User:Kerry Raymond

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The Working Woman's Barnstar
Quietly and constantly revising pages of Australian and Queensland content, enhancing Wiki quality Q8682 (talk) 10:45, 29 February 2020 (UTC)
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About me

I come from a long-time Queensland family and my interests (as reflected in my contributions) are primarily about Queensland history (including biography) and geography.

And this is my 300,000th edit on Wikipedia.

Having said that, I have been involved in a project to machine-generate articles for sites on the New South Wales State Heritage Register taking advantage of the CC-BY licensing of the New South Wales Heritage Database. This project is in collaboration with Rangasyd and The Drover's Wife who are rolling out the articles with copy-editing (machine generation is rarely perfect) and other additions. This leverages similar machine-generation of articles that I did for the Queensland Heritage Register (also CC-BY licensed), see below for more on that project.

Another project is the machine-generation of articles based on content in the CC-BY licensed Australian Heritage Database, which contains entiries from the Australian National Heritage List, Australian Commonwealth Heritage List and the Register of the National Estate. Although the Register of the National Estate is now not a statuory register, many of its sites are now listed on state heritage registers (some of which are not CC-licensed). So reusing RNE content (which is CC-BY licensed) creates the opportunity to write articles about sites on the non-CC-BY licensed state heritage register, which will be one of my next projects.

I have completed my roll-out of stubs for the towns/suburbs/localities in Queensland which did not have an article. That involves some machine-generation too. I am now working to bring all articles about Queensland towns/suburbs/localities to a consistent minimum standard of information usually available about most places e.g. census, postcodes, schools, etc.

Finally, three big cheers for the State Library of Queensland, Queensland State Archives, Queensland Government and the increasing number of other state and federal governments across for increasing embracing CC-BY licensing on their web sites and archives. And three big cheers for Trove for making it so easy to find Australian library resources of all kinds, for digitising all those millions of historic newspaper articles, and for providing us with copy-and-paste Wikipedia citations to every single thing; Australian libraries are world leaders!

Outreach

Visual Editor training, Australian National University, 2019

As a member of Wikimedia Australia, I do face-to-face outreach work here in South-East Queensland (or more widely using Zoom) to provide one or more of:

  • A general talk about Wikipedia aimed at readers, including statistics about Wikipedia, how trustworthy is, some behind-the-scenes policies and processes, and how to get more out of Wikipedia as a reader
  • Introduction to contributing to Wikipedia using the Visual Editor, including user pages, character and paragraph formatting, adding wikilinks and citations
  • Beyond Basics editing, including adding photos, using templates and creating new articles

I will also advise on organising events like edit-a-thons and, where possible, attend the event on the day to support it as required.

I provide all these services as a volunteer (free of charge) because I believe in free knowledge.

If you are interested in any of the above, please contact me at [email protected]

Status update on the New South Wales State Heritage Register project

Needs updating!

Participants

Statistics for en.Wikipedia (as at 23 March 2019)

  • Number of sites listed on the New South Wales State Heritage Project when we started: 1,695
  • Number of existing articles about those topics on English Wikipedia when we started: 383
  • Number of articles in Category:New South Wales State Heritage Register (and sub-cats where appropriate): 1,642

All statistics are approximate.

Next phase: upload suitably licensed images from the New South Wales State Heritage Database to Wikimedia Commons: estimated 6,000 photos, hopefully including some for the approx 600 articles currently without photos. Includes creation of the Commons categories as needed, adding to the articles.

Subsequent phase: add {{photo requested}} tags to all the articles still without photos

Status update on the QHR project

Needs updating!

Statistics for en.Wikipedia

Statistics for Photos

While most of the QHR text goes into creating/expanding QHR articles, some of it has also been used to create/expand articles on architects and history sections of related topics, that's why the numbers of such articles will eventually exceed the number of QHR articles. My initial focus was on creating new articles rather than expanding the existing ones to achieve maximum coverage of topics, but now the new articles are done, I am now more focussed on expanding existing articles.

Unless I have somehow overlooked any, every site listed on the Queensland Heritage Register as at mid 2014 should now have an article of some kind on Wikipedia (either created from the CC-BY text of the QHR or one that already existed on Wikipedia). What is going to happen next:

  1. The 200-ish pre-existing articles need to be inspected to see if there is scope to expand them using QHR text, add infoboxes, etc. If you've done any article merging, you will know merging is a lot of work as often the two articles have a different structure and style. (I have paused on working on this now, but will get back to it)
  2. Look for photos for many articles (I am working on this now, particularly architectural plans from the Queensland State Archives)
  3. Find what articles have been added to the QHR since I grew up my workplan and create articles for these. A quick look suggests there are about 40 new QHR listings (mostly schools). Obviously this is an ongoing maintenance task as the years go by (currently there are about 15-20 new QHR listings a year).
  4. Exploit the QHR information for other purposes. Many heritage listings contain biographies and local histories of people and places associated with the heritage site. There is a lot of opportunity to re-use such content to create/expand other articles on Wikipedia.
  5. Try to track down the sites that were on the QHR but have since been removed. Many of them are probably still notable.

