The Power of Commons

No, not the old New England shared space in the center of the village (AKA village green), but a sister project of Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons. This is a place people upload photos with free licences to then be shared across the globe. The main point was to allow for a single repository for all images across all Wikipedias (English, French, German, etc.) that would allow for easy access between this different projects. That way the Germans could more easily find and use images of the US, and vice versa for US based editors and German images. Add the Germans certainly do use our images, such as one from an old house I took. Even the Japanese use it too, as the Hillsboro article has nine images of mine.

My picture of the OSC in Salem that I've seen in many places

But Commons has grown beyond this as site where many people and organizations go to find free content.  Encyclopædia Britannica in their article on Hillsboro uses one of my images, as do some foreigners with WES, and Worldnews.com used a fish image of mine among many other images they have used from Commons. Searching Google has turned up many for me, and many for others on Wikipedia/Commons. Other images include Erratic Rock State Park, Council Crest Park, the Martha Springer Botanical Gardens where someone used this image for talking about gardening, and these folks at the Mall Hall of Fame blog used three of mine and countless others from Wikipedia/Commons. And these are just the ones that have actually given credit, whereas many others fail to credit Wikimedia or the individual photographers. In fact this image of mine I have seen in a variety of places on the web, often without credit, but here the Associated Contentfolks properly attributed the image to me (those folks are also heavy users of Commons images). However, I think I am most proud of getting on OregonLive in the proper manner. Last fall I warned them about using my image of Lattice Semiconductor without proper attribution, and they took it down (would have been easier for them to just add the caption in the story). So its nice to see they learned their lesson.

Now, more importantly, what does this have to do with you? If you looked at some of the images, hopefully you liked some of them, but most are certainly not Pulitzer Prize winners. Some of my images could use some editing, and others filters, and other better lighting. But, hey, I don’t get paid for this. Anyway, Wikipedia gets free images which helps illustrate articles, and I get a sense of satisfaction/ego boost seeing my work around the world. And you can too! So, if you do not already have a Commons account, I encourage you to sign up for one and start uploading your images. If you need ideas for what to take a picture of, here is a list of images already needed. And who knows, maybe in a month or so your picture of a Bigfoot trap might make the front page in Mongolia.

 

 

 

 

A Bright Future Ahead for One of Our Own

This is a big day for WikiProject Oregon.

While we are a truly collaborative effort among a diverse group, it’s no doubt that this project owes a great deal to the hard work of Pete Forsyth. Pete has been instrumental in the organization of WikiProject Oregon, especially in public outreach work. This very blog was his idea to begin with.

So it’s with great joy that we get to wish him luck as he heads on to a new opportunity in San Francisco as the Public Outreach Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. For those not familiar with it, the Foundation is the non-profit that helps run Wikipedia and countless other free culture projects.

As his work with WikiProject Oregon clearly shows, Pete has a gift for reaching out to the public on behalf of Wikipedia. While all of us devote our free time to editing the free encyclopedia, Pete is one of the slightly rarer individuals who work outside the wiki to educate the public about the Wikimedia movement.

Now he gets to do that not just for Oregon and Wikipedia, but for the whole of the Wikimedia Foundation. Congratulations Pete!

 

What Geocities closing means and how you can help

If you haven’t heard, Geocities is closing on October 26, 2009. This is almost two weeks away. For many, this is an end of an era. Geocities has played host to a lot of unique content that you cannot find elsewhere on small niche websites created by individuals and small organizations. Many of these sites were created in the late 1990s and early 2000s when web hosting was much more cost prohibitive. Geocities offered an alternative to that problem. As people’s interests changed, as time went on, they stopped updating their pages for a variety of reasons.

Geocities continues to be a treasure trove of the arcane information. Fan communities, genealogy communities, history communities, sports fans, school groups are going to lose a lot information.

Fan communities are going to lose their history: What did those Passions sites look like back in the 1990s? They were sprayed with purple back grounds. Sailor Moon sites were image heavy and had a lot of fancy html for their time.

Genealogy groups are going to lose hand written lists of people buried at small town cemeteries, people’s family trees and other types of records that people compiled using offline sources. For people looking for information

The history community is going to lose a lot of original research in many areas including fan communities, sports, military, women’s studies and more.

