Hello! And welcome. My name is Phoebe Ayers. I am an academic librarian, currently based in Davis, California. I've been writing about, editing and using Wikipedia on and off since August 2003. There is always something else I want to do.
I work on Wikipedia, but I also talk about it a lot in various contexts, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation am involved in our project-wide governance. I have also been involved in a variety of other projects, detailed below.
For why I work on Wikipedia -- why I started and why I continue -- see my essay Why work on Wikipedia?
You start talking about the long term — about being one of the first large information sources on the web that is truly free. You start talking about what will happen if this works; that because it's free, it's going to be the default resource for a whole lot of people, and you start to get a little bit awed by the responsibility to build it properly, and keep it open, and keep it sane, and most of all, to get the facts right, because this work is going to be a base on which many unforeseeable future projects will be built. -- user:CatherineMunro
Things I do around here edit
Board of Trustees edit
In July 2010 I was selected for a two-year term on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees through the chapters seat selection process. During 2011-2012 I am serving as the Executive Secretary.
The 10-member volunteer Board of Trustees governs the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the infrastructure for Wikipedia and her sister projects, as well as development and maintenance of the MediaWiki software. This work includes legal, press, financial and administrative support, as well as community-focused activities; you can find more about the Board (and our official bios) here.
You can read my candidacy statement and question answers here: statement | Q&A. I am happy to answer questions anytime, and as secretary and community trustee, am also happy to receive and pass on concerns to the Board.
- Note: unless explicitly stated otherwise, please assume that any edits or statements I make here (or on any other projects) I am making as a community member and not in any official capacity whatsoever.
Book: How Wikipedia Works edit
With Charles Matthews and Ben Yates, I am the author of How Wikipedia Works, a book about using and editing Wikipedia. It was published in September 2008 by No Starch Press. Find more information here, or find the full text of the book at How Wikipedia Works. The book is licensed under the GFDL and covers all aspects of Wikipedia from a community perspective.
If you are interested in leaving comments or questions, please add them to this wiki for now, or feel free to email me. The old page about the book, with suggestions, can be found here; user:phoebe/book; Feel free to email me if you would like to be notified of announcements and news about the book. Cheers!
Article editor edit
- Editor on en:wp since August 2003
- I especially work on historical scientific biographies and related topics; plus a smattering of whatever. I care about the library articles and core topics, and have historically worked on marine science articles. I like doing merges. Lately I've been doing a lot of work on biographies, both old and new.
- However, I also have interests in lots of other areas and I like to research things. Sometimes I just fix typos, or merge articles, or rewrite clunky phrasing. Things I'd like to see improved include core articles, applied science and technology articles (including engineering), and sourcing for nearly everything.
- Referencing is my true love. I estimate I've added roughly a couple hundred references (so far) to print sources for articles I didn't originally write, mostly due to my Dictionary of Scientific Biography project.
- an outdated list of contributions
- I am also rather proud of my contributions on meta.
Conferences and meetups edit
I am a big believer in the benefit of getting together face-to-face to build community, socialize, and get work done. I feel extremely privileged that I have gotten to meet Wikimedians and go to Wikimedia events on five continents, over many years.
- Wikimania: I have had the great joy of being involved in all of the Wikimania conferences to date, and I care a lot about making it a great event. I have been involved in writing and fixing up the event handbook and documentation on meta, at m:Wikimania. My involvement has been as an organizer (Wikimania 2006-2009), as a bid jury member, moderator or advisor (Wikimania 2007-2012), and as a presenter/moderator at the actual conference (2005-2011). For a full resume of my participation (and a scratchpad for notes), see here.
- WikiSym: WikiSym is an academic conference about wikis and open collaboration; it is unaffiliated with Wikimedia but there is obvious overlap -- many research papers about Wikipedia get presented at WikiSym. I was chair of WikiSym 2010 and am on the conference steering committee; I have also been on the program committee and planning committee as Wikimedia liaison (for 2008 and 2009 respectively).
- RCC: I helped out with Recent Changes Camp San Francisco, May 9-11 2008: "The family reunion for the wiki ohana!"
- Local meetups: I have been involved with the irregular San Francisco-area meetups. We now have a mailing list -- see that page for details.
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The Real-Life Barnstar | |
| For your dedication to Wikipedia meetups, and that Kat had given you the RL version -- User:WikiLeon |
Other projects edit
- research into Wikipedia
- I'm interested in and participate in Wikipedia and wiki research. I presented a short paper at m:Wikimania 2005; completed a literature review of ongoing research that will be presented at ASIS&T'06; and helped with a hugely successful research BoF at Wikimania '06. I am also involved with WikiSym (an academic conference about wikis), chairing it in 2010. I follow the research lists and can probably point you towards what's going on in this area. Check out the new Research index on meta!
