Free, Public Talk, Lunch & Wikipedia Edit-a-thon with Dr. Constance Crompton, University of Ottawa
To celebrate Open Access Week, Dr. Constance Crompton (University of Ottawa), 2017-18 Honorary Resident Wikipedian at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) and the University of Victoria Libraries, will give a free, public talk. “Donating and Developing: Contributing to Wikipedia to Make a Better Web” takes place on Monday October 22nd from 11am-12pm in the Digital Scholarship Commons, Mearns Centre for Learning, McPherson Library. Following the talk, participants are invited to learn how to edit the global, online encyclopedia Wikipedia in order to put their personal knowledge to work online.
Many still wonder whether Wikipedia is a legitimate source for finding information. Can a free, “amateur” encyclopedia be trusted? We think so. Wikipedia attracts 70,000 active contributors who work on 41,000,000 articles in 294 languages. Dr. Crompton speaks on the relationship between Wikipedia and academia and how it can be harnessed by academics to provide a well-researched, free resource to the public.
This event is free of charge and open to UVic students, staff, faculty, librarians, administrators, and the general public. Edit-a-thon participants are kindly asked to bring a laptop (laptops may be borrowed from Music & Media in the library) and to register via https://wiki2018.eventbrite.com.
Participants are welcome to bring their own material to contribute to Wikipedia, or else to draw resources from the UVic Libraries. Please let us know if there is a specific subject matter or artifact from Special Collections and University Archives that you would like to work with so that the archivists may have it on hand for you on the day of. We will also have some material from Special Collections on hand should you choose to work with it.
Abstract
“Donating and Developing: Contributing to Wikipedia to Make a Better Web”
Have you ever wished you could sit down with a computer to tell it how the world really works? The Wikimedia Foundation projects give you a way to do it. Whether you fix a typo in Wikipedia, help students and friends publish through Wikibooks, or add a few facts to Wikidata, you are giving computers the power of what you know to be important about history, culture, art, and literature. Tell it like it is — join us for the “Donating and Developing: Contributing to Wikipedia to Make a Better Web” lecture and edit-a-thon.
Schedule
- 11am-12pm, Dr. Constance Crompton talk, “Donating and Developing: Contributing to Wikipedia to Make a Better Web”; Introduction by Dr. Ray Siemens
- 12pm-1pm, Lunch provided
- 1pm-3.30pm, Wikipedia overview by Matt Huculak and Michael Radmacher, and edit-a-thon
Bio
Dr. Constance Crompton is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Humanities in the Department of Communication at the University of Ottawa. She is also co-director, with Michelle Schwartz, of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada project, and a researcher with the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership. Dr. Crompton serves as the Vice-President English of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques, Associate Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and Research Collaborator with The Yellow Nineties Online, housed at Ryerson University’s Centre for Digital Humanities. Dr. Crompton received a PhD in Communication and Culture from York University. Her research interests include digital humanities, queer history, Victorian visual and popular culture, prosopography, and code as a representative medium, and her work on these topics and others has appeared in a number of edited collections as well as the Victorian Review, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, UBC Law Review, and Digital Studies/Le champ numérique.
Schedule – all events to take place in Digital Scholarship Commons
The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL) and UVic Libraries are pleased to host Dr. Crompton as their 2017-18 Honorary Resident Wikipedian, a role that was previously held by Dr. Christian Vandendorpe from 2014–2016. This initiative is co-sponsored by the ETCL, UVic Libraries, Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). Please direct any inquiries to the ETCL via Alyssa Arbuckle (<alyssaa@uvic.ca>), and / or to the UVic Libraries via Matt Huculak (<huculak@uvic.ca>).
Registration