I’ve been enjoying various crowdsourcing projects for many years, most noticeably Flickr Commons until Flickr’s user interface became unwieldy for my purposes, about a year ago. I still use Commons images for collage projects sometimes, but only from my “Flickr Favorites” board at Pinterest. (Can you still use Flickr? Good for you. I can’t. Yes, I know changes are afoot. Changes are always afoot at Flickr; that’s not always something I like in a website.)
So I needed a new crowdsourcing home, and Wikipedia was the obvious next choice. I’d already started to do little tasks there, and I was already comfortable writing Encyclopedia-ese from two print encyclopedia projects I worked on. Now, a year on, I do still miss my Friday mornings with the Bain Collection, but I have a new playground, and so far I’ve liked that a lot too.
As of this morning, I’ve created 27 new entries on Wikipedia (26 on my own, one to help a friend whose work was stuck in an editorial queue). Mostly women, but there are two men (both of them involved with oceans, though that’s a coincidence); a lot of people involved in museum work, which I don’t do, but I guess I gravitate towards those who do. Some of these names I knew before starting their entries, but some were new to me on that day. I like edit-athons, and I like picking names from a list and seeing where they take me. Not surprisingly, I prefer writing about dead people, because their obituaries and tombstones are fair game, and their images are more likely to be available for use. Six of my posts have been linked on the front page of Wikipedia as “Did You Know” (DYK) facts so far–not for more than a few hours, but it’s still a hoot, and the process of getting there is an impressive part of the backstage rigging of the site.
And yeah, six of them involved Flickr Commons images I wanted to know more about. So it’s maybe not such a big shift after all.
Here are my 27 entries as of June 23, 2014:
(*=written as part of an editathon)
- Gertrude Van Wagenen (DYK 19 March 2013)*
- Nelle Richmond Eberhart (DYK 30 July 2013)
- Edith R. Wyle (DYK 4 March 2014)
- Pauline Gracia Beery Mack (DYK 22 March 2014)*
- Chizuko Judy Sugita de Queiroz (DYK 13 May 2014)*
- Henrietta Rodman (DYK 27 May 2014)*
- Grace Nicholson*
- Zarh Pritchard*
- Lydia Fowler Wadleigh*
- 40 Families Project*
- John Francis Ropek
- Fanny McIan*
- Mary Rose Hill Burton*
- Sandra Welner
- Zelma Wilson*
- Caroline Gardner Bartlett
- Jessica Duncan Piazzi Smyth*
- Maud Younger
- Tsianina Redfeather Blackstone
- Eveline Winifred Syme*
- Ethel Spowers*
- Lill Tschudi*
- Antoinette Rodez Schiesler*
- Nellie May Naylor*
- Shirley Kaneda
- Gretchen Sibley
- Adrienne Asch (with Beth Haller)
Pennamite 