- scratchpad: User:Phoebe/Research
- Signpost community newsletter
- For several years, I have contributed occasional stories for the Signpost; in 2009, I was the lead reporter for the "news and notes" section, writing almost every week.
- Other stories include: license update | books extension | Wikimania 2008 wrapup | report on Maker Faire and Recent Changes Camp in SF | Wikimania 2007 plans | and a whole series of articles in Summer 2006, with sj, about Wikimania 2006.
- Presentations
- I give general presentations about wikis and Wikipedia to various groups, particularly librarians. A handout I developed for librarians may be found here. I am happy to share slides, notes, and thoughts on what works & what doesn't.
- More notes notes
- My presentations are always out of date! Someday, I will make a full bibliography of my slides etc.
- misc
- I am interested in good essays about Wikipedia; please add them to essays.
- I also served on the now-defunct m:Special Projects Committee, from May 2006-2007ish.
- for a couple of years in from late 2008-early 2010, I worked on summarizing the Foundation-l mailing list at the List Summary Service; hopefully this is useful to those who need to quickly catch up with the list.
- I can often be found on IRC, where I go by brassratgirl; and can sometimes be found sending long-winded posts to various Wikipedia mailing lists. I almost always regret this in the morning.
Things I do in other places edit
In the rest of my life, I am a librarian at the University of California, Davis, specializing in science and engineering. As of Summer 2011 I am the subject specialist for computer science, electrical engineering, physics and astronomy. I have academic training in literature and history, as well as library science. Professionally, I am interested in open access issues, how people find information, the effective use of collaborative tools (such as wikis) within communities, and how trustworthy information and knowledge is created both on- and off-line. I have a personal website here.
Things I care about edit
- Foundation governance, transparency, and sustainability; integrating new contributors into governance smoothly; exploring what it really means to "lead with a community."
- Goodwill and fun with my fellow Wikipedians: hence, meetups and Wikimania :) Events are very important to the community as a whole, and I encourage everyone to go to and organize meetups.
- References and sources in articles. This is not about arguing whether crufty websites 'count' as sources; this is about making sure the 90% of totally verifiable content gets good references added, for the sake of the readers.
- Communicating about Wikipedia.
- Gender on the projects; the construction of outsiders versus insiders, and implications for creating knowledge.
- Free knowledge; parse this as you will.
Friends and usernames edit
| Wikipedia:Babel | ||
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| Search user languages |
| 1.4 | This user has 1.4 centijimbos. |
- I have been fortunate to meet many Wikipedians in person.
- on usernames
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I used to edit content under the name brassratgirl. I generally teach and present using my given name. That username is longstanding and has nothing whatsoever to do with MIT, or this. It is also not symbolic of anything in particular. If you're curious, ask and I'll send you the explanation. (I am also not user:BrassRat, or related to any other variation). wikihiero
personal principles edit
- From the past: or the use common sense department, or why it's good to remember not to make a big deal out of things.
- On RFAs and project history
A question from the very first batch of archived RFAs, in 2003 (around the time I joined the project):
- Wow. I don't know. What are the responsibilities of being a sysop?
- As far as I know, there aren't really any responsibilities, just a list of obvious things not to do.
I'd encourage anyone new to the project who is thinking about being an adminstrator, or who is getting heavily involved, to read up on your history; many of these friendly people are still around today, though many others sadly aren't.
- On policy
| “ | If Wikipedia achieves its potential there will be thousands of people writing and editing articles. There is no system in place that would allow all of this activity to be monitored by some central authority to insure compliance with various editorial policies. With this in mind, we should not try now to lay down policies as if the project is easily controlled. We should assume that policies will emerge from use and experience. We should not try to anticipate what the lessons of experience will be. from Tim Shell, from here | ” |
- If all policy discussion was conducted in verse, the world would be so much better.
- On sourcing
I wrote a mini-essay about why sourcing is important, and posted it on Foundation-L. You can join those (unfortunate?) readers here.
- On arguments
- (nb: I wrote the following paragraph soon after joining wp, but it holds true today; though after a couple of years I don't mind holding my own in a debate, I still don't participate in many arguments.) Things I like doing on Wikipedia: browsing, wikifying, adding citations, verifying things like bibliographies and expanding articles about common yet complicated things, and having the sense of working on an encyclopedia in the grand tradition of same, albeit in a completely new fashion. I also like reading articles. Things I don't like at all: debates about controversial subjects, flame or edit wars.
