Grants:TPS/Gretchenmcc/Linguistic Society of America 2017 panel and editathon/Report

Event name

Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Austin, Texas.

Participant connections

Editathon: 23 people; 23 articles edited (several repeat participants from previous lingwiki editathons). Highlights: two participants who'd been new participants at previous lingwiki editathons had continued editing since then and were able to take on a leadership role with other new participants. The editathon also connected a new editor who's a researcher and speaker of Chatino with User:Babbage who's experienced in making language maps - together they made a language map for the Chatino article.

Panel talk: about 120 people in the audience - about a dozen people came up to talk with me afterwards or at other times during the conference about the talk.

Talked with Wiki Ed representative (who had booth in exhibit hall) and people on committees on the status of women in linguistics and on ethnic diversity in linguistics about making a list of notable linguists who don't have bios on Wikipedia or whose bios need significant improvement so that Wiki Ed can direct graduate seminars looking to learn more about the career trajectory of linguists to this list of bios to improve.

Currently discussing ways of making editathon easier to attract drop-in participants for future years, perhaps by having it over a longer period in exhibit hall rather than a conference room? Now that there are several regular LSA attendees with experience editing Wikipedia, we could have a rotating staff for it.

Outcome

Option 1: Shared Experience: What is one way you shared something from your experience with your community (either locally or globally), after the event?

Add a link here to a blog post or newsletter you wrote about your participation afterwards, or to a meet-up you organized to share your experience with your local community.

Wrote a blog post on All Things Linguistic with the results of the editathon (includes links to all 20 articles edited including notably the map of Chatino.)
Fifteen tweets about the editathon and the importance of Wikipedia editing for linguists by me and six other linguists on the #lingwiki and #lsa2017 hashtags, which also inspired a non-attending linguist to create an article: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15]
Wiki Ed also wrote a blog post.
The Ling Space posted all the slides online from the panel and reblogged my blog post.

Finances

Flight: booked for me by Wikimedia, budgeted $455 USD ended up costing $671.89 USD
Cab from airport: budgeted $40 USD, was unexpectedly able to get a ride for most of the trips - actual cost $22.81 CAD = $17 USD - receipt emailed to Wikimedia
Food: $51 CAD = $38 USD (budgeted $40 USD) - photo of receipt emailed to Wikimedia.

Request permission to shift funds for cab to flight cost, and to not claim reimbursement of food receipