Tamsin and Mike will be attending the International Congress of History of Science and Technology (ICHST) (29 June – 5 July 2025) as Congress Wikimedians.
Created English Wikipedia page for Austrian historian Marianne Klemun, linked from six pages, and added selected list of award winners to Mary C. Rabbitt.
Created English Wikipedia page for Elodie Edwards-Grossi, and improved Wikidata item.
Tidied the Wikipedia page for International Union of History and Philosophy of Science, which contains the list of congresses, by making external links into citations as per Wikipedia style, and adding themes where known, and linking notable people.
Created Wikidata items for the overarching series, and individual items for all other congresses (1929 to present). Added organisers and participants to 27th congress item. Scholia for 27th here. Added proceedings and final reports and plenary speakers, participants and organisers when mentioned.
Kerri Inglis spoke about the history of leprosy in Hawaii, mentioning Kalaupapa, Kalawao County, and Waikolu. She was surprised at the poor coverage, and that there was no article on leprosy in Hawaii—we are posting a suggestion for collaboration on WikiProject Hawaii. She pointed out that the missionaries Marianne Cope and Father Damien are well-covered in the sources (being saints), but there is a lack of coverage of the ordinary Hawaiians who lived with leprosy.
Heard about a project by Barbara Hof (Q131324228) to improve the science diplomacy page with input from a group of experts. Plans to interview Barbara later in the week about the project.
Chatted with Stephen P Weldon (Q86954283) about how to work with Wikipedians in his community on history of science issues.
Met Barbara Hof (Q131324228) and arranged an interview about her work on the science diplomacy article.
Met Allison C. Marsh (Q122051475), who has edited her first Wikipedia article (Mabel MacFerran Rockwell), and demonstrated Scholia and Author Disambiguator on her publications. Talked about improving the Fair Use image of Mabel.
Corrected a book title on Robert G. Morrison's page, and added the new book to his list of publications.
Talked to Susanne Hoffmann (Q135070772) about being an expert on Wikipedia, linking publications to Wikidata using ORCID, and working with students to improve Wikipedia.
Gave Adam Sundberg (Q123699988) advice on setting Wikipedia-writing assignments in the classroom, improving articles on natural disasters like the Christmas Flood of 1717. Took a headshot for Wikidata.
Listened to John Schaefer's presentation about Kew Gardens plant collectors, in which he has been graphing networks of collectors using the Bionomia API, OpenRefine, and Wikidata. Made a Wikidata item for John R. Schaefer (Q135187917) and linked to one of his publications.
Updated Ute Meta Bauer's article, created in 2015, poorly-sourced, and now out of date. Showed her how to add suggestions to a Talk page and how to contact Wikipedians near her in Singapore. Showed her how to add identifiers like DOIs to her publications in ORCID and discussed why that is useful. Took a photo to replace a very old one on her Wikipedia pages.
Attended the session on "Women in Science and Gender and Risk", with a talk by Allison C. Marsh (Q122051475) on women electrical engineers, then Vandana Singh (Q135070967) on the challenges facing women scientists working in extreme environments, and Jan Hua-Henning (Q134962653) on gender and risk in fire responses in Germany and the US. Spent an hour talking Allison through Scholia, and adding publications to ORCID as a way to get them attached to authors in Wikidata. We changed the photo on the Mabel MacFerrand Rockwell article, and talked about visualisations of datasets through Wikidata.
Discussed visualisations of women astronomers dataset using Wikidata with Toner Stevenson (Q134747527), and put her in touch with local Wikidata experts who may be interested in helping.
Attended a talk on Tsuda Umeko's collaboration with Thomas Hunt Morgan, a publication mentioned in neither's Wikipedia article; information on her publication, the first written in English by a Japanese woman, added to both pages with a diagram from the 1894 paper.
Attended Karen Ross (Q135090428)'s talk on the pro-vivisectionist Ernest Harold Baynes, improved the article, and asked her for more and better sources for it. Talked through how Wikipedia works in an academic setting, how journal editors could collaborate with a Wikipedian, and using Wikipedia in the classroom.
Talked to Breno Arsioli Moura (Q135013264) about illustrations and how they get into Wikipedia, and how he can use Wikimedia Commons structured data together with Wikidata to record the engravers and artists of scientific illustrations.
Discussed the Albin Lesky and Erna Lesky articles with Felicitas Seebacher (Q134962551) who has written a book about them. Can we connect her with a Wikimedian local to Vienna who could help improve these articles?
The final sketchnote whiteboardListened to Alexandra Hui (Q105099699) talk about the history of duck calls. Added some citation needed tags to the duck call page, and noted that Wikimedia Commons doesn't appear to have audio of humans using duck callers. The Wikipedia page is also missing representations of the different types of notation of duck calls. Alexandra finished by playing a recorded radio broadcast of a trained huia caller in 1949 mimicking a huia call (fixed broken link to a recording from the huia page; made a suggestion on the talk page to include a 'huia in popular culture' section).
Discussed with Pascal Marichalar (Q88694351) how to make improvements to Wikipedia articles missing citations, or with large unsourced or biased sections.
Of the headshots taken, 38 are now being used on Wikidata, and 22 Wikipedia pages have been improved with the addition of an up-to-date image.
An online meeting of two researchers and two Wikimedians was held the week following the congress, to discuss connections of biological specimens, collectors, and digitised field notebooks relating to Banks and Solander's work in New Zealand and the rest of the world.
Connected Toner and Annie for possible project on women in astronomy.
Erika Milam
Penelope Hardy
Johannes Mattes
Patrick Charbonneau
Richard de Grijs
Adam Sundberg
Edwin Rose
Pascal Marichalar
