I am a staff member at the Wikimedia Foundation, but this is my personal user account. I only use it for volunteer activities. All wiki edits I make as part of my job are under my organizational user account(s): meta:User:TBurmeister_(WMF).
Wikimedia Hackathon 2022
Contributor Goat
This user contributed to hackathon projects
![](http://up.wiki.x.io/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2c/Doge_homemade_meme_es.jpg/220px-Doge_homemade_meme_es.jpg)
Current wiki work
edit- July-August 2022: Facilitating a "How to Edit Wikipedia" peer learning circle at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.
- August 2022: Helping organize a [meetup in Pittsburgh for Wikimania]. Holler on the talk page if you're interested in attending and/or presenting!
Notes for Learning to Edit Wikipedia
editTopics to potentially cover:
- Navigating the UI, creating an account, understanding how page structure works and the utility or lack thereof of left nav; why there are so many banners and words everywhere
- Link overload and rabbitholes
- Community norms and codes of conduct, things like abbreviations ("NPOV") that relate to core principles
Starting points
editImportant to know: your account has to be 4 days old and you have to have made 10 edits before you are considered autoconfirmed and able to create new articles or move pages.
- Help:Introduction
- Wikipedia:A primer for newcomers
- Wikipedia:Ten simple rules for editing Wikipedia
- Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual - chapter 1 covers "editing for the first time"
- Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Adventure - a perhaps overly-guided newcomer experience
- Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia - very long but comprehensive and reasonably beginner friendly
Neutral point of view
editReferencing and reliable sources
edit- Help:Referencing for beginners
- Wikipedia:Verifiability
- Wikipedia:No original research
- Quiz: Help:Introduction to referencing with Wiki Markup/reliable sources quiz
- How to add citations in VisualEditor: Help:Introduction to referencing with VisualEditor/2
Community norms
editFinding tasks or ways to contribute
edit- Wikipedia:Task Center (for newcomers, supposedly)
- Citation Hunt: https://citationhunt.toolforge.org/en?id=c8bf6b0b
- Stub articles in various topic areas: http://en.m.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Stub_sorting/List_of_stubs
- Articles that need copy-edits: http://en.m.wiki.x.io/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_articles_needing_copy_edit
- Articles that need links to other articles: http://en.m.wiki.x.io/wiki/Category:Orphaned_articles
- Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia#Maintenance tasks, news, and discussions
Things to avoid and be careful about
edit- Help:Your first article#Things to avoid
- Copyright: http://en.m.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Copyright
Finding help
editPast wiki work
editI created the article on Christina Thürmer-Rohr as part of the 2016 Art+Feminism Meetup in Pittsburgh (which I helped organize).
Women of the Whole World and DDR publication copyright
editUpdate: I asked the question below and got answers from kind folks at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Copyright/Archive/2022/04#Copyright_status_for_photos_of_East_German_periodical_cover and on User talk:Triciaburmeister#East German copyright law.
Years ago, I worked in a library, managing periodicals. In the course of my work, I encountered these fabulous publications from the mid-1960s. I took photos / scans of the covers myself. I am now attempting to determine if I can put those images on Commons. This is my journey.
What I want to do:
- Add an article for "Women of the Whole World", the publication of the Women's_International_Democratic_Federation (and mentioned in that article: add a link! also, add a link and a page for FR https://fr.wiki.x.io/wiki/F%C3%A9d%C3%A9ration_d%C3%A9mocratique_internationale_des_femmes).
- Upload the pictures I took of some of the publication covers from the 1960s to Commons.
My copyright / licensing questions and research:
- Can I put the photos I took of the physical magazine covers on Commons? The issues for which I have photos range from 1960 to 1964 at the latest.
- Research: woohoo, I might be in luck! All the images I have are from magazines published in or before 1964. So, per Commons:Licensing: "For works first published before 1964, copyright lasts 28 years after publication, and is therefore currently expired unless the owner filed for renewal during the window between 27 and 28 years after publication."
- Also: these were published in East Berlin, in the former DDR. So even though US copyright law probably doesn't apply...there's not really a government entity that still exists that would have laws governing this copyright...right? This is very fun and complicated.
- Not helpful: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_rules_by_territory/Soviet_Union
- Not helpful: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright_rules_by_territory/Germany
- Read sections of https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_urhg/index.html as suggested by the aforementioned Germany commons copyright rules page. Didn't get a clear answer there, other than determining that this is probably not considered a "press publication" because it's more of a periodical (academic / artistic).
- Okay, so after a bunch of online research I still can't find anything (in English) about what happened to DDR copyright law after German reunification. The safest bet would be to assume that the current German rule of author death + 70 years applies, IF these are not actually public domain. I still feel like they might be? So, now I need to figure out how the concept of "author death" applies to an organization, not a person. Before I do that, I'm going to try to find a copy of one of these issues and see if it has any copyright statement in it. Maybe the communist ladies made this content freely available for all time when they published it, out of an act of solidarity? (a girl can dream)
- German National Library record: https://d-nb.info/010611312
- https://search.iisg.amsterdam/Record/1398843
- https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographic_entity%7Cbibliographic_details%7C3347032
- UN article snapshot from the Wayback Machine
- https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000641475
- Can I put the photos I took of the physical magazine covers on Commons? The issues for which I have photos range from 1960 to 1964 at the latest.
Random articles to improve
edit- Recreate wiki article about David Throckmorton, this awesome Pittsburgh jazz drummer. Use better sources, like:
- Improve Chaff (I can't remember why, but sure)