Wikipedia:Meetup/San Francisco/Prelinger Library Wiki-a-thon with Bay Area Wiki Salon

BAWS Wiki-a-thon @ Prelinger Library No.2

When and Where
Date + Time	Sunday August 25, 2019, 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Address	Prelinger Library 301 8th Street
City, State	San Francisco, CA 94103
Directions	Google Map view
Entry info	At the street entrance to 301 8th street use the intercom to reach “Prelinger” by scrolling left/right through the arrow keys, then press the CALL button to be buzzed up
Organizer	Bay Area Wiki Salon
Hashtag	#prelingerwiki -- Please include this hashtag in your edit summary so we can track outcomes with the Wikimedia hashtag tool!

Join us for another wiki-a-thon hosted by the Prelinger Library and the Bay Area Wiki Salon! Building on the good vibes of the first Prelinger Library-BAWS Wiki-a-thon that was held in February of this year, we will continue working together to create and improve Wikipedia articles and enrich other Wikimedia projects using the unique, largely image-rich and public domain, holdings of the Prelinger Library, a collection 19th and 20th century historical ephemera, periodicals, maps, and books not commonly found in other public libraries.

Event information

• Date: Sunday, August 25, 2019
• Time: 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
• Location: Prelinger Library, 301 8th Street, San Francisco
• Registration: This event is open to all! But please do register below so that we know how much food to order
• Host: This event is hosted by the Prelinger Library and organized by the Bay Area Wiki Salon.
  • There will be delicious food + refreshments to share and enjoy!
• Please bring a laptop and power cord with you!

What to expect

A book from the Utopia section of the Library

This will be a relaxed afternoon of exploring and working together freely with no set agenda except a mid-point discussion break and wrap-up discussion at the end where we discuss what we are working on, discoveries, contemplations, and questions. There will be experienced Wikipedians present to help Wiki newcomers to get started and answer questions. We will also have printed editing reference materials (in addition to the editing reference materials listed below, and those found in the minds of fellow attendees).

We will also have a tasty Mediterranean lunch, so please come with both hungry minds and stomachs.

Bring your laptop, power cord, curiosity, and ideas for entries that need updating or creation. Stop by for a short while or stay for the whole afternoon. No Wikipedia editing experience necessary!

If you are unfamiliar with Wikipedia, check out this training module which helps explain many dimensions of the Wikipedia universe.

Accessibility

The Library room is wheelchair accessible at the floor level (thanks to the ADA elevator in the front of the building). However the shelves are 13’ so the upper shelves are not wheelchair accessible. For wheelchair access of the upper shelves, wheelchair users may visually browse the upper shelves through the Stacks Explorer, a tool with which anyone can view any shelf in the library from a laptop. The Library hosts will be on duty throughout the event to pull materials from the upper shelves requested by differently abled researchers.

The Prelinger Library's holdings

Shelf of collected issues of the magazine Datamation at the Library

The library holds approximately 30,000 bound objects, 60,000 loose sheets and 10,000 zines. Read more about the "library’s unique geospatial taxonomy" here, explore the lists and virtual shelves below, or visit in advance of the event (see open hours below).

• Detailed Descriptions of Main Shelves
• Stacks Explorer
• Online Book Catalog
• Full List of Periodicals

Want to visit the library before the event?

Conference proceedings from the Space section of the Library

If you want to peruse the collection and start contemplating what you will work on beforehand, please come visit during the following open hours between now and the event:

• Wednesday 8/14: 1–8 PM
• Wednesday 8/21: 1–8 PM
• Thursday 8/22: 1–7 PM
• Friday 8/23: 1–7 PM
• Saturday 8/24: 12–5 PM

RSVP

If you are planning to come, please register below! If you do not have a Wikipedia account, please write your name or alias; if you have a Wikipedia account, you can sign your user name by typing four tildes (~~~~). We look forward to seeing/working with you!