Geocities was home to a thriving sports community. People created websites for their clubs, wrote the history of their teams, etc. Some of this information never migrated to new official sites for those organizations or to other resources for the sporting community. Australian Rules Football, underwater hockey and handball are three sports communities that are going to be hugely hurt by this.

There have been four really visible efforts to try to preserve this history that I am aware of. They are:

• Archive Team: Creating a back up of all sites on Geocities.
• Fan History Wiki: Screencapping fansites. Creating articles about as many fansites hosted on Geocities as possible. Creating articles about stories archived on Geocities as possible. Creating stub articles about fan fiction archives hosted on Geocities. Finding historical definitions of fannish terminology to track definitional changes.
• Organization for Transformative Works: Preserving information on fansites and archives by screencapping, adding articles about those sites to Fanlore and offering hosting to fansites on Geocities hurt by this closure.
• The Genealogy community: Several people in the Genealogy community are trying various preservation efforts including the Lousiana Genealogy Blog.

There does not appear to have been any push for trying to preserve information of local interest in many communities. It would be fantastic if people in Oregon would go through the 43,200 plus pages that mention Oregon on Geocities and try to identify pages that have information that cannot be found elsewhere, screencap this information or otherwise save it to another location. As time permits after Geocities close, it would then be fantastic to integrate the saved information in to articles on about Oregon on Wikipedia and other wiki projects. Some topics that might be of interest for people in Oregon that are covered on Geocities but not as well as they could be on Wikipedia include GLBT activism in the state, information on historical buildings, information on state fauna, and information about clubs located in the state. If it isn’t saved in some form before October 26, 2009, this information may be lost forever.

 

Fun with maps

Two cool things:

Wikimedia Commons recently added the ability to add tags to images, and…

I recently discovered that the U.S. National Atlas and the U.S. Census Bureau have online mapping tools that let you build custom maps; and because they’re made by the U.S. government, you can then upload the results to Wikipedia, etc. Pretty cool!

Here’s an example. Click on it to see it on its Wikimedia Commons page, where you can view the tags. Go ahead and do it — there are some fun surprises!

Map of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation

 

Featured in the Wikipedia Signpost

This week, I was interviewed along with several other WikiProject Oregon members for the Wikipedia Signpost, a newsletter for the Wikipedia editing community. Reporter Cryptic C62 asked some thoughtful questions, and gave us a great opportunity to talk about our work and why we think it’s important. We were asked about our outreach efforts outside Wikipedia, our collaboration in person and on this blog, and about possible policy changes like flagged revisions and tightening the reins on anonymous editing.

Read on for the full interview. (Please note, unlike most content on this blog, this interview is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.)

Interview from the Wikipedia Signpost

Here at the WikiProject Report, we generally conduct interviews with one interviewer and one interviewee. In this week’s issue, we bring to a special group discussion with five active members of WikiProject Oregon. For those readers who live outside the United States, Oregon is a US state in the Pacific Northwest region. Although the state has a population density of only 35.6 people per square mile, the project has more than 50 active members and 15 featured articles. Here to discuss the project are Peteforsyth, Aboutmovies, EncMstr, Steven Walling, and Esprqii.

1. While many projects have weekly or monthly collaborations on singular articles, most of WikiProject Oregon’s collaborations feature two or more articles. This process has generated at least 29 DYKs and 4 GAs. Why do you use a double collaboration system, and why does it work so well?

EncMstr: I’m not sure how two was chosen, but it works very well. Usually they are complementary—for example a biography and a piece of legislation—so if one article or task is somehow unappealing then the other is likely to be more interesting. (See here for previous collaborations of the week (COTW).) If the number of active members continues to increase, perhaps the right number would be three at once. I doubt the COTW is responsible for the majority of DYKs and GAs—it’s more often something that comes up on the project talk page that strikes a chord with several people. The best examples of this are Johnson Creek (Willamette River) and Cannabis in Oregon.

Esprqii: I think taking a rational approach to the collaborations has been a key part of it. For example, before the weekly collaborations started, we spent a long time rating every single article in the project both in terms of importance and in terms of quality. That left a matrix that showed, for example, which articles were of top importance but were still only stubs. Those were the first articles we collaborated on, and today, if you look at the matrix, there are no articles in that category.

