Wikimedia Girl Geek Dinner/Manchester October 2013

• Sunday 27th October
• 11am-5pm, MadLab, Edge Street, Manchester. Please remember the clocks go back on Sunday.
• Tickets: £3 (including lunch) - book HERE

lunch, and possibly cake, will be provided

Manchester Girl Geeks presents an introduction to editing Wikipedia! Practically everyone uses The Free Encyclopedia to find out about the world - but have you ever tried adding to it? Women are sorely underrepresented in editing and contributing to Wikipedia articles, and we aim to shift the balance.

We'll show you how to take your first steps as a Wikipedia contributor, and can provide more advanced help if you've already dabbled. Bring along your favourite sources, and we can fix things and add to the body of knowledge together. If you're not experienced, trainers will take you through the basics of logging in and editing, as well as give you some ideas of how to contribute.

We'll have some reference sources from local libraries and online sources, but if you have any good reference works, please bring them along. We'll be joined by guests from the national Ada Lovelace Day celebrations, who have also been holding Wikipedia days to edit articles about women in science and make sure they're comprehensive and accurate, and give credit where it's due to female scientists. If you're in need of a focus on which articles to try editing, you're welcome to take this as inspiration and fix up your favourite science hero.

Refreshments and lunch will be provided.

What to bring

• A laptop/computer, on which to edit; if you don't have one you can bring, please get in touch beforehand and we can sort something out
• Reference materials on topics you'd like to write about, such as books, papers or journals
• Also, remember to create a Wikipedia account before attending

The venue has wi-fi and projectors

Participants

There were 13 participants, 70% were women.

1. Katie Steckles (contribs) - some editing experience
2. Ruida (contribs) - some editing experience
3. Kpudner (contribs) - some editing experience, was assisting others
4. GemHill (contribs)
5. Yarakyo (contribs)
6. BhavishaPatel (contribs)
7. CarolynChafer (contribs)
8. Liz Granger (contribs)
9. Altogether-andrews (contribs)
10. EllenChalkdust (contribs)
11. Van tho (contribs)
12. MrBenF (contribs)
13. Maas-Neotek GmbH (contribs)
14. AMANIBANGI (contribs) - attended the morning teaching session

Topic suggestions

• w:Alice Catherine Evans

Some notable computer scientists whose articles could be improved:

• w:Elisa Bertino — widely cited database and security researcher
• w:Anita Borg, [1]
• w:Deborah Estrin — networking researcher, one of the most widely cited computer scientists with an h index of nearly 100 (an h index is the highest h such that the researcher has published h papers each with h citations)
• w:Sally Floyd — widely cited networking researcher, developer of key TCP specifications
• w:Sara Kiesler — widely cited human-computer interactions researcher
• w:Mary Kenneth Keller, believed to be the first female PhD in computer science
• w:Frances Spence
• w:Lixia Zhang — widely cited networking researcher
• w:Jean E. Sammet

Some potential articles that we might want to create:

• w:Christel Hamann - Took out a U.S. patent on a calculating machine in 1903.
• w:Christiana Newhaus - Patented an Abacus in 1890.
• w:Elise Harmon - Computer Hardware. Major player in the minaturizing of computers. Career Physicist and Chemist. She devised an entirely new method for creating printed circuitry. A "hot die stamp method of infusing silver conductors on polymeried thermo-plastic and thermo-setting materials."
• w:Emily C. Duncan - Received two patents for Calculators (1903, 1904). Her calculators allowed people to calculate the interest and remaining terms for loans of various amounts.
• w:Lydia D. Myers - Patented an Abacus in 1895.
• w:Margaret Cavanaugh - Programmed Argonne's first scientific computer. (It had about 2 kilobytes of memory)
• w:Mary E. Winter - Patented an Adding machine in 1882.

Topics edited

Some articles that were created or edited during the event were:

1. w:de:Winifred Asprey
2. w:PAFAH1B1
3. w: Expatriate
4. w:Blackley
5. w:Lucy Wilson
6. w:Manchester Science Festival
7. w:Helen Octavia Dickens (w:Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Helen Octavia Dickens)
8. w:Alice Hamlin Hinman
9. w:Mary E. Winter (w:Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation/Mary E. Winter) - not much info available on her!
10. Some topics around w:Investment trust

What we learnt

List of things that the attendees fed back at the end of the event.

• Referencing
• Citation Wizard
• Citation needed
• '''Be bold'''
• Markup code
• Everything!
• A lot easier than we thought
• Collaborative
• Supportive
• Place for open debate
• How to edit – mistakes
• Always things that need fixing
• Low proportion of editors are women
• Articles written by many people

An attendee has also written a blog post about the event! - http://biofluff.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/wikipedia-editing-day-msf13/

Agenda

If we get enough participants, we would like to split the group into two (we have two rooms available), with people who know how to edit to go straight into creating articles, and the newcomers to have the editing training first.

• 10am set up for organisers and trainers
• 11am start - editing training
• 12:30pm lunch
• 1-1:30pm, till 5pm - editathon. We will have cake around 4pm.

Trainers

• Bazonka (talk) - lead
• Yaris678 (talk) - lead
• Daria Cybulska (WMUK) (talk) - arriving 11:15am
• Harry Mitchell (talk)