Linguistics Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at LSA annual meeting

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m organizing a linguistics Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the LSA annual meeting, with the goal of improving linguistics-related articles on Wikipedia and getting linguists thinking more about how to contribute.

My plan for the workshop is to make available a set of slides with the easy-to-remember short url bit.ly/lingwiki, explaining how and why to edit Wikipedia as linguists. They’ll be online in advance and participants can use them as a reference or go through them at their own pace, after a brief initial overview, because people have varying backgrounds and comfort levels with Wikipedia, wikis, and technology. I’ll also be running a survey to summarize what kinds of improvements we make as part of the editathon and get feedback for planning future events.

The slides are also Creative Commons licensed, which means that anyone can re-used them for future editathons with attribution. There’s not a whole lot in there that’s linguistics-specific, so I think they’d be fairly easy to adapt to other fields even.

But putting the slides and survey online also means that anyone can participate from anywhere in the world with internet access, even if you aren’t at the LSA annual meeting, and I highly encourage you to do so. (In fact, I’ve talked with a few people who are interested in doing this already.) In this case, I’d suggest using the tag/hashtag #lingwiki to find and coordinate with other online participants on social media, and I expect there will be some editathon activity on #lsa2015 as well.

The editathon itself will take place from 8-10pm PST on Saturday, January 10, 2015 in Parlour C, but if you’re tuning in from online, feel free to edit and be counted at any point over the course of the meeting, January 8-11. (Although of course you can edit Wikipedia at any time, it’s a free internet.)

To that end, I’ve put a draft version of the slides up online now, so if anyone has feedback, comments, ideas for things I’ve left out, notes on parts that are confusing, and so on, please do let me know! I’m especially encouraging editing on the following topics:

1. Linguistics stubs

2. Under-documented languages

3. Biographies of prominent linguists, especially female linguists and other minorities

If you’re considering participating in the editathon, either in person or online, you may also want to create a Wikipedia account in advance – it’ll only take a couple minutes, and it’ll speed things up on the day of. But don’t let not having an account already stop you from participating if you’re interested!

If you don’t know much linguistics, there’s still a massive thing that you could do which would be helpful (in addition to contributing in an area where you do have expertise). Although I’m directing people to linguistics stubs, there are also a huge number of linguistics articles where we don’t even know whether they’re stubs or not! So categorizing the articles on this list according to these criteria can help future editors and editathons a lot.