In addition to the rational process, we maintain a wish list of future projects, which inevitably include pet projects of various members of the project. You can’t very well ignore it when your pet has the spotlight! Aboutmovies, who manages the whole collaboration process, has been very crafty about mixing up the rational and the irrational to make it fun, get a lot of people involved, and get a lot of good work done.

 

Forest Park article to be featured on main page

Tomorrow (July 30), the article on Portland’s Forest Park will be featured on Wikipedia’s main page. Though many of us have worked on this article over the years, its status as a “Featured Article” is a testament to some tremendous work by WikiProject Oregon member Finetooth. Finetooth has produced a number of high-quality Oregon articles, mostly about rivers and watersheds. Take a look for a thorough examination of one of Portland’s great natural areas!

 

Gathering photos on two wheels

I’m a bit of a geek and a motorcycle junkie. Combining them was natural, though it’s taken some time.

I uploaded my first photo on July 6, 2003, when I realized there was no article on redcedar bolts, which are blocks of cedar used to make shingles. Yes, I was out riding- in fact, I was dirt biking in far western Washington on July 4th.

Some of the following pictures came while we were motorcycling through Latin America. Here’s a replenishment ship from the Royal Netherlands Navy, just after leaving the harbor in Cartagena, Colombia, which we saw because we were getting our motorcycle around the Darien Gap using the services of a drunken pilot with a scary-small sailboat.

Now that we’re back in the States, I’ve really been enjoying contributing with the WikiProject Oregon. I’ve recently been tackling editing every high school in the state and getting them up to a minimum standard (infobox, refs, location, coords, photo). The photo is difficult, as many of them are a long distance away.

I started playing with Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Oregon, then User:Para pointed out the recursive category export tool, which outputs kml. Nice!

I then used gpsbabel to convert the kml to gdb, Garmin’s format. Score! I can now get the requested photos in my GPS. A recent trip to Tri-Cities Washington is a good example of how I will integrate photos into an existing motorcycle trip: plan the basic route, then add in locations with requested photos.

I added 99 miles and 4.2 hours to my trip over, and 34 miles and 2.3 hours to my trip back by taking the photos. In total, I collected 29 photos for Wikipedia. Here are some of my favorites:

I use a Garmin 60-series GPS for routing and storing tracks, and a SPOT Messenger so people can keep track of me in case something bad happens. My “big” camera is a Canon T1i (EOS 500d), and the motorcycle is a Suzuki V-Strom 650:

I hope this encourages you to get out and help take photos for WikiProject Oregon, or for any other part of Wikipedia! It can be done on foot, on bicycle, or via motorcycle/car/airplane/rocket.

 

WikiProject Oregon hits the airwaves!

I’ll be on the radio tomorrow morning with Oregon Encyclopedia editor Bill Lang, discussing our respective online encyclopedia projects and how we engage with the people of Oregon.

Hope you can listen, and call in with questions! Check out producer David Miller’s excellent post introducing the show. And for those out of state, you can listen online (or check the post after the show for an audio archive).

Tomorrow morning:

Friday May 8, 9-10 AM PDT
Oregon Public Broadcasting
91.5 FM in Portland

 

Why Do You Edit Wikipedia?

It’s always interesting to talk to people who don’t really know anything about Wikipedia and mention that I am a frequent contributor to Wikipedia. People tend to give me a look that they usually reserve for Masons or members of the Trilateral Commission, and then they ask/comment: “Isn’t that always inaccurate?” That one I can pretty much shoot down thanks to other posters on this blog, but the next one is a bit tougher: “Why do you edit Wikipedia?”

I usually stammer off something about how I like delving into history and information, but I decided to really think about it: how did I start editing Wikipedia? To find out, I had to dig deep into my edit history. This is a bit like digging into my junior high journal (no, I didn’t really have one, and besides, I burned it), but here goes.

I actually remember my first edit pretty well. (You never forget your first time…) One of my neighbors at the time was future NBA player Kevin Love. In the summer of 2006, he was still in high school and had just announced he would be playing college basketball at UCLA. One afternoon, I checked out his Wikipedia article and immediately spotted an irritating (to me) grammatical error.

I probably checked the page several times waiting for someone to fix it before it dawned on me that I was supposed to fix it myself. So, at 3:38 on August 7, 2006, I signed up for a Wikipedia account; and then after what I remember as being 10 minutes of excruciating worry that I was surely doing it all wrong, made my first edit.

