.

Regular Meeting
Wikipedians present live in the following suburbs:


 * Northern Beaches
 * Ashfield
 * Strathfield
 * Bankstown x 2
 * Quakers Hill
 * St Ives

The most central location appeared to be Strathfield.

Motion: Tentatively set the next meeting to be a BBQ at Ta bu shi da yu's residence in Strathfield on a Sunday in approximately three months time from this meeting.

Motion carried by consensus

Melbourne's proposal regarding incorporation
Motion: To deal with the proposal by responding to the Melbourne Wikipedians such that:


 * We make it clear to them that we do not wish to discourage them from the excellent work they are doing, but that we would like them to clarify some elements of their proposal that on the information we have available appear strange, risky or counter-productive.
 * Do the Melbournians plan to install servers in Australia?
 * Is it actually possible for a local chapter to transfer proceeds of donations to a US based organisation?
 * Some of the concerns we should express are:
 * The idea of having an office space seems unnecessary and expensive. It seems to us that all of our funds would be directed to the office space and possibly still land us in the red.  In order to fund the office space, we have calculated that Wikipedia Australia would need to recruit in excess of 1000 members at an annual membership fee of $20 with no money to spare for other more needy purposes.
 * We think that elections have the possibility of becoming politicised
 * We think that efforts at this early stage have a strong possibility of drawing Wikipedians away from the core purpose of Wikipedia - ie. that of editing and approving articles.
 * We think that professional advice should be sought on issues such as public liability and defamation.
 * We feel that having Wikipedia proxies in Australia don't have add value because there are already many proxies in Australia by ISPs etc.

How we could take steps to be more organised in light of Melbourne's proposal:
 * Get a PO Box.
 * Seek professional advise on defamation.
 * Prepare a procedure for an organised response to rogue media encouraging vandalism of Wikipedia.
 * Appoint a contact person for purposes such as producing press releases and responding to media.
 * Talk to the UK guys about their experience in setting up a local chapter.
 * Talk to other Australian organisations about their experience in incorporating in Australia.
 * Consider adopting a constitution based on samples provided by the Government website and other grassroots organisations. (eg. Open source Victoria)
 * Consider public liability insurange.

Bits of information that might come handy:
 * Auditing is only required if turnover of the organisation is large.
 * Who is Adam Carr?
 * DFA website?

Things we don't know:
 * Are online AGMs legal?

Why might we want to setup a local chapter?
 * A public identity that people can contact and refer to.

If we setup a local chapter, what implication are there?
 * How does the chapter serve its members? They are paying for membership after all.

Update: Please see response to some of the above.

Articles needing attention
We made the following discussions that provide guidance to our efforts for the near future.
 * Australian Universities articles need improvement. Universities articles we need to pay particular attention are UNSW, UTS, Macquarie University, UWS, and Australian Catholic University.
 * Want an article explaining and covering government selective schools:
 * History
 * What they are, how they work.
 * Comparison with other schools.
 * Similar schemes in other nations.
 * The how and why they were setup.
 * Include a list of them - there are approximately 29 in Sydney and its surrounds.
 * Believe they are governed by an Act, but which act?
 * Caulfield Grammar School in Victoria is a featured article and can be presented as a template.
 * Landmarks
 * Want to have a landmarks section in every suburb article with pictures.
 * Sydney wiki project:
 * Needs to be updated and cleaned up (e.g. remove graphs with 0% progress)
 * User:Ta bu shi da yu does not have the time to do this but is happy for other people to take over the work.
 * For the purposes of determining which suburbs each landmark actually resides, the Geographical Names Board of New South Wales has an official database of suburb boundaries.
 * Be wary of some suburb names listed by the Geographical Names Board because they are sometimes variant names of the same thing.
 * Need to contact the Geographical Names Board and ask for help. Action: Nickj to send email to the GNB asking if we can get image of suburb boundaries just from the suburb's name (currently cannot do this - e.g. was extremely manual to find an image of Summer Hill's boundaries, so this approach won't work on a large scale.)
 * Bankstown Airport is supposedly a suburb in its own right! (Reference: http://www.gnb.nsw.gov.au/name_search/extract?id=KWckwpUluj and http://www.gnb.nsw.gov.au/name_search/extract?id=MaYblMsE ). However for some reason Kingsford Smith is officially just an "airport" - reference: http://www.gnb.nsw.gov.au/name_search/extract?id=TRlpoeZTGH and http://www.gnb.nsw.gov.au/name_search/extract?id=anKqvqrXan.
 * Ways of letting relevant people know of Sydney articles that are relevant to them:
 * Council newsletter. Approach a council and ask about including a link to the Wikipedia suburb articles in a council newsletter?
 * Local newspaper articles.
 * Want to have articles about all of the various local newspapers (e.g. estimates that there are around 50 local newspapers in Sydney, many of which are delivered free).
 * PICMAN website of the National library has a database of photos. Any photos before 1950 have expired copyright and are therefore in the public domain.
 * The Sydney article is missing climate information - want to add this (e.g. temperature range, average rainfall, average temp, etc).
 * Find a range of sources to do research about areas in which Wikipedia's coverage of Sydney articles is deficient. Useful sources include dictionaries, encyclopaedias, websites, government publications. Merge these, and then see what we're missing.
 * Images should be added to Wikicommons. Other sources should be added to Wiki sources.
 * Action: Check legal status of Australian laws and legislation and whether or not it limits what Wikipedia can do with them. For instance are laws covered by copyright or other acts that limit reproduction and redistribution?
 * Law articles in general are deficient.
 * Need an article on the NSW Parliament. E.g. NSW Parliament is currently a redirect, to one paragraph in a larger article. Must be able to expand this, and make into separate article.
 * NSW politics need more work.
 * Need stubs for all Electoral Districts in New South Wales. Currently only a handful of these are covered - see Template:Electoral Districts of New South Wales.

Humourous and notable articles

 * Exploding animals
 * Anti-tank dog
 * USA PATRIOT Act
 * Octopus card
 * Intelligent design