SpotOn London 2013 Wikipedia editing workshop

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This event took place in November 2013.

SpotOn London 2013 Wikipedia editing workshop - In a nutshell

Where?: British Library, London
When?: 9 November 2013 - 2:30pm
Duration: 1 hour
Point of contact: toni.santwikimedia.org.uk

What is it?

Twitter hashtag flyer

Wikipedia provides an ideal tool for making information about science more readily accessible to a wide community, ranging from school children, the general public with an interest in science and policy makers as well as other scientists.

This workshop provided an opportunity for SpotOn London 2013 delegates who may be new to Wikipedia to create a Wikipedia profile and update existing Wikipedia articles. The SpotOn London 2013 conference was held on 8 and 9 November.

You can see the slides used during the presentation here and the recording of the full session here.

The session started with the list of reasons why researchers may wish to make use of Wikipedia; as Cameron Neylon had said if you’re serious about ensuring public engagement in your research then you need to make damn sure your work can be incorporated into Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the most important engagement channel for your research.

After this, and the introductions for the facilitators and hearing about the level of Wikipedia expertise of the participants we then provided details of the task to be attempted during the session:

Create a Wikipedia account
Create a user profile & add personal details (e.g. name, organisation, interests, …)
Add hyperlinks to (a) external Web sites (e.g. your organisation) and (b) Wikipedia articles (e.g. areas of interest)
Add simple formatting

After everyone created a profile, we concluded with discussions on strategies for creating new articles, the fundamental Wikipedia principles and details of other Wikimedia projects beyond the Wikipedia service.

Trainers

Brian Kelly - lead
Toni Sant :: WP talk page - simplified help!

Attendees

23 SpotOn conference delegates (10 female and 13 male) attended this session. We were also able to observe that there were 14 postgraduate students, while the rest were academics, researchers, or other non-students.

A number of attendees created new Wikipedia user accounts during the workshop. The following were captured: