A wikipedia strategy for the Royal Society of New Zealand

Over the last 48 hours I’ve had a very unsatisfactory conversation with the individual(s) behind the @royalsocietynz twitter account regarding wikipedia. Rather than talk about what went wrong, I’d like to suggest a simple strategy that builds the Society’s causes in the long term.
First up, our resources: we have three wikipedia pages strongly related the Society, Royal Society of New Zealand, Rutherford Medal (Royal Society of New Zealand) and Hector Memorial Medal; we have a twitter account that appears to be widely followed; we have some employee of RSNZ with no apparent wikipedia skills wanting to use wikipedia to advance the public-facing causes of the Society, which are:
“to foster in the New Zealand community a culture that supports science, technology, and the humanities, including (without limitation)—the promotion of public awareness, knowledge, and understanding of science, technology, and the humanities; and the advancement of science and technology education: to encourage, promote, and recognise excellence in science, technology, and the humanities”

The first thing to notice is that promoting the Society is not a cause of the Society, so no effort should be expending polishing the Royal Society of New Zealand article (which would also breach wikipedia’s conflict of interest guidelines). The second thing to notice is that the two medal pages contain long lists of recipients, people whose contributions to science and the humanities in New Zealand are widely recognised by the Society itself.
This, to me, suggests a strategy: leverage @royalsocietynz’s followers to improve the coverage of New Zealand science and humanities on wikipedia:

1. Once a week for a month or two, @royalsocietynz tweets about a medal recipient with a link to their wikipedia biography. In the initial phase recipients are picked with reasonably comprehensive wikipedia pages (possibly taking steps to improve the gender and racial demographic of those covered to meet inclusion targets). By the end of this part followers of @royalsocietynz have been exposed to wikipedia biographies of New Zealand people.
2. In the second part, @royalsocietynz still tweets links to the wikipedia pages of recipients, but picks ‘stubs’ (wikipedia pages with little or almost no actual content). Tweets could look like ‘Hector Medal recipient XXX’s biography is looking bare. Anyone have secondary sources on them?’ In this part followers of @royalsocietynz are exposed to wikipedia biographies and the fact that secondary sources are needed to improve them. Hopefully a proportion of @royalsocietynz’s followers have access to the secondary sources and enough crowdsourcing / generic computer confidence to jump in and improve the article.
3. In the third part, @royalsocietynz picks recipients who don’t yet have a wikipedia biography at all. Rather than linking to wikipedia, @royalsocietynz links to an obituary or other biography (ideally two or three) to get us started.
4. In the fourth part @royalsocietynz finds other New Zealand related lists and get the by-now highly trained editors to work through them in the same fashion.

This strategy has a number of pitfalls for the unwary, including:

• Wikipedia biographies of living people (BLPs) are strictly policed (primarily due to libel laws); the solution is to try new and experimental things out on the biographies of people who are safely dead.

• Copyright laws prevent cut and pasting content into wikipedia; the solution is to encourage people to rewrite material from a source into an encyclopedic style instead.

• Recentism is a serious flaw in wikipedia (if the Society is 150 years old, each of those decades should be approximately equally represented; coverage of recent political machinations or triumphs should not outweigh entire decades); the solution is to identify sources for pre-digital events and promote their use.

• Systematic bias is an on-going problem in wikipedia, just as it is elsewhere; a solution in this case might be to set goals for coverage of women, Māori and/or non-science academics; another solution might be for the Society to trawl it's records and archives lists of  minorities to publish digitally.

• Everything on wikipedia needs to be based on significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject; the solution is to start with the sources first.

Conflict of interest statement: I’m a high-active editor on wikipedia and am a significant contributor to all many of the wikipedia articles linked to from this post.

Prep notes for NDF2011 demonstration

I didn't really have a presentation for my demonstration at the NDF, but the event team have asked for presentations, so here are the notes for my practice demonstration that I did within the library. The notes served as an advert to attract punters to the demo; as a conversation starter in the actual demo and as a set of bookmarks of the URLs I wanted to open.

---

Depending on what people are interested in, I'll be doing three things

*) Demonstrating basic editing, perhaps by creating a page from the requested articles at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_Zealand/Requested_articles

*) Discussing some of the quality control processes I've been involved with (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_pages_patrol)

*) Discussing how wikipedia handles authority control issues using redirects (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Redirect ) and disambiguation (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:Disambiguation )

I'm also open to suggestions of other things to talk about.

Metadata vocabularies LODLAM NZ cares about

At today's LODLAM NZ, in Wellington, I co-hosted a vocabulary schema / interoperability session. I kicked off the session with a list of the metadata schema we care about and counts of how many people in the room cared about it. Here are the results:

8 Library of Congress / NACO Name Authority List
7 Māori Subject Headings
6 Library of Congress Subject Headings
5 SONZ
5 Linnean
4 Getty Thesauri
3 Marsden Research Subject Codes / ANZRSC Codes
3 SCOT
3 Iwi Hapū List
2 Australian Pictorial Thesaurus
1 Powerhouse Object Names Thesaurus
0 MESH

This straw poll naturally only reflects on the participants who attended this particular session and counting was somewhat haphazard (people were still coming into the room), but is gives a sample of the scope.

