Annual report (2010–2011)

Program activities

National Archives

WikiXDC

On Saturday, January 22, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) hosted Wikipedians in Washington, D.C. for WikiXDC, to celebrate Wikipedia's 10th birthday. Approximately 80-90 people attended, including NARA staff, numerous experienced Wikipedians, as well as new editors and Wikipedia readers and fans.

The morning included a welcome by US Archivist David Ferriero, presentations by NARA staff talking about records management and various other aspects of what they do, and a behind-the-scenes tour. During the welcome, James Hare brought up the idea of the Wikimedia DC group bidding for Wikimania 2012, with warm reception to the idea including from Ferriero. NARA's Beth Cron gave an overview of their records management process, and as a case study, Martha Murphy discussed NARA's collections on the w:John F. Kennedy assassination and examined the Wikipedia article on the topic. Kitty Nicholson gave a talk on record conservation. Jill Reilly James discussed work on improving the search functionality for finding records, and demonstrated a new search prototype. She also talked about digitization efforts. Currently, there are approximately 153,000 items digitized and available online, out of millions of cubic square feet worth of boxes. They are interested in increasing the priority of digitization to improve public access. NARA also talked about their interest in working with Wikipedia volunteers, and facilitating easier access to NARA records. At some point, they would like to have a Wikipedian-in-Residence working with them.

Inner-depths of the National Archives

The afternoon featured lightning talks by Wikipedians and others, with the first session of the afternoon focusing on GLAM-Wiki topics. Thomas Gideon presented about the FedFlix and International Amateur Scanning League project for digitizing video from the National Archives holdings (see also the WikiProject FedFlix). Ed Summers presented on his Linkypedia tool for tracking outgoing links from Wikipedia to other websites. Harihar Shankar spoke about the Memento plugin for Firefox that helps access Wikipedia and other sites as they were at some date in the past. Sarah Stierch talked about WikiProject Public art and her work on documenting public art around Washington, D.C., interest from the audience to help photograph and map the artwork. Econterms, a statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, presented on Statipedia.

Wikipedia chocolate cupcake

The second session of lightning talks focused on Wikipedia, more generally. Kat Walsh looked back at 10 moments in Wikipedia history, and Jyothis talked about the Malayalam Wikipedia and discussed about Indian language versions of Wikipedia. Sage Ross and PJ Tabit presented about the Wikipedia Ambassador Program and the role of Campus Ambassadors, discussing how it has worked so far and how they would like to see ideas translate to GLAM outreach efforts. Katie Filert gave a brief overview of the collaboration between Wikimedians in DC and the Smithsonian Institution, including work with the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Archives of American Art.

The day wrapped up with celebration of Wikipedia's 10th birthday, cupcakes, followed by a session of Wiki-Trivia led by Kat Walsh and Phoebe Ayers. Socializing continued afterwards at a nearby pub, with discussion about Wikimedia DC's bid for Wikimania 2012 and moving forward with forming a chapter.

• http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiXDC
• http://inkdroid.org/journal/2011/01/23/wikixdc/

Wikipedian-in-Residence

Dominic McDevitt-Parks has uploaded 54,469 National Archives images to Wikimedia Commons, including documents for transcription on Wikisource. [1]

Smithsonian

Archives of American Art

Job Goodman, working on a clay model for panel of a mural for the Works Progress Administration.

For the Smithsonian Archives of American Art collaboration, Sarah Stierch is coordinating uploads to Wikimedia Commons of 285 public domain photographs from the Federal Art Project.

District of Columbia Public Library

Library Lab

The Library Lab project got underway in September at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the main branch of the District of Columbia Public Library. The idea for the project was conceived by Samuel Klein and Nate Hill, as a beta sprint proposal of the Digital Public Library of America initiative. The Library Lab is a temporary popup space that will be at the MLK Jr. Library through end of December. The project has support from the DCPL Chief Librarian Ginnie Cooper and is an opportunity for Wikimedia DC to build stronger ties with the community and city, and engage in outreach to diverse populations in DC.

Throughout September, we worked on recruiting volunteers from beyond the core Wikimedia DC volunteer base, strengthening our connections with the broader DC tech, social media, and free culture/knowledge communities. We are also working closely with the DCPL's Adaptive Services and Teen Program staff.

We have identified potential keystone projects to undertake at the lab over the next months, including:

• Digitizing historic photographs from the library's special collections, which are mostly / completely uncatalogued currently. The library has 15,000 photographs in its Historical Image Collection, dating from ~1880-1940 including many out-of-copyright. The library also holds 1.3 million photographs from the Washington Star newspaper, dating from the 1940s to 1980s, which we may seek to be made available under a Creative Commons CC-BY or other free license.
• Collecting oral histories and stories, including people's experiences and thoughts related to Martin Luther King Jr. (with his memorial being dedicated soon), civil rights, and other experiences in DC more generally.

Secondary projects or activities may include digitizing, caption and transcribing video and audio materials in the Washingtonian special collections, making them available online and accessible to the disabled.

Proposed events include workshops on topics including Wikisource, Wikipedia editing, copyrights, social media, technology, mapping, and more, Wikipedia edit-a-thons, and hackathons, focused on accessibility (maybe identify MediaWiki, Vector skin bugs), civic / open gov, and other topics.

We held a series of events at the Library Lab in September including:

• OpenStreetMap workshop - September 3 (6 attendees)
• Wikipedia meetup - September 10 (~10 attendees)
• Hack day - September 17 (6 attendees)

A number of people have also made use of the Lab space on weekdays, working to plan out activities and projects for the space.

Timeline

• Wiki Society of Washington, DC incorporated

Administrative

Board activities

• Board meeting on September 10

Membership

• We have 35 members now.

Finances

• We have ___
• __ in expenses in September
• __ in revenue

• In the past year, we spent _ and brought in _ income.

Events

• ...