• Mewestin (talk) 04:32, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
• Dreamyshade (talk) 03:40, 8 August 2019 (UTC)
• Rickprelinger (talk) 01:48, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
• Al83tito (talk) 22:00, 15 August 2019 (UTC)
• Nikikana (talk) 20:18, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
• Binksternet (talk) 20:28, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
• Dicklyon (talk) 21:33, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
• Dannyobrien (talk) 23:20, 19 August 2019 (UTC)
• --Lizzard (talk) 00:21, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
• M.S.Prelinger (talk) 22:38, 21 August 2019 (UTC)]
• MahmoudHashemi (talk) 19:23, 24 August 2019 (UTC)
• (I may be there around 1:00!) Stephen (talk) 04:20, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
• Cmdrjameson (talk) 16:45, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
• Writejustified (talk) 18:11, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
• Chefmikesf (talk) 18:23, 25 August 2019 (UTC)
• Termothy (talk) 21:12, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Lists of articles/projects to work on

Feel free, of course, to come with no plan and work on whatever inspires you in this library of serendipity! Meanwhile, for those who like to plan and congregate on tasks, below is space to list articles or other Wikimedia projects or categories that would benefit from edits and expansion during the event, supported or inspired by the unique holdings of the library.

Enrich

List of Wikimedia project areas that could be enriched through material in the library and/or projects to work on related to material in the library:

• Ephemera in Wikimedia Commons
• Wikimedia Atlas of the world – contribute something from the library's vast map collection to this "collection of geographical, political and historical maps available at Wikimedia Commons"
• WikiProject Spaceflight
• WikiProject Birds
• Assist with the merge of Portal:Human_spaceflight and Portal:Spaceflight that has been ongoing since the 2010 merge decision
• Category:Typography stubs

Improve

List of articles to improve:

• Media (communication) – needs major clean up and expansion, has no images
• Nature – already a good article, expand it to featured article quality
• Influence of mass media – expand, add images, make more accessible, current?
• Content (media) – expand, add images
• Ebony (magazine) – expand, add images _{(the library holds a long run of this magazine)}
• Utopia – expand, refine
• Intergalactic travel – expand, fix original research issue (verify claims, add citations)
• Interstellar communication – expand
• Bell Labs – add citations to discoveries and developments section
• Datamation – expand, add images _{(the library has a long run of this magazine)}
• Space colonization – fix original research issue (verify claims, add citations)
• Peace – work on NPOV
• Internalized oppression – propose a better restructure, expand, cite more examples.
• Commune – expand, add citations and history, work of NPOV
• Water in California – improve factual accuracy in Groundwater and Predicted need for increased water supplies sections; verify and add citations to Uses of Water
• Doomsday Clock – expand, add images
• Franck Report – expand
• United States Life-Saving Service – expand _{(the library holds copies of the annual reports of this predecessor of the US Coast Guard)}
• Tennessee Valley Authority – add citations, verify
• Typography – verify, add citations
• Space advocacy – diversify examples to present more global view, add citations
• Space law – propose reorganization, expand Ethics section

Create

List of articles to create:

Continue working on

Below is a list of articles that were improved at the last Prelinger Wiki-a-thon in February. Help to pick up where we left off, or boldly take the articles to new places!

• Calvin Company – copyedits and improving neutral point of view
• Educational film – fixed likely vandalism
• Enactivism – added further reading
• Jam Handy – added link to related material
• Kaliflower Commune – expanded and cited influence
• Machine learning – added quote about bias
• Media (communication) – revised history section with citations
• Robert C. Binkley – added link
• Serendipity – expanded examples
• Sid Davis – removed off-topic material
• Space medicine – section reorg; begin Project Mercury section
• Tennessee Valley Authority – fix citations
• Wilding Picture Productions – copyedits
• Yun Gee – expanded information about the Chinese Revolutionary Artists' Club
• Chinatown, San Francisco – expanded early history

Outcomes

Here we will list the outcomes of the event.

