#wikied

I organized several Lingwiki editathons in conjunction with the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation at the University of Hawaii Manoa. We had a total of 37 participants who edited at least 29 articles, including 15 about languages, 5 about topics and organizations, and 9 about people. 

One participant commented, “I am one of about 3 people in the world who knows enough about the grammar of this language to edit its Wikipedia article.”

Thanks to the University of Hawaii Manoa, the organizers of ICLDC and especially Andrea Berez-Kroeker and the student volunteers who assisted with organizing the editathons. 

Here’s a list of articles edited. Feel free to check them out and see what else you can add! 

If you participated in any of the editathons but don’t see your article on here, just put it in bit.ly/lingwikisurvey and I’ll update the list. You can also check out the slides at bit.ly/lingwiki if you want advice on how to edit for linguists, or wikiedu.org if you’re thinking of assigning Wikipedia editing as a class assignment. 

Languages (15)

Yurok_language Igbo_language Anii_language Vurës_language Vera'a language Nivaclé_language Mlabri_language Yasa_language Kala_language Shor_language Awetï_language Gyele_people Kwasio_language Iau_language Sikaritai_language

Topics and organizations (5)

Ka_Haka_‘Ula_O_Ke‘elikōlani,_College_of_Hawaiian_Language Language_nest Tepehua_de_huehuetla  (on Spanish Wikipedia) Kaipuleohone University_of_Hawaii_at_Hilo

People (9)

For the third consecutive year, I organized a lingwiki editathon at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, which this year was in Austin, Texas. We had 23 participants who together created or edited 20 articles (listed below) -- 5 about linguists, 8 about languages, and 7 about other topics in linguistics. 

This year I was very pleased to see again several participants from previous years. Thanks especially to Lauren Collister, Moti Lieberman, and User:Babbage for helping out other participants in addition to their own edits, as well as to Lauren Gawne for supporting people in the #lingwiki hashtag on twitter. Thanks also to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Wiki Education Foundation, and the LSA for their support.

I also gave a talk on a panel about linguistics outreach to high school students, which I co-organized with Moti Lieberman, about stumbling into linguistics online via blogs and Wikipedia, what’s been done so far and how to get involved. There were about 120 people in the audience and the slides for my talk are CC-BY and available at bit.ly/lingwiki-lsa2017.

I’m also pleased to report the beginnings of a collaboration with Wiki Ed and the LSA Committee on the Status for Women in Linguistics (COSWL) and Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL). Wiki Ed has been working with many linguistics classes on editing Wikipedia as a class assignment, but it can be hard to fit biographies of linguists into more topics-oriented classes. However, graduate seminars often want to each students about an academic career trajectory, how to read an academic website/CV, and so on, so editing biographical articles is a natural fit. But since Wiki Ed doesn’t have as much linguistics-specific knowledge, COSWL and CEDL are working on putting together lists of notable linguists who don’t have articles or whose articles need improvement, so that Wiki Ed can direct classes to them. If you’re interested in potentially having a class edit Wikipedia, check out wikiedu.org for ideas. 

Here are the articles edited in this editathon. Feel free to check them out and see what else you can add!

Topics

Alveolo-palatal_fricative Alphabet_soup_(linguistics) Semantic_overload Online_discussion Idealized_cognitive_model FrameNet Anglicism

Languages

Chatino_language File:Chatino-map-wikipedia.svg Chickasaw_language Tz’utujil_language K’iche’_language Xavante_language Wichí_languages Mapuche_language

People

I’m excited to share the news that the Wiki Education Foundation and the Linguistic Society of America have formed a partnership to improve linguistics-related articles on Wikipedia. From the blog post: 

Wikipedia’s coverage of linguistic topics is ripe for improvement. Currently, only 12 of the 4,668 highest-quality articles on the English Wikipedia relate to language or linguistics. Many linguists, theorists and theories simply aren’t represented on Wikipedia. Likewise, most dialects and languages have articles that could be improved by applying linguistic expertise.

Our programs can help LSA members contribute to Wikipedia in two ways: First, by supporting instructors as they assign students to edit Wikipedia. Second, by helping linguistic departments sponsor Visiting Scholars.