Wikipedia:GLAM/CodeTheCity/CTC20

Participants at the Aberdeen Editathon August 2019

About the event

This event is the 20th hack weekend facilitated by Code The City in Aberdeen. All our events are built on the use of data and tech for social good. Each has a central theme. This one's is the history and culture of Aberdeen and the North East.

We've identified or had partner organisations suggest a number of potential challenges & opportunities, outlined below, which we could address at the weekend. Most likely all except those marked (*) in this list will involve working with WikiData, Wiki Commons or Wikipedia.

• Mesolithic Deeside (*)
• Register of Returned Convicts of Aberdeen (1869-1939) (*)
• Aberdeen Harbour Arrivals (*)
• Aberdeen Built Ships
• Mapping Memorials to Women in Aberdeen
• Aberdeen March Stones
• Listed Buildings in Aberdeen
• Aberdeen Provosts and Lord Provosts
• Current and historic entities of Aberdeen (Schools, Hospitals, Cemeteries, Poor Houses, Businesses)
• Aberdeenshire Settlements on Wikipedia

All you need is a laptop, if you'll be using one, or your phone or camera.

We'll kick off Saturday morning with a quick ice-breaking session, decide on which challenges we will work on, form teams for those and work on projects until we stop at lunchtime. then we get back together Saturday afternoon until about 17:00. Then we break until Sunday when we start all over again. Sunday normally concludes with a show and tell - what did you work on, how did it go, what did you achieve, and what will you continue to work on after the event is over.

ALL WELCOME – no experience necessary, but basic computer literacy is preferable.

* If possible, please create a Wikipedia account before the workshop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UserLogin/signup

How do I prepare?

• Sign up for the event (see below)
• Create a Wikipedia account
• Learn about Wikipedia if you like: Tutorial, or Getting started on Wikipedia for more information
• Learn about Wikimedia Commons if you like: Illustrating Wikipedia
• Learn about Wikidata if you like: [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction
• Think about what you would like to edit about - you can even prepare some materials to bring with you on the day
• Lunch will be provided

Books used at a Wikipedia editathon.

Saturday Programme

• 09:30 - Introductions, championing projects
• 10:00 - Team formations then work on projects
• 12:00 - Lunch
• 13:00 - Work on projects
• 16:30 - Wrap up session - feedback, lines of further enquiry, future plans
• 17:00 - Finish

Sources for Wikipedia

• Wikipedia is a tertiary resource, which relies upon secondary sources. Wikipedia is not a place for personal interpretation.
• For more guidance on the use of sources, see this guide here.
• Aberdeen City Libraries will be bringing some reference material on the day.

Log into our dashboard

Make sure your contributions are counted.

• go to this dashboard, and log in with your Wikpedia password.

A laptop showing the dashboard for an editathon

Work list

This list is under construction

Mapping Memorials to Women

This project will see volunteers work on adding items to Wikidata for memorials to women in and around Aberdeen, and items for the women which they commemorate. There will be opportunities then to use that data to create maps and other visualisations. Much more detail on this challenge can be found here.

Aberdeen Built Ships

Begun at CTC19 but not yet completed. this project involved AAGM staff and a volunteer working on scraping the Aberdeen Built Ships site for the data there with a view to getting it into Wikidata.

Data has been scraped and it should be possible to create Wikidata entries from it in the future, all linked back to the online ABS system using a new identifier in Wikidata. Since them we’ve completed the identification of which ships already exist in Wikidata. The next step will be to use Quickstatements or another tool to bulk upload data to the platform.

We could also then potentially identify ships in the Aberdeen Harbour arrivals that were know to have been built in the city. A more detailed write-up is provided in this blog post and a more defined list of tasks (updated) can be found on the Github repo.

Aberdeen March Stones

This is a small project to ensure that all of the Aberdeen March Stones (historic boundary stones) are well represented on Wikidata and Wikicommons.

There is much more on this project description doc including a bunch of useful background sources, a list of suggested next steps, and the suggestion to create a Wikipedia article on the March Stones.

Listed Buildings

Of the 2000+ Aberdeen listed buildings / structures on Wiki Data it transpires that 1845 of them have no image associated with them. See this map. There is an opportunity for keen photographers to capture high quality pictures of these, upload them to WikiCommons and link the Wiki Data entries. There are multiple ways to do this and full training will be given if needed.

Also the descriptions of the buildings are as imported from Historic Scotland's database so are frequently reversed (eg "Aberdeen, 24 Albert Terrace Including Boundary Walls And Railings" instead of "24 Albert Terrace, Aberdeen Including Boundary Walls And Railings" and the P31 (Instance of) properties are frequently vague.

Aberdeenshire Settlements on Wikipedia

There are 198 villages in Aberdeenshire listed on Wikipedia some with excellent names for example; there’s Kirkton of Tough the home of the famous Aberdeen Angus cattle breed, a settlement called Lost which keeps losing it’s street sign, and of course, Cock Bridge. Many of these are only stub articles of a few sentences, but you can fix this! See also

• List of places in Aberdeenshire,
• Towns in Aberdeenshire

These pages all fall under WikiProject_UK_geography and WikiProject_Scotland. WikiProject_UK_geography gives clear outline for settlement pages.

For the infobox see here: Infobox_settlement or, Gavin recently updated the Newmachar and Kingseat, Aberdeenshire pages which may be easier to copy from.

You can go for a little explore and gather photos of landmarks like churches, village halls and schools for wikimedia.

If you have a good Doric voice you could record the pronunciation of the village names, this is especially useful for the weird ones like Finzean or Ythsie. See Embedded Audio Pronunciations.

Other handy links:

• Check place names and parishes on old Maps
• Find community councils
• Check Ward, Council area, UK Parliament constituency, Scottish Parliament constituency and Scottish Parliament region on the [https://www.bcomm-scotland.independent.gov.uk/

Boundary Commission website]

Wikidata: Schools, Hospitals, Cemeteries

There are loads of opportunities to improve Wikidata to ensure that all hospitals, schools, cemeteries, workhouses, bridges and other things (current and historic) are represented in Wikidata. This will aid linked data queries - such as "How many Provosts of Aberdeen are buried in St. Peter's Cemetery?"

For example contrast this map of NE hospitals through time with this list from Wikidata. 

The list of cemeteries in Aberdeen on Wikidata has fifteen items. FindAGrave lists 32 of them, whereas Aberdeen City Council lists seventeen of them.

Similarly, the number of bridges returned by an Open Street Map query far outnumbers the number of bridges currently in Wikidata for Aberdeen.

Adding pictures

to be added

Articles for creation

to be added

Articles for improvement

to be added