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.

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!

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.

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

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.

Aboutmovies: I chose two to begin with, as EncMstr indicates, to allow for maximum participation. Not everyone will be interested in a certain topic, unless you are really broad in choosing the topic. But the broader the topic, usually the less participation (or at least you have difficulty tracking the participation). Choosing two doubles your chances of enticing participation. Then when choosing each time, I also try to make them diverse to further spread the net. I also try to make them geographically disperse where possible, and also try to rotate between areas within the state and general topics, such as transportation or culture or education, etc. so that on a long-term basis (theoretically) more people will stay involved in the collaboration and hopefully the project as well.

As to working well and the GAs/DYKs, I do think the COTW does help. In legal terms I think the COTW is the proximate cause, but not necessarily the but for cause. In that the articles that were created during a COTW would likely eventually be created by the same editor, just not at that time. With those that came via an expansion, I do think those articles likely would not have become DYKs at all except for the COTW process. With the GAs, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. The Register-Guard I don’t see making GA but for the COTW. It had about 30 edits over 3 years until the COTW, and then about 26 during the COTW which led to the GA nom and status. Others, like the Portland Trail Blazers, I think would eventually make it to GA without the COTW, though the COTW likely spurs this along. Johnson Creek and the Cannabis articles that EncMstr mention were not COTWs to my knowledge, they were collaborations within the project outside of the COTW process. Both are great examples of the collaborative spirit within the project in general, and here I would agree with EncMstr that the GA status (FA for Johnson) has to do with the topic being of interest to those who got involved based on the project’s main talk page. Which not surprisingly, cannabis was a big “hit” in Oregon. Thank you, thank you very much, I’ll be in Vegas all week at the Mirage.

2. There are those Wikipedians who believe that putting a massive amount of effort into a single article is a waste of time considering how many undeveloped, unreferenced, and nonexistent articles we have. The Oregon COTW occasionally features more widespread cleanups, such as Featured Article updates, article creation drives, and disambiguation patrols. Are these broad collaborations designed to cater to those Wikipedians, or was there some other inspiration to break away from the norm?

Pete Forsyth: We do these sorts of broad projects, as well as updates to specific articles, both within and outside the context of COTW. I don’t think any of us would buy into the notion that any improvement to the encyclopedia is a waste of time; we all come with our personal aspirations for expanded content, but also with a desire to make sure we’re generally moving toward comprehensive coverage of what’s important about Oregon. We have some great examples of massive improvement to specific areas: Mtsmallwood has done some really neat articles about the importance of steamships to the state’s economic and cultural development, Finetooth has produced several FAs about Oregon rivers and streams, and Emk4ever added some excellent coverage of older political figures related to his university studies. Meanwhile, Tedder has taken it upon himself to bring all high school articles up to a basic level of quality, and the work we’ve done on the state legislature has earned our work the praise “easily the state legislature best covered here on Wikipedia.”

Also, we keep our eyes open for “diamonds in the rough” from inexperienced Wikipedia editors. When new people make contributions, they’re often unfamiliar with our vast collection of policies, the Manual of Style, and the culture of the community. We do our best to make everyone feel welcome, and help them make their best possible contribution. And on the (hopefully rare) occasions where we come up short, we are not shy about stepping in and telling each other to cool off or take a breather. That’s one of the most gratifying things to me, personally — developing respectful and productive working relationships, and helping one another become both better editors and better community members and leaders.

Overall, I’d say we take an organic and inclusive approach to content development, rather than trying to make and execute a specific plan for comprehensive coverage. We try to support one another in developing the content we’re passionate about, and each of us, in our own way, also tries to make sure we’re branching out into new areas some of the time. There are certainly wide topic areas that are not yet covered well, but in general, I think we’re making solid progress in the right direction.

Aboutmovies: For a lot of them (I’m speaking about the COTW only), it is simply variety again. Wider net=more fish, in theory. With some others, I’m actually trying to educate/expose some of the newer editors to items they may not have encountered or known about. I know when I first started I had no idea about the “what links here” feature, nor what it was useful for, so the dab patrol COTW was more about exposing the newer users to this feature. It also furthered a useful purpose of helping readers find the correct article, while it was also something anyone could easily do and do with minimal time input. Similar with the twice-yearly photo drives. Helps increase image coverage, but also let people know about the reqphoto feature and the associated categories.

