Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle

Wikipedia in Seattle (created from a photograph by Bryan Bell)

The first of a series of Seattle Wikipedia meetups (or Cascadia bioregion meetups — they don't all have to be held in one city!) took place on Saturday, 6 November 2004 at the Seattle Central Library. The second took place 15 January 2005.

[edit] Fifth meetup

tentative: June 19, 2008 See Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle5 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Still in the planning phases. Some researchers at the University of Washington have expressed interest in helping organize this meetup.

[edit] Fourth meetup

September 9, 2006. See Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle4 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Topics of conversation included:

• linkspam, paid editing, and public relations flacks. There was a general sense the Wikipedia is attempting a "Just Say No" policy and that, like the U.S. government War on Drugs, it isn't working.
• A broad conversation about original research, Verifiability, intellectual honesty as the "missing pillar", overcitation, civility and admin behavior (including "Jimbo dropping in out of the blue to ban somebody"), the "gap between written and actual policy".
• Further work on articles about the Pacific Northwest.

[edit] Third meetup

14 January 2006 See Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle3 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Topics of conversation included:

• Librarian and library sciences attitudes toward Wikipedia
• A suggestion that we should supplement Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia with some more related project pages:
  1. Wikipedia:How a Wikipedia article is built, which would explain the various mechanisms that facilitate collaboration and the policies (No original research, Verifiability, etc.) that support reliable content.
  2. Wikipedia:How to read an article history, about what to look at in an article history to help evaluate an article.
  3. Wikipedia:A researcher's guide to discussion pages: how to read discussion pages as part of determining reliability, and how to use them if you have doubts.
• Contrasts to Encarta
• Stable versions, semi-protection, etc.
• Original research, verifiability and all that, especially the original intent of the policy against original research.

[edit] Second meetup

15 January 2005 See Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle2 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

Topics of conversation included:

• Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia's new internal newspaper, started by Michael Snow.
• SeattleWiki [1], started by Matiasp.
• Possible contact with small, local history museums; DanKeshet and Jmabel followed up to the point of writing Wikipedia:Museum projects, though there has not yet been systematic outreach.
• Whether some (maybe 1%?) of articles are either sufficiently controversial or sufficient "vandal magnets" that our normal, open way of free-for-all editing may just not work for these; suggestion of starting dialogue on alternatives. Jmabel will probably try to start discussion on this.
• Larry Sanger's recent criticisms of Wikipedia, and the issues of elitism/anti-elitism
• ... and we pretty much all seem to think Seattle, Washington is ready to be a featured article.

[edit] First meetup

6 November 2004 See Wikipedia:Meetup/Seattle1 for a more detailed account of this meetup.

The first Seattle Meetup took place Saturday, 6 November 2004 at the Seattle Central Library and was a great success. Decumanus says it was "fantastic". Participants came from a geographic area ranging from Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, British Columbia.

Topics of discussion included:

• How to get librarians to understand Wikipedia so they might consider it worthy of being an authorative source. (Within days after the meeting, this led to a pretty good start on a document at Wikipedia:Researching with Wikipedia.)
• Licensing issues
• Possible software changes that might allow POV-type overlays
• Wikipedia war stories about POV warriors, trolls, etc.
• BryceHarrington regaled us with tales of the wild and wooly early days of GNUPedia and Nupedia, and how he made the leap to Wikipedia.
• User:Jwrosenzweig earned our sympathy with his stories about being on the arbitration committee, a thankless task for which none of us seemed to envy him.
• We came to a quasi-agreement, mostly through a nodding of heads, that a system of committees that might judge the worthiness of questionable content (rather than just violation of Wikipedia rules per se), might save everyone lots of pain and heartache. As of November 12, however, no one has begun fleshing this into a concrete proposal.

After initially gathering at the coffee cart we moved to the 10th floor, under the slanted roof designed by Rem Koolhaas We also tried our hands at Michael Snow's Wikipedia quiz.

At six o'clock most of us adjourned to have dinner in Seattle's International District, at a Chinese restaurant, Hing Loon.

First meetup, introductions at the Coffee Cart: from left, Jordan, DanKeshet, Llywrch, Eclecticology, Michael Snow, Jwrosenzweig, and Jmabel.

First meetup, on the Tenth floor: Llywrch, Kees Cook, BryceHarrington, and Eclecticology

Third meetup, clockwise: Katy (in red scarf), Jmabel, GTBacchus, DVD_R_W, JFPerry, WAvegetarian, Bumm13, Brassratgirl, The Rod, Michael Snow, Ksnow, SchmuckyTheCat (behind the snows), Eclecticology, Shawn. Also present, llywrch, joshuadfranklin, and at least one person who didn't sign in.