Join us to in a social and supportive workshop to write some brilliant queer women and allies onto Wikipedia!

In late 2015 I teamed up with some colleagues here at SOAS to start running editathon events to improve linguistics and endangered language pages on Wikipedia. We’re happy to announce that for 2016 we are teaming up with Wikimedia UK to run a series of monthly editathons modelled on Gretchen McCulloch’s lingwiki events for SOAS students and staff members. Wikimedia UK are kindly providing funding for snacks and pizza for all of our hardworking editors. We have some big plans for the year including: 1. Linking language pages on Wikipedia with corpora in Paradisec and ELAR. 2. Encouraging people who work on particular languages improve or create those pages 3. Encouraging people that have expertise in particular areas of linguistics to improve pages on those topics 4. Integrating Panlex materials into Wikipedia. Get involved! If you want to help make Wikipedia a better place for information about the world’s languages in 2016, please join us! Even if you don’t live in London, you can use our meeting times as extra motivation to get online. I’ll be here on chat and on Twitter if you want some company. Related: Superlinguo participation in Lingwiki events in 2015: http://www.superlinguo.com/post/107822178873/the-superlinguo-lingwiki-wrap-up I’m teaming up with Gretchen McCulloch to teach a course at CoLang 2016 on Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages: http://www.alaska.edu/colang2016/courses/workshop32/ Lingwiki at SOAS slides, if you want to get involved: http://bit.ly/lingwikiSOAS

In 2015-2016 we ran 4 lingwiki events at SOAS - that was two each teaching term. These events were kindly sponsored by Wikimedia UK, which allowed us to feed our fabulous editors pizza and snacks. Thanks also to SOAS, and particularly the ELAR team for hosting the events in their office. Here’s a photo of some of our diligent crew continuing to edit even after the pizza has arrived: All the numbers and stats: Attendees: 14+ (that’s just how many we got names for, but more came and went). The participants were almost all graduate students or researchers at SOAS. New Wikipedians: 10 of our participants were new Wikipedia editors, some of them are old hands now! Edits made: 158 edits were made over the editathons - that’s over 10 edits per participant! Characters added 40,293 characters were added to Wikipedia. New pages: 11 new pages were added to Wikipedia over the course of the editathons. Many edits happened on existing pages. We created a GLAM project page for the kind of work we’ve been doing in these sessions. The majority of edits focused on one of three things Linking archive pages to the relevant language page on Wikipedia to make those materials easier to discover Improving the Wikipedia pages of specific languages with both linguistic and ethnographic information found in descriptive grammars Improving Wikipedia linguistics pages, or linguist biographies Some of the pages we improved during the sessions: Multilingualism Government phonology Tombonuwo language North Ambrym language Belait language Baniwa language Huilliche language Sunwar Language Wutun language Nen language (Papuan) Sabahan languages Sama–Bajaw languages Particular commendation must go to ADHarvey, who added links to ELAR corpora for over 150 languages at the editathons and in the times between. lingwiki will be back in 2015-2016, bigger than ever This year we’re teaming up with colleagues at Queen Mary University of London and Oxford University to make lingwiki bigger and better than ever. I’ve also been talking with colleagues at UK institutions about taking lingwiki on the road. I’ll share updates here, and on Twitter under the #lingwiki hashtag.