EncMstr: I have encountered Wikipedians who think creating stub articles is a waste of time (“useless” stubs for years), as well as those who think there are significantly diminished returns polishing a GA to an FA. Clearly both types of editing have value, and most editors agree that developing an article up to class B is near the sweet spot of effectiveness. But, thank goodness we’re not all the same: an army of automatons cranking out rote sentences to fulfill our destiny of “completing” Wikipedia! There are no two similar personalities among WikiProject Oregon. It stands to reason that the COTW must vary in subject, scope, frequency, skills, topic, etc. or we’d be bored, and probably abandon the project and vanish.

3. With monthly meetups, an active blog, and correspondence with other Oregon-related organizations, WikiProject Oregon is unusual in the amount of activity it has off-wiki. How did this off-wiki activity come about? Do you think this multi-faceted project model would benefit other WikiProjects as well?

Pete Forsyth: Without question, these efforts have been very beneficial. We’ve reached out to local organizations that have nothing to do with wikis, and also immersed ourselves in the broader wiki culture. These efforts have helped us locally, for instance working with the Oregon Encyclopedia to establish synergy in our work; and they have helped us establish better conditions for Wikipedia editing, like winning an important decision at the state legislature to ensures state law is not entangled in unnecessary copyright protections.

Some efforts have evolved on their own, others have been more carefully planned out. Our group blog, which we’ve used to support most of our outreach efforts, was an idea Steven Walling and I cooked up as we were driving back from RecentChangesCamp, a wiki conference we attended in 2008. Ourmonthly WikiWednesday meetups evolved through our individual connections with other wiki-based communities and local luminaries like Ward Cunningham, the guy who invented wikis to begin with.

I look at it like this: in order to serve an audience, it’s essential to be engaged with that audience, explain your work to them, and seek their feedback. And in order to continually do better work, it’s important to interact with and learn from others who are doing similar kinds of work. With both kinds of outreach, occasionally you inspire somebody enough that they want to contribute to the project themselves — which is the best payoff of all.

EncMstr: Pete is modestly sidestepping credit for his inspirational role in organizing the blog and advertising the monthly meeting. However, I doubt such a multi-faceted model can easily benefit other WikiProjects—even if Pete worked for them: Our extra-wiki enthusiasm is a manifestation of Oregon attitudes, and that’s a lot harder to replicate than simply throwing wiki parties or whatever. My desire to affect the world for the better is reinforced significantly by the huge readership our articles enjoy. WP:ORE had 6,121 articles in the project in June 2008. In May 2008, those articles were viewed a total of 7,843,643 times. (The summary is at Wikipedia:WikiProject Oregon/Readership/All—the most read were D. B. Cooper, River Phoenix, and Nike, Inc.) Though not in the top 50, Mount Hood attracts 500 to 700 readers per day.

Aboutmovies: I have not been involved with off-Wiki meetings and projects, other than meeting Pete and Katr in person at events where I was able to get some pictures. That said, I have contemplated figuring out a way to reach out to local historical societies. The local county/city level ones are usually small, but very knowledgeable about their local histories. What’s more, and I hate to stereotype, but the most are mainly volunteer organizations and the volunteers are usually retired folks. These people (again to generalize) often have free time on their hands/like to tell stories/have access to many sources and in these respects are perfect recruits for WikiProjects that involve history/biographies and the like. But, I have two obstacles to overcome from Wikipedia standpoint (there is also the personal problem of time).