Summary: still plenty that can be done, but the worst of it is behind me! Huzzah!

Assorted To-Do lists

If you are reading this and would like to help, either jump right in and get started, or contact me if you need some help to get started.

  • Add the various silo art, water tower art, etc to the articles for the relevant town/locality. Source:

Having a random image

Random page in category/Female artists from Australia?server=commons.wikimedia.org&type=file

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

Main page: First World War Wikipedian in Residence Project Page

From start of February to mid April 2016, I was a Wikipedian in Residence at the State Library of Queensland for 1 day per week. This was paid employment and the subject matter was Queensland in World War I as part of the State Library's commemoration of the centenary of World War I. My role was to:

  1. advise and assist staff and volunteers at the State Library of Queensland and their affiliated GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and heritage organisations to contribute content to Wikipedia relating to Queensland in WW1 drawing on the material in their collections as sources
  2. personally contribute content to Wikipedia in relation to Queensland in WW1 drawing on those same collections as sources

The role was designed to align with the Wikimedia Foundation's strategic plan to "improve quality ... via partnerships with universities, cultural institutions and other groups who align with our mission".

The State Library of Queensland understood the concerns about paid editing and conflict of interest on Wikipedia. I was not expected to edit content relating to the State Library of Queensland or any topic that I believed would constitute a conflict of interest. The State Library of Queensland has a long history of being a supporter of Wikipedia, having contributed tens of thousands of out-of-copyright images to Wikimedia Commons and collaborated with Wikimedia Australia on providing Wikipedia edit training throughout Queensland. I was the first Wikipedian in Residence at the State Library of Queensland with others to follow later in 2016.

Note, outside of my role with the State Library of Queensland, I continued to edit as a volunteer, pursuing my usual interests at that time of the Queensland Heritage Register and the history, geography and biography of Queensland.

Roles

I am a Fellow of The Women's College at the University of Queensland, where I was a Council member from 2002 to 2019.

I was a Council member or the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland.

I was a Management Commitee Member of the Queensland Family History Society.

I was a Management Committee Member of Wikimedia Australia.

I was a member of the steering committee of the Wikimedia and Libraries User Group (2018-2019).

Memberships

I am a member of:

  • Wikimedia Australia (and a liaison to the State Library of Queensland)
  • Royal Geographical Society of Queensland
  • Brisbane History Group
  • Queensland Family History Society
  • Genealogical Society of Queensland
  • National Seniors Australia

Second account

I have a second account User:WMAU KR for outreach work in order to have a "vanilla account" to use in creating screenshots and live demonstrations intended new users so they will see behaviour similar to their own account unaffected by my preference choices in my regular account. This is permitted by WP:VALIDALT.

My thoughts about quality in Wikipedia

In terms of the Wikipedia debate on deletionism and inclusionism, I'm probably more inclined to inclusionism. I feel that if someone takes the trouble to contribute material to Wikipedia in good faith (including that they have no conflict of interest in relation to the topic), then they would not do that unless they thought others might find it useful. If we want Wikipedia to be "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" (as it says on the Wikipedia main page), we must understand that "anyone" encompasses a massive range of abilities when it comes to writing. And for new/occasional contributors, it isn't realistic to assume that they know the Manual of Style inside-and-out. Yes, overall we want to strive towards quality, but we cannot always expect to start with quality. I think deleting good faith contributions on the grounds of quality will only offend the contributor and makes them less likely to contribute in future.

Having said all that, if a lot of work has gone into creating an article (whether it be for reasons of quality or controversy), a new editor bumbling about with good-faith low-quality edits can unintentionally do a lot of damage or re-ignite a lot of old arguments. I think there is a legitimate argument for switching to a different mode of editing for such articles for new editors to that article. For example, the Edit button could lead to a screen that explained why the article could no longer be edited in the normal way and then invite the new editor to simply indicate the changes they wanted, but which would be implemented by an editor experienced with that particular article (a curator role). The curator could then negotiate/explain to the new editor if their proposed edits weren't appropriate (based on the long history of the article's development) or re-write the proposed changes to better reflect the agreements previously reached in the article's development. That is, apply a higher bar to contributions to high quality articles and a lower bar to lower quality articles.

Favourite text and citations

Favourite external links

Local heritage registers

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References

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