JISC DI team training workshop

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What: A one-day workshop for the Digital Infrastructure team of the JISC to include Basic Wikipedia training and a discussion of some topics selected by the trainees.

Where: JISC headquarters, Brettenham House near the Strand, WC2E 7AE. Entrance is opposite Waterloo Bridge. Nearest tube stations are Charing Cross and Embankment.

When: 10am-4pm, Monday 8th October 2012

Trainers

(travel expenses and lunch covered)

• Martin Poulter
• Charles Matthews
• Edward Harding
• Tom Morris

Outline programme

This session involved hands-on editing and improvement of Wikipedia, but, given the interests of the audience, a large proportion of the day focused on how Wikimedia functions as a set of communities, how the projects work behind the scenes and how they relate to each other.

Event began with coffee at 10.00 for a 10.30 start.

• Introductions
• Wikimedia's mission and the Five Pillars of Wikipedia (Martin)
• The Wikimedia projects and how they work together, especially how Commons and MediaWiki (and soon Wikidata) provide an infrastructure for the other projects. (Martin and Charles)
• Exercise: quality on Wikipedia. FAs and GAs. (Martin)
• Topics for group discussion (All)
  • Using Wikimedia as an outlet for suitable open educational resources created by other projects, in accordance with Wikimedia's mission
  • Making links to open-access versions of cited research papers
  • Bots and human-bot collaboration
  • The book tool

• Lunch

• Handling disagreements: Bold, Revert, Discuss. Consensus and why Wikipedia isn't a democracy.
• Basic editing and interaction with other users
• Look at article histories, user contribution lists and watchlists
• Article improvement (on an article related to each user's personal interest, or a random article)
• Getting help
• Finish at 4pm

New users registered on the day

• User:Ambrouk
• User:Rvwest80
• User:Chriscb77
• User:Weight 139
• User:Andrew.mcgregor77
• User:Peach500

Evaluation

Out of 3 submitted.

What will you do as a result of today's session?

• Keep an eye on Wikipedia pages and correct errors (3)
• Improve or create Wikipedia articles (3)
• Encourage friends to contribute in some way (2)
• Arrange an event in your workplace (1)
• Submit images or other media to Wikimedia Commons (1)

The workshop aimed to give you an overview of the Wikimedia projects and how they work. How well did it achieve this? (1 = poorly; 5 = very well)

5, 4, 3 (mean: 4)

The workshop aimed to give you the confidence to edit Wikipedia. How well did it achieve this? (1 = poorly; 5 = very well)

5, 5, 4 (mean 4.7)

Tell us one surprising thing you've learned about Wikipedia or Wikimedia today.

• The different task forces you can join.
• Statistics about most read articles (e.g. Aspergers syndrome). Editing pages actually more difficult than I thought it would be (I guess it's good to have training sessions).
• The breadth of the projects that are taking place - it makes me want to find something relevant to my interests.

Tell us at least one thing that would have improved this workshop for you.

• Advanced templates (doubt time to in one day)
• Maybe more time to reflect on how I could use Wikipedia in my work & with the communities I deal with.
• [blank]

Tell us one thing that would make Wikipedia better.

• More non-English speaking people engaging with it.
• Encourage experts in topics to improve specific pages.
• [blank]