First, since we are all volunteers, I find it difficult to represent Wikipedia. I know if someone came up to me at said “I edit for Wikipedia, want to help us and give us lots of free pictures?” I know my first reaction would be something regarding do you work for them? Then if I find out they are just volunteers with no authority to act on behalf of Wikipedia/The Foundation, I’m going to be a little hesitant to work with them. Sort of like when I get emails about some dead person in Nigeria who happened to have the same name as me and now their lawyer needs help getting their funds out of some other foreign country, and I get a cut! One solution I’ve thought about is that possibly the Foundation in some way could create unpaid volunteer coordinator positions around the country for these types of recruitments. The Foundation could provide an email account and/or business cards for these people to go out and recruit groups (historical societies/think tanks/professional societies) with a more professional/official looking process. Maybe even higher at The Foundation (if one does not already exist) a coordinator that would work with these recruiters, including mailing out more official correspondence using letterhead (for legal reasons I would hesitate on giving unpaid people letterhead as this can be used to for making binding contracts). Then once groups are recruited, WikiProjects could jump in and work with the groups, allowing the recruiter to move on to new conquests. Just an idea.

Secondly, the abilities/qualifications of these people may not be what we are looking for. The problem with most amateur historians is they are not usually trained in historiography. There is enough mis-information out there in history that we don’t need more. Its bad enough when you come across the old professional stuff that is littered with errors, propaganda, boosterism, and myths repeated as facts. We don’t need more of that. Now, some of these people are retired academics or used to work in fields related to history and have adequate training, but my interactions with some groups didn’t give me that feeling. Additionally, many older folks (my parents included) are not as savvy with computers and the internet. I consider myself a pretty good computer person, but it took awhile to get used to how Wikipedia worked just from a user interface/technical standpoint.

Some obstacles to overcome, but potential for a good return on investment. Though I guess this is a bit tangential to the question.

Steven Walling: Much of this energy for real-world activities has sprung out of our attendance at other wiki and technology-related events, such asRecentChangesCamp, which helped bring us together to create the blog. Personally, I think public outreach is one of the most important things we do. Getting out in our communities, both locally and online, shows the human face of Wikipedia and makes us seem less monolithic. The more people understand about just how Wikipedia works, the more who are willing to engage with us and help build the encyclopedia, rather than just be passive consumers. But the simple fact is that majority of our readers will never edit, and that’s okay. If we can invite a few more volunteers and educate a large audience along the way, then that’s a success in my eyes.

4. Pete said that “in order to serve an audience, it’s essential to be engaged with that audience”. The ability of a project to engage its audience is somewhat diminished when its audience is not as geographically confined as yours. In terms of incorporating external social media into the project structure, what have you learned that can apply to any WikiProject?

Pete Forsyth: In my time as an editor, I’ve come to believe that we do our best work when we view Wikipedia as one thread in the rich fabric of our society. I think there’s a tendency — and I’ve been as guilty of it as anyone — to sometimes think of our work here as being separate from the rest of the world. But at the core, we base our work in writing an encyclopedia in high quality secondary sources; and engagement with the world that produces that source material is vital to producing the best and most useful content.

Certainly, there are opportunities with a geographically-based topic in that it’s easier to meet with people in person. But that’s just one small aspect of what we do. Engaging with non-Wikipedians with similar interests can be done online, by telephone, etc. And there may be excellent opportunities for in-person engagement, too, if you’re creative about it. If you’re part of a WikiProject on computer programming, you might find opportunities to let your local tech community know that they have a Wikipedian in their midst; or you might find that 2 or 3 other programmer Wikipedians in your area want to get together once in a while to discuss your collective work.

I don’t think there’s any one winning formula for how to best engage with other Wikipedians or with your community. But if you try to find ways, I’m sure you will succeed, and it will inform the work you do on Wikipedia.

Steven Walling: Being organized around a single state doesn’t mean we’re all always have it easy coordinating real-world events. Many of the most dedicated members of the project are distributed throughout the state, and have a hard time traveling to Portland for our events. But we still use distributed organization, just like Wikipedia as a whole. Currently, distributed networking tools our most valuable assets as a group. Since that’s the case, I don’t think it’s outlandish to say that say, the military history project could do more off-site organizing. You just need to go where your community is, either virtually or in physical space.