I expected someone to object, but no one seemed to mind. And it only took me another six weeks to be brave enough make another edit, this time to aging NFL star Morten Andersen. (I had seen his first NFL game back in 1982 and now he was the oldest player in the NFL, so I felt some kinship to him.)  Since he was on the verge of breaking the NFL scoring record, it led me to edit a variety of other related articles. I think I was hooked at this point.

From sports, it was an easy leap into another passion of mine, politics. With an election coming up, in the fall of 2006, I started looking into Oregon-related politics articles. I was surprised to note that so many Oregon politicians didn’t have Wikipedia entries, so in October, in my next big step of development, I created my first article from scratch, for former Congressman Jim Bunn. He never even sent me a card. Oh well.

After the Bunn article, I started getting more involved with Wikipedia. Why were there so many uncompleted articles about Oregon Congresspeople? (or as we call ‘em in the WP:ORE community, ODGs: “Old Dead Guys/Gals”) And this is really where it clicked for me: this was a contribution I could make. On the day before election day 2006, I joined WikiProject Oregon and began systematically running down the missing ODGs. I also took a fancy to creating articles for members of the Oregon Sports Hall of Fame (and sometimes both at the same time).

Along the way, I read stories of incredible perserverance and being in the wrong place at the wrong time, uncovered strange sex scandals, learned about mysterious drownings and defenestrations, and basically was amazed to discover that I had never heard about this stuff before, and moreover, it seemed that no one else had either.

So…why do I edit Wikipedia? To me, it’s not the epic articles about Barack Obama or the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens; those are great, but there is so much easily accessible information elsewhere about those topicsthat Wikipedia will only ever scratch the surface.

Wikipedia is exciting because it can go deeper than that. Former Oregon governor Tom McCall would never rate an article in Encyclopedia Britannica, and is unlikely to even get a mention in any study of environmental cleanup, but his impact is clear. Wikipedia can fill this gap. The strange case of the Oregon Congressional election between Andrew Thayer and George Shiel is unknown to virtually everyone, but is a fascinating story of political intrigue.

As newspapers disappear and more and more of our information becomes online and ephemeral, it will become lost; and moreover, easily changed and “corrected.” Pete Forsyth told me the story of an online article that was challenged and then corrected without comment; how much more of our news will be lost in this way? The correction is part of the story!

With the ability to explore article history, unlike your junior high journal, information cannot be lost. Wikipedia can be a place to store information that should not be lost to the world. I hope more people take up the challenge.

 

Wikipedia for Journalists & Bloggers

WikiWednesday last September

I’m proud to be able to announce that we’ve got something slightly different in mind for the May installment of the Portland WikiWednesday.

In little less than a week, we’ll be serving up a short presentation and panel on the research techniques journalists and bloggers (or anyone really) can use to get the most out of Wikipedia.

Often maligned and misunderstood, Wikipedia is nonetheless a body of knowledge that can be a rich resource if used properly. I’ll be giving the introductory presentation myself, with a half hour to answer such questions as…

• Can journalists avoid compromising standards and still use Wikipedia?
• How can you find exactly what you’re looking for out of 2.8 million articles?
• What clues can you look for to assess the veracity of articles and individual facts?

Afterwords, a panel of both Wikipedians and journalists will delve in to their experience with the site, and answer your questions about the nitty-gritty of working with Wikipedia in your research. On this panel will be:

• Myself (Steven Walling), a Wikipedia adminstrator with years of experience and over 30,000 edits.
• Pete Forsyth, a Wikipedia administrator with a special expertise concerning Oregon articles in particular, and a key instigator of WikiProject Oregon’s organizing and outreach.
• Abraham Hyatt, former managing editor at Oregon Business magazine.
• Dan Cook, former editor of the Portland Business Journal.

This is a little more structured than most WikiWednesdays, but the spirit remains the same. Whether you’re familiar with wikis or just one of the billions of people who use Wikipedia regularly, this should be an interesting and information look at research with the largest encyclopedia in history.

If you go

Where: AboutUs, 107 SE Washington, suite #520 (map)
When: Wednesday May 6th, 5:30pm-7:30pm
Cost: Free (as always!)
More: Calagator and Upcoming