Wikipedia:Meetup/Adelaide/Meetup 11

Adelaide Meetup Next: TBA Last: 6 March 2020

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Meetup 11 - Wednesday 23 July 2014

Time: 7pm

Location: 27 North Terrace, Adelaide. (UniSA building located in the red SM building next door to the Riviera Hotel, on the corner of Gray St. Signs will be on the front door. Enter via the side door 10-15m down Gray St - Knock loudly).

Guest speaker: Dr Darren Peacock, Executive Officer, National Trust of South Australia

Topic: Improving WP articles and lists re South Australian heritage issues, especially built heritage

N.B.: Dr Peacock will be arriving at 6:30pm to set up PowerPoint display.

List of current members of the Adelaide Wikipedia Users Group

Please add your username if you are interested in joining in group activities:

• Adrian J. Hunter^{(talk•contribs)}
• Alex Sims (talk)
• Bahudhara (talk)
• Bilby (talk)
• Cowdy001 (talk)
• Doug butler (talk)
• Danimations (talk)
• Pdfpdf (talk)
• Touring123 (talk)
• Tullyis (talk)

Pre-meetup discussion

Dr Peacock has previously worked for History SA. He has a lot of experience with IT, and is currently developing an app for the Adelaide City Council to enable mobile users to discover heritage locations and view information on those sites.

He is very interested in the progress we are making in developing an active WP community in Adelaide, and will also try to come to our June Meetup.

I spoke with Dr Peacock on 9 July about the responses on WP to the creation of the List of Nationally Significant 20th-Century Architecture in South Australia at our edit-a-thon on July 6. He said that he will bring this to the attention of Steve Grieve (SA Chapter President of the Australian Institute of Architects) and Dr Christine Garnaut (Director of the UniSA Architecture Museum), and ask if they are able to attend the Meetup as well. Bahudhara (talk) 02:33, 10 July 2014 (UTC)

Resources

• 120 nationally significant 20th century buildings in SA I'm working my way through this list, and taking photos that I'll upload to Commons soon.
• Gunton, Eric (1983): Gracious Homes of Colonial Adelaide - I'm working through this as well. Bahudhara (talk) 03:51, 19 June 2014 (UTC)

List of articles which may be in need of improvement

• List of historic houses in South Australia
• List of Nationally Significant 20th-Century Architecture in South Australia

Summary of Meetup 11

Attendees

Alex Sims, Bahudhara, Bilby, Doug Butler, Tullyis, + guest speaker Dr Darren Peacock, Executive Officer, National Trust of South Australia

Attendance was low, perhaps because of the heavy rain that evening. It has also been suggested that an off-wiki email contact list be set up, to remind the perhaps more absent-minded members of the group, that a meeting is about to be held.

Reports and comments

Dr Darren Peacock has previously worked in the museums sector; he attended the 2009 GLAM-Wiki conference in Canberra, and a follow-up 1-day workshop in Denver in 2010.

He spoke to us about the use of Semantic MediaWikis as a social technology tool for developing crowd-sourced local history projects.

He discussed three main projects with which he is involved:

• Now and Then -- beginning with Now and Then Mallala which spawned Now and Then Gawler and Now and Then Willunga.
• Adelaide City Explorer, a collaboration between the National Trust of South Australia and the Adelaide City Council to develop a blog-style site to house information about the historical sites of Adelaide city and North Adelaide.
• Adelaidepedia, which is due to go live very shortly.

The Now and Then projects began 5 years ago as a pilot project funded by the Collections Council of Australia, to see if the knowledge and resources of local history museums, in this case located in Mallala, could be made accessible online using community resources and local history experts. The project integrates Flickr and YouTube, and Darren reports that the community really took to Flickr, digitising hundreds of local documents, largely because the format is so instantly rewarding. The Gawler instantiation draws upon a much larger local population and a robust local history group where monthly meetings with guest speakers regularly draw crowds of 60-80 people. The Willunga version, too, draws upon a strong local community with a robust identity. Taking advantage of the area's recent installation of the National Broadband Network, it will add a mobile version and QR codes to the technologies used, in a similar way to Freopedia. The project uses semantic forms to ensure the data is entered in a very structured way, and this is frequently appreciated by the often older volunteers who don't usually have a great deal of experience, even in basic use of a computer. The semantic structure also allows the information in the database to be queried for complex data-matching, filtering and retrieval.

The Adelaide City Explorer website has an integrated mobile device app and has a strong advocacy as well as tourism agenda. It covers Adelaide city plus North Adelaide. The site arranges its data into trails (of which there are currently 8).

Adelaidepedia, soon to be launched, uses a semantic wiki for sharing Adelaide's heritage, and will have three main components. Unlike Wikipedia, which anyone can edit, individual experts such as recently retired engineers and architects will be invited to join a "community of authors", to write articles about Adelaide's 420 state heritage listed sites (out of around 3,500 places in total, including those on local heritage registers, and those places which have been nominated but not yet assessed for listing). There will be a blog component attached to these articles, to which people can add their personal experiences, to help the public to "understand why a particular building is important, and to develop some sort of feeling for it". There will also be a mobile component, allowing users to create themed self-guided walks.

Darren also brought to our attention the National Trust of South Australia's Innovention site, which our members will appreciate.

Following the presentation, discussion continued about how collaboration could occur between these projects and Wikipedia.

Darren conceded that the Now and Then projects with their "relaxed credentials of knowledge" probably wouldn't meet Wikipedia's criteria for being regarded as reliable sources, whereas the Adelaidepedia articles would be appropriately referenced. (He noted that the Willunga Now and Then project does have an off-line editing process, and that this collaboration may be due to local cultural factors.)

Moving forward with this information might include:

• gaining access to the list of sites that on the state heritage list (Darren can provide the list; the National Trust has a lot of information on these sites, which has not all been been digitised yet)
• developing structured tasks with user-friendly data forms and a narrow idea
• aiming for instant gratification for volunteers, feedback and rewards such as through Flickr (Trove does this also)
• inviting recently retired professionals.
• there is scope for the National Trust to develop a list of significant 20th century architecture, as the vast majority of these places have not yet been put onto the state and local heritage registers.