It’s Electric: Wiki Wiki Wiki

Chair: Richard McCoy, Conservator of Objects & Variable Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art 1. Extracting Data from Historical Documents: Crowdsourcing Annotations on Wikisource Many historical documents contain records of interest to historians, scientists and the general public, from census records in government publications to tables in scientific journals, even in personal diaries -- in some cases, records not available from any other sources. Extracting these records can be a time-consuming and expensive process, requiring painstaking attention to detail; however, crowdsourcing this task to citizen scientists has the potential to simultaneously involve a larger pool of interested transcribers, thus parallelizing the work. In this presentation, we outline a workflow to crowdsource the annotations for 352 pages of previously transcribed biology field notebook text. Within sixteen weeks, citizen scientists had identified 2,342 species, locations and dates marked up in a computer-readable format. We used freely available technology, in particular Wikisource and Wordpress, to recruit volunteers, coordinate efforts and to extract the records from the transcribed text while maintaining a link between annotation and content. Presenters: Gaurav Vaidya, Graduate student, University of Colorado at Boulder David Bloom, VertNet Coordinator, University of California, Berkeley 2. GLAM Women: How You Can Help Close the Gender Gap on Wikipedia As of 2011, only 9% of editors to Wikipedia are women. How can GLAMs, which are generally women dominated organizations, contribute to the closing of the Wikipedia gendergap by participating and encouraging women's participating in Wikipedia? This presentation by Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellow & former Smithosnian Institution Archives Wikipedian in Residence, reflected on what women in GLAMs can do, utilizing examples of participation options ranging from offline and online events to editing Wikipedia. Presenter: Sarah Stierch, Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellow, Wikimedia Foundation 3. So Now What? Next Steps in GLAM-Wikimedia collaborations By now you no longer need convincing. Wikipedia is not only a ubiquitous reference platform for our users, but is also home to a thriving, global volunteer community that is eager to distribute the deeper expertise residing in museums. So now what? As a group of Wikipedians who help museums share content, GLAM-Wiki has made great strides in formalizing over the past few years. But how do museum technologists better connect and interface with this resource? How can we work together to more efficiently share our media, research, and expertise? This presentation shared the current progress of the GLAM-Wiki infrastructure and offered insights into how museums can best connect with the Wikipedia community in order to share cultural resources on the globally accessible platform. The future of GLAM-Wiki was also considered, including a proposed model that will allow museums to support one another in Wikipedia-focused endeavors. Presenter: Lori Byrd Phillips, US Cultural Partnerships Coordinator, Wikimedia Foundation Presented Thursday, Nov 8, 2012 at the Museum Computer Network Conference in Seattle, WA. mcn.edu