Day of the Dead Wikipedia editathon

Day of the Dead Wikipedia editathon – 31st October 2016

Dario Taraborelli, head of research at Wikimedia, passed a link to http://passingon.natematias.com/ to my colleague, Melissa Highton, Assistant Vice Principal of Online Learning and Director of Learning, Teaching & Web Services at the University of Edinburgh, as the University ran two Wikipedia editathons last year on ‘Women in Science & Scottish History’ and ‘Ada Lovelace Day – celebrating Women in STEM’.

We are endeavouring to keep the momentum going this year and have already run events on Women in Art for International Women’s Day and Women in Espionage for ‘Spy Week 2016’. All of these events are mentioned on my project page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh

So the plan is to run an event, or a series of events, in the Autumn which would make use of the brilliant application which scrapes data from the annotated corpus of 25 years’ worth of New York Times articles to help identify missing Wikipedia articles about notable women; utilising these obituary records to help celebrate the lives of those recently passed on and changing Wikipedia’s representation of notable females in the process.

The tricky part will be whether the application could incorporate Scotland/UK based news obituaries e.g. scraped from the Scotsman newspaper or the Guardian newspaper for example.

Some investigating to be done…