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Bonus 56: Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia
🕑 Added 2021-10-08 00:25:58 +0000 UTCWikipedia is a treasure trove of late-night rabbit holes on all sorts of topics, including many related to linguistics! But there's more than just the articles themselves -- Wikipedia is also the process of how random people from around the internet work together to figure out what to put in them.
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about improving linguistics content on Wikipedia! We talk about gaps and biases that still exist for linguistics-related articles, getting started with Wikipedia edit-a-thons for linguists (#lingwiki) in 2015, how Wikipedia can fit into academia (from wiki journals to classroom editing assignments), and the part that Wikipedia played in the Lingthusiasm origin story.
Announcements:
There's just under one month left to sign up for the Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack! Become a Ling-phabet patron or higher by November 3, 2021 (anywhere on earth) and we'll send you a pack of four fun Lingthusiasm-related stickers! Plus, if we hit our stretch goal, that'll also include the two bouba and kiki stickers below for all sticker packs. Tea and scarf, sadly, not included, but the usual tier rewards of IPA wall of fame tile and Lingthusiast sticker are. (That could be seven stickers!)
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- Wikipedia
- Superlinguo post 'Before we get to ergativity, unaccusitivity and other kinds of morphosyntactic funtimes…' from Gretchen's Crowdsourced Linguistics project
- Linguistics Wikipedia edit-a-thon slides
- All Things Linguists announcement post for the first edit-a-thon at LSA 2015
- Lauren's round up from the first edit-a-thon on Superlinguo
- Gretchen's round up from the first edit-a-thon on All Things Linguistic
- Lauren's Twitter thread on how Wikipedia pages for languages generally are underdeveloped
- Gretchen's round up from the second edit-a-thon at CoLang 2016 on All Things Linguistic
- Wiki Ed's partnership with Linguistic Society of America
- WikiJournal of Humanities
- A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman) by Lauren Gawne, on WikiJournal of Humanities
- Wikipedia entry for the Yolmo Language
- All Things Linguistics posts tagged 'lingwiki'
- Superlinguo posts tagged 'lingwiki'
You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
To chat about this episode and other lingthusiastic topics with your fellow linguistics fans, join us on the Lingthusiasm Discord server.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles
Comments
I got excited when you mentioned the social aspect of Wikipedia because I remembered having to edit a Wikipedia page for a digital humanities class I attended for my undergrad. Just like in Gretchen's joke in this episode, the Wikipedia page I chose was that of my hometown😂. I was so surprised to find that in the edit view of that Wikipedia page there was a really heated discussion going on about the politics surrounding my hometown. This discussion was not at all visible to the readers of the page because the edits would go through, I suppose, the Wikipedia monitoring board, and by the time the information was published to the page, it had already been fact checked to an extent. This was four years ago so I'm not sure if I'm remembering details correctly. Hoping to be part of one of your editathons in the future! 🥺💚