- On pet peeves:
- My biggest pet peeve: cite your sources, people! If you need help finding sources, there's the Reference Desk, the new Newspaper and magazine article request service, the fact and reference check people, or I will individually work with anyone who needs help finding or verifying sources. Just ask.
- When in doubt, be nice and see Wikipedia:Simplified_Ruleset. It's not so hard.
- things to keep:
- A few of the unpopular things I have fought to keep over the years:
- WP:BJAODN : part of our history; community building; sometimes genuinely funny. In remembrance, have started my own small collection: User:Phoebe/fame.
- List of important publications in computer science : imperfect but actually useful.
- Library of Congress classification subpages : more browsing systems are good. Could go to wikisource as suggested by mako.
- On mergers
Oppose. Bananas do not have nearly the nutirition and great flavor of plantains when cooked right. It would be an insult to plantains to combine the two. from Talk:Banana.
Editing resources edit
A referencing challenge edit
There are many useful and scholarly online sources of further reading and information that I feel should be systematically cited in appropriate articles. For example:
- the great bibliographies of basic mathematical books available from the "Basic library list" of the Mathematical Association of America
- How products are made, an encyclopedia from McGraw-Hill that is inexplicably free online (and very cool)
- Internet Public Library pathfinders are lovely guides to the web in a small topic area
- not to mention the Librarian's Index to the Internet, a peer-reviewed collection of sites on all topics
- The National Academies Press puts most of its books online; they are generally nicely reviewed treatises on policy and technical issues
- the National Science Digital Library has good resources also
- The LOC American Memory "on this day" project -- for the date articles
- Almost every topic has a book about it listed in worldcat
- Open CourseWare courses
- biographies of biologists from biologists
- tree of life pages with citations
- A giant list of field guides! guides for almost everything imaginable.
- british newspapers
for those with access to printed or expensive resources:
- see here for a project to collect history of science biographical resources
more to come
editing and teaching resources edit
- Are you a professor teaching or a student in a class about Wikipedia? read this.
- For any editor: An amazing index
- How to satisfy Criterion 1a
- how to find everything
- Mediawiki user's guide -- despite writing a book, I have a terrible time remembering syntax
Random things:
- dict. sci. bio.
- Infoboxen!
- upload images and that new-fangled image markup
- templates for you!
- line art drawings of fish [1] for use on marine/fishery/fish pages. Excellent line art drawings. done so far: sturgeon, flounder, mola mola..
- how to look up page view statistics: [2]
Handouts edit
These are handouts for learning and teaching Wikipedia. Feel free to print them, distribute them, use them for presentations, change them, claim them, whatever you need to do.
- Also see: Wikipedia:Instructional material
Tip of the moment...
 How to provide a link to a specific Google Search
On talk pages, it may be useful to provide a google search link directly in a discussion of a topic's notability or in debates about which name for a subject is the most common. The Wikimedia software that powers Wikipedia lets you make links to Google by including
Which looks like this: Note: It is important not to use spaces in the search. To add more parameters to the search, separate them by a plus sign, +. For a phrase search, use a hyphen (minus sign), -, between each word. E.g. to search for To provide a link to a Wikipedia-specific search, include in the google-link
Which looks like this: To clean up the link so that only the part you want to show is presented, use the pipe, like this:
Which makes it look like this: – – Read more: To add this auto-randomizing template to your user page, use {{totd-random}}
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toolbox edit
shamelessly stolen from user:Ravedave
Reference: unreferenced/unsourced template should be used extremely liberally | as should Template:Not verified | Wikipedia:WikiProject Fact and Reference Check | Wikipedia:Newspapers and magazines request service
Librariana: Wikipedia:WikiProject Librarians | Library-stub articles | Wikipedia:Reference Desk
Research: Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikidemia | (see also: meta)
Fix it: Wikipedia:Cleanup resources | cleanup templates | articles to be merged (perhaps my favorite cleanup task | Wikipedia:Typo | the professor test | Engineering x fact-check articles | Electrical Eng x fact-check | Unreferenced BLPs | db reports
Make it great: Wikipedia 1.0 | Wikipedia:List of articles all languages should have | Template:Grading_scheme and Category:Wikipedia editorial validation (meta-discussion) | core biographies!
Meet: Wikipedia:Meetup (I'm still a Seattleite at heart) | Wikimania
Tools: catscan, the greatest thing ever | stats are good for you
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