Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/University of Sydney Wikibomb

The University of Sydney is planning a gender diversity "Wikibomb" event on Friday 31 October 2014. Staff and students are all welcome, please join us.

The aim of the event will be to add and expand content about notable women currently or historically associated with the University.

The results of the event will be featured by the Vice Chancellor at the Women at Sydney: share, connect, change symposium the following day.

This page will serve as an on-wiki coordination page.

Location and time

2pm-6pm on Friday 31 October 2014. Volunteers should register at the Charles Perkins Centre Learning Studio on arrival.

Chocolates, strawberries and champagne will be provided during the sessions!

Interested editors

If you are interested in participating in some way, please list your username here. This will help other Wikipedians to monitor the progress of the Wikibomb, communicate with us, and help newcomers most effectively.

If you are a University of Sydney staff member, a formal registration in the CareerPath MyLearning system (under "Diversity and Inclusion") should also be provided (if you cannot attend on the day, a "virtual" session is available if you want to contribute electronically).

Advice for participants new to Wikipedia

Wikipedia can be a daunting place for new writers, but the open, collaborative, and correctable nature of the project means that is often easiest to simply pitch in and try something than to try to do it perfectly first time. With that in mind, here are a few things you can get started on:

Create an account (this is best done before the day of the event, so that as a group we avoid triggering the spam flags)
Add your user name to interested editors list above
Create a simple user page to give other editors an idea of who you are. We have provided a sample userpage, the source of which (click "edit source") can be copied into the source for your userpage. If you want more information about Wikipedia userpages, see Wikipedia:User pages
Choose a subject (or a few) from this table, and add your username to the appropriate column.
Start finding sources and information on your subject.
If you're in the virtual session, or just super keen, get started writing in your sandbox.

Choosing a subject

The event organizers have prepared this table of USyd women who may be notable according to Wikipedia requirements. If you are writing about an academic, there is a more focused academic notability guideline. If you choose a subject who does not meet these guidelines, the article is likely to be deleted down the track. You should also check whether you can find material published about your subject that is sufficient to write at least a short article. If you are affiliated with the article subject, please see our conflict of interest guideline, but it's better practise to start with someone else.

Finding sources

Newspaper sources are often quite useful for biographical subjects, especially if they're not famous enough to have entire books written about them. The library has provided this list of news databases we have access to. Trove is particularly easy for pre-1950 subjects because each newspaper article has a pre-formatted Wikipedia citation template available (once you find an article, click "Cite" near the top left). For modern subjects proquest and factiva are both useful.

Learning to edit

Contributing is easy: see the editing tutorial or a more general introduction to contributing. For a summary of the core principles of participation, see the Plain and simple guide. The Cheatsheet will remind you of basic wiki markup. You can practice editing and experiment in your sandbox, and this is a good place to prepare your first article at the Wikibomb - we can easily move it into article-space when it is ready.

Be bold in improving existing articles! When adding facts, please provide references so others may verify them.

Writing content

Do not copy text from your sources, even if they are publicly available. Wikipedia takes a very strong position against copyright violations. You need to write your own prose (with citations to substantiate it). Collecting, summarizing and synthesizing your sources will take time and effort, so it may be worth doing some research in advance of the wikibomb. The formatting and markup can be done on the day with help from those who have edited before, so at this stage the text is the crucial thing to prepare. By contributing your efforts to Wikipedia, you release it under a free license for others to use and adapt.

Because the subjects of our articles are people, and many are still alive, a special Wikipedia policy called Biographies of Living Persons applies to protect the subjects of the articles. Please ensure your material is verifiable, neutral, and does not contain original research or knowledge obtained from non-public sources.

Referencing your content to reliable, independent, third party sources is essential. Articles can be deleted if left unreferenced. Third party sources means that links to non-independent websites alone, like faculty websites, aren't sufficient.

Article subjects

Our current list of potential subects is at Wikipedia:Meetup/Sydney/University of Sydney Wikibomb/subjects. Feel free to peruse the list and choose subjects to start researching.

Articles from the event will be placed in the Category:University of Sydney Wikibomb 2014.

Recent edits to these articles will be listed at Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:University of Sydney Wikibomb 2014.

Paid Contriubtions

The Terms of use for Wikimedia Foundation websites including Wikipedia include prohibition of:

“

Paid contributions without disclosure

These Terms of Use prohibit engaging in deceptive activities, including misrepresentation of affiliation, impersonation, and fraud. As part of these obligations, you must disclose your employer, client, and affiliation with respect to any contribution for which you receive, or expect to receive, compensation. You must make that disclosure in at least one of the following ways:

a statement on your user page,
a statement on the talk page accompanying any paid contributions, or
a statement in the edit summary accompanying any paid contributions.

”

Many of us participating are employees of the University of Sydney, and thus indirectly receive compensation for our contributions. Thus it is prudent to disclose our employer and our participation in this event on our userpages. The sample userpage contains this information, so can be directly copied onto your userpage.

Related events

For an example of a previous Wikibomb event, held at the Australian Academy of Science and focused on Australian female scientists, see Wikipedia:Meetup/Canberra/2014-08-14-Wikibomb.