New subject: editathon tomorrow at the Berkeley Student Cooperative

6 Apr 2013

Hi all -

I announced this on the list a couple weeks ago, but figured I'd make a
second announcement now.  I'll be hosting an editathon at Hoyt Hall, one of
the Berkeley Student Cooperative's all-women houses.  It'll be at 2519
Ridge Road in Berkeley from 3-6pm, with a primary audience of co-opers and
Berkeley students, although anyone is welcome to attend.  The event will
generally be themed around women's history and our gendergap, with an
especial focus on improving Wikipedia's coverage of prominent women in the
history of the cooperative movement.

The attendance of a few extra experienced Wikipedians would be especially
appreciated (I do realize that, unfortunately, I cross-scheduled with the
iconathon at WMF :).)  We had originally intended for this to be a 15-20
person event which I would be comfortably able to facilitate myself, but
it's looking like we may have as many as 70 or 80 people show up - so
having a few extra experienced Wikipedians beyond what we already have
floating to help make sure everything is running smoothly would be awesome.

Most of the participants will be students, and many of them will never have
edited Wikipedia before.  From talking to some of them, many of them
haven't even previously realized that Wikipedia is something that can be
edited.  In other words, they are pretty much our target outreach
demographic :)

If you're interested in helping out on the administrative side, please feel
free to drop me a note tonight or to show up an hour or so early tomorrow
so we'll be able to hammer out the last details of a gameplan.  I'll
definitely have a list of target articles for improvement and intro to
Wikipedia resources present, but don't have an as thoroughly laid out plan
as I'd like to handle an event of this size - I ended up spending half this
week just fixing Hoyt's network problems and installing extra capacity so
that we'd actually be able to have this many extra laptops on the wireless
without everything going kaboom.

Regardless of how well the event tomorrow goes, there will likely be a
number of themed editathons at BSC house in the future.  I'll ensure that
none of those wind up being cross-scheduled :)

Thanks,
Kevin Gorman