I don't recall whether the heading was "Metadata we care about" or "Vocabularies we care about," but it was something very close to that.

Unexpected advice

During the NDF2011 today I was in "Digital initiatives in Māori communities" put on the the talented Honiana Love and Claire Hall from the Te Reo o Taranaki Charitable Trust about their work on He Kete Kōrero. At the end I asked a question "Most of us [the audience] are in institutions with te Reo Māori holdings or cultural objects of some description. What small thing can we do to help enable our collections for the iwi and hapū source communities? Use Māori Subject Headings? The Iwi / Hapū list? Geotagging? ..." Quick-as-a-blink the response was "Geotagging." If I understood the answer (given mainly by Honiana) correctly, the point was that geotagging is much more useful because it's much more likely to be done right in contexts like this. Presumably because geotagging lends itself to checking, validation and visualisations that make errors easy to spot in ways that these other metadata forms don't; it's better understood by those processing the documents and processing the data.

I think it's fabulous that we're getting feedback from indigenous groups using information systems in indigenous contexts, particularly feedback about previous attempts to cater to their needs. If this is the experience of other indigenous groups, it's really important.

Goodbye 'social-media' world

You may or may not have noticed, but recently a number of 'social media' services have begun looking and working very similarly. Facebook is the poster-child, followed by google+ and twitter. Their modus operandi is to entice you to interact with family-members, friends and acquaintances and then leverage your interactions to both sell your attention advertisers and entice other members of you social circle to join the service.

There are, naturally, a number of shiny baubles you get for participating it the sale of your eyeballs to the highest bidder, but recently I have come to the conclusion that my eyeballs (and those of my friends, loved ones and colleagues) are worth more.

I'll be signing off google plus, twitter and facebook shortly. I my return for particular events, particularly those with a critical mass the size of Jupiter, but I shall not be using them regularly. I remain serenely confident that all babies born in my extended circle are cute, I do not need to see their pictures.

I will continue using other social media as before (email, wikipedia, irc, skype, etc) as usual. My deepest apologies to those who joined at least party on my account.

Recreational authority control

Over the last week or two I've been having a bit of a play with Ngā Ūpoko Tukutuku / The Māori Subject Headings (for the uninitiated, think of the widely used Library of Congress Subject Headings, done Post-Colonial and bi-lingually but in the same technology) the main thing I've been doing is trying to munge the MSH into Wikipedia (Wikipedia being my addiction du jour).

My thinking has been to increase the use of MSH by taking it, as it were, to where the people are. I've been working with the English language Wikipedia, since the Māori language Wikipedia has fewer pages and sees much less use.

My first step was to download the MSH in MARC XML format (available from the website) and use XSL to transform it into a wikipedia table (warning: large page). When looking at that table, each row is a subject heading, with the first column being the the te reo Māori term, the second being permutations of the related terms and the third being the scope notes. I started a discussion about my thoughts (warning: large page) and got a clear green light to create redirects (or 'related terms' in librarian speak) for MSH terms which are culturally-specific to Māori culture.

I'm about 50% of the way through the 1300 terms of the MSH and have 115 redirects in the newly created Category:Redirects from Māori language terms. That may sound pretty average, until you remember that institutions are increasingly rolling out tools such as Summon, which use wikipedia redirects for auto-completion, taking these mappings to the heart of most Māori speakers in higher and further education.

I don't have a time-frame for the redirects to appear, but they haven't appeared in Otago's Summon, whereas redirects I created ~ two years ago have; type 'jack yeates' and pause to see it at work.

Thoughts on "Letter about the TEI" from Martin Mueller

Thoughts on "Letter about the TEI" from Martin Mueller

Note: I am a member of the TEI council, but this message is should be read as personal position at the time of writing, not a council position, nor the position of my employer.

Reading Martin's missive was painful. I should have responded earlier, I think perhaps I was hoping someone else could say what I wanted to say and I could just say "me too." They haven't so I've become the someone else.

I don't think that Martin's "fairly radical model" is nearly radical enough. I'd like to propose a significantly more radical model as strawman:

---

1) The TEI shall maintain a document called the 'The TEI Principals.' The purpose of The TEI is to advance The TEI Principals.

2) Institutional membership of The TEI is open to groups which publish, collect and/or curate documents in formats released by The TEI. Institutional membership requires members acknowledge The TEI Principals and permits the members to be listed at http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/ and use The TEI logos and branding.

3) Individual membership of The TEI is open to individuals; individual membership requires members acknowledge The TEI Principals and subscribe to The TEI mailing list at http://listserv.brown.edu/?A0=TEI-L.

4) All business of The TEI is conducted in public. Business which needs be conducted in private (for example employment matters, contract negotiation, etc) shall be considered out of scope for The TEI.

5) Changes to the structure of The TEI will be discussed on the TEI mailing list and put to a democratic vote with a voting period of at least one month, a two-thirds majority of votes cast is required to pass a motion, which shall be in English.

6) Groups of members may form for activities from time-to-time, such as members meetings, summer schools, promotions of The TEI or collective digitisation efforts, but these groups are not The TEI, even if the word 'TEI' appears as part of their name.

---

I'll admit that there are a couple of issues not covered here (such as who holds the IPR), but it's only a straw man for discussion. Feel free to fire it as necessary.