View all #prelingerwiki hashtagged edits here.

Rickprelinger

• Jam Handy – improved introduction, added citations, more to come!

Cmdrjameson

• K1839 – referencing and citations improved from previous draft translated from the Russian Wikipedia.
• Draft:Norman Jouppi – New draft article translated from the German Wikipedia.
• Draft:Rosamund Grosvenor – New draft article translated from the Dutch Wikipedia.

Dannyobrien

• Datamation Byte (magazine) Byte Information Exchange – extra citations and details

With Geeklizzard,

• Hexadecimal – After rediscovering a 1968 Datamation article, we spawned a whole new section on proposed ways to pronounce numbers like 1A and FF
• Made a viral tweet which was also apparently on the front page of Hacker News for a bit!

Geeklizzard

• Wrote a stub page for speculative fiction author Craig Laurance Gidney including getting some folks to upload photos of him to Wikimedia Commons
• Wrote a stub page for San Francisco Bay Area women's group from the 1980s/1990s, The Outcasts (organization)
• Went through some boxes of zines!
• Answered hundreds of people interested in the hexadecimal pronunciation system (from my tweet about it which went hella viral!)

Dicklyon

Chased down some info and maps on local creeks. Scanned, edited, uploaded, and linked some public domain photos on:

• San Fernando Valley – a 1912 topographic sketch comparing water resources to those of the Livermore Valley
• Crystal Springs Dam – a 1912 photo of the dam overflowing into San Mateo Creek in the wet winter of 1911
• Fairchild Camera and Instrument – a 1921 aerial photo of Columbia University on the cover of Aerial Age magazine

And on the way to and from, stopped by various spots on Hale Creek, Adobe Creek (Santa Clara County, California), Purisima Creek (Santa Clara County), Mills Creek (San Mateo County), Easton Creek, and San Mateo Creek (San Francisco Bay Area) to take more photos; see photos on all of those or at User:Dicklyon#Creeks, rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.

Binksternet

I found a collection of African American scholarly journal articles, a few of which I used to:

• expand the lead section of Honky,
• suggest a line of future expansion at Talk:Black genocide,
• and add one paragraph under a new section header at Racism in the United States.

In the same vein, I updated the Black genocide article with recent events, one of which was suggested by meetup host Megan Prelinger. I also assisted meetup participant Termothy in his trimming of off-topic material in the MIDI article, and I sent a welcome note to start Termothy's new user talk page.

Al83tito

• Work on the final stages of addressing review points of the Good Article nomination of the article Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
  • Thanks to the responsiveness of the reviewer, the article achieved Good Article status just as the Prelinger Library meetup was wrapping up.
• Some small, almost gnome-type, edits on computer game Grim Fandango in wikiquote, and on composer Peter McConnell.
• Made some incremental progress in the drafting of an article about the soundtrack of a computer game (Music of Grim Fandango).

Resources for editing

• Beginners' Guide to Wikipedia (account creation, article editing)
• Five Pillars of Wikipedia (philosophical guidelines and best practices for Wikipedia editing)
• Tutorial
• How to Edit a Page

Citations and style guidelines

• Manual of Style
• Citation templates
• Citation guide

Formatting shortcuts

• Editing brochure
• Cheatsheet for editing Wikipedia Commonly-used Wiki markup language, including how to sign your username and add links
• PDF cheatsheet for editing Wikipedia (PDF version of printed handout of commonly-used Wiki markup language)
• Full list of Wiki markup All of the Wiki markup language
• Text formatting
• Section headers, indents, and lists
• Links

Images and photos

• Uploading images – tutorial, general overview
• Image use policy – rights, licenses, is it okay to use the image
• Picture Tutorial – technical details of getting image uploaded and displaying in a way that looks good
• Free image resources – where to find free images for use in Wikipedia (in addition to holdings of the library that you could photograph and upload to Wikimedia Commons)

External links

• Prelinger Library