How to join in with our distributed Wiki edit day

You may have seen our post last month about our remote Wiki Editing Day, this coming Saturday 12th May. We’re hoping to get a bunch of people in different locations editing pages on Wikiquote and other Wikimedia sites, to improve the visibility of female mathematicians. Here’s how you can get involved.

On the day, we’ll be editing from 10am-3pm BST (although we don’t expect everyone to edit for the whole day, or even to stay within these times – we just want to give people a nudge/opportunity/excuse to get involved). You’ll need to be somewhere with a computer and internet connection.

If you’re near to one of our real-world meets, you could join in there – Katie will be editing in Manchester at Google Digital Garage, where she’s reserved a room, and Nicholas Jackson is happy to join people in Coventry. Check the shared Google Doc for details of how to contact them, and to add your own real-world locations if you like.

Things to do ahead of time

To edit pages on Wikimedia, you don’t technically need an account – edits can be made using the IP of your computer as an identifier – but it’s better to have an account, so you can keep track of your edits, respond to questions, and not have your edits confused with those of others who happen to be on the same wifi network (and like to put rude words into things and get your IP blocked/banned). You can sign up for an account here.

It may also be worth doing some research to find suitable quotes, or lists of people that might be a good source of quotes – although it’s probably fine to leave this until the day, as we’ll hopefully have time to do this then. We’ve made a start in the shared Google Doc.

Things to do on the day

Our main plan is to fix up the Wikiquote Mathematics page – to that end, we’ve started collecting quotes in the shared Google Doc. Each will need to be separately verified from a second source, by someone other than the person who suggested them, and then can be added to the Wikiquote page. You can also find more examples of quotes to add to the doc, and make sure you’re clear about who’s going to do which bit by putting your name next to the task in the shared doc (and then making sure you do it!)

Editing Wiki pages involves knowing a little bit of markup – most of the knowledge you’ll need can be gleaned by looking at the existing entries on the page, and if you make any mistakes someone can always fix them (it is a Wiki, after all, so someone probably will anyway before too long). If you’d like more in-depth info, there’s a great how-to guide on Wikiquote, with a list of markup.

Once we’ve pimped out the Wikiquote Mathematics page, there are other pages within Wikiquote, and elsewhere on Wikipedia, that can also be worked on while we’re at it. We’ll use the shared Google Doc to suggest things for people to work on, and it’s totally up to you what you get involved with. We’ll also aim to run a video Hangout, for which we’ll post the link in the shared Google Doc, so that people can chat to each other (if they’re not somewhere that would inconvenience anyone).

We hope you can join us to help improve Wikipedia for female mathematicians, and that you can learn a little about editing Wikipedia while you’re at it – it would be great if you can carry on doing this work in your own time afterwards too.

If you have any questions about the event, or what to do, check the shared Google Doc, or email katie@aperiodical.com and we can try to help!