Esprqii: I would just echo that despite the fact we are all in one state–it’s a big state. Yes, many of us are in the Portland area, and have the benefit of access to Portland’s rich wiki community (hey, what other WikiWednesday group can boast the frequent appearance of wiki inventor Ward Cunningham?). But some of our most prolific contributors are fully engaged in the project without being physically present. Actually, I’d say the biggest social media piece we use is the project talk page. It’s a rare day that goes by without some member of the project pointing out an article that needs attention, the discovery of a new resource, or simply the reemergence of a pesky vandal. It seems pretty basic, but the life of a wikiproject really begins to thrive on those talk pages. Until you can get everyone talking there, not much else is going to happen.

5. Finally, to what extent do you think flagged revisions would benefit WikiProject Oregon?

Steven Walling: I do not think WikiProject Oregon is really the target of flagged revisions, in terms of where the need is most dire. The most direct benefit of all our organizing both here and offline is that we have good cohesion as a group, and do very well handling any situations that might arise. In other words, we don’t really need a sweeping technical solution, since we’ve solved most of our problems to date with social innovation. I think most people see flagged revisions as something to solve site-wide problems with biographies of living people and such, and not as something aimed to benefit finite WikiProjects such as our own.

Pete Forsyth: I agree with Steven. The topic of flagged revision saddens me a bit, because I feel that Wikipedians on the whole (and particularly in Oregon) are continually getting better at handling undesirable edits, and the hopeful armchair anthropologist in me wants to see where that goes. I believe that in Oregon, we do a very good (though not perfect) job of monitoring content, and taking care of issues in humane, non-dramatic fashion. This keeps issues away from the noticeboards, and minimizes their demand on administrators and Foundation staff. I hope we continue to grow in our ability to handle conflict in a non-bureaucratic, non-technical manner, so it saddens me that we must consider technical solutions like flagged revisions.

None of that should be taken to mean that I oppose considering technical changes like flagged revisions. While we’re conducting our little encyclopedia experiment, real people and situations are impacted by our edits and by our policies; people’s biographies are vandalized, and worse. So doing nothing is not an acceptable option.

There are two approaches I’d favor over flagged revisions:

1. My friend Danny Wool of Wikia has done research and built a strong case that wiki communities generally benefit from disabling anonymous editing. The significant point, I believe, is that requiring account creation makes it much easier to interact with, welcome, and guide new contributors.
2. I believe we need to do a better job encouraging (but of course not requiring) new editors to use their real names, and to describe their goals and possible conflicts of interest on their user pages. I believe this recent edit, which removed the text “You should strongly consider choosing a username that is not connected to you” from the initial signup screen, will have a strong positive impact on the quality of new contributors’ experience with Wikipedia.

A basic tenet of the Wikipedia philosophy is that on the whole, the desire to do good outweighs the desire to vandalize. Therefore, I generally favor policy changes that promote individual transparency and accountability, rather than technical measures that create different levels of ability to contribute to the project. So, I generally prefer the approaches mentioned above, and would rather not see flagged revisions; but there’s plenty of room for discussion on this important point.

EncMstr: I’ve been an administrator for about a year and a half, but soon after acquiring the mop, I desperately felt that registration should be required to edit as it seemed that such a great proportion of vandalism came from IP editors. I’ve since come to realize that—on balance—helpful anonymous editors contribute more much than IP vandals, particular since about 95% of vandalism is removed with a click or two. Within the scope of WikiProject Oregon, vandals have much less of a chance. Besides each active member having an (apparently) extensive watchlist, we have a group watchlist which shows all changes to pages in our scope. Vandalism is quickly reversed and persistent vandals are quickly recognized and blocked. Flagged revisions are much better suited for lightly watched pages.

Thanks for a very enjoyable interview!

]]> http://wikiprojectoregon.wordpress.com/2009/07/30/featured-in-the-wikipedia-signpost/feed/ 1 Pete Forsyth http://wikiprojectoregon.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/forest-park-article-to-be-featured-on-main-page/ http://wikiprojectoregon.wordpress.com/2009/07/29/forest-park-article-to-be-featured-on-main-page/#comments Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:58:39 +0000 Pete Forsyth http://wikiprojectoregon.wordpress.com/?p=429 ]]>

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!

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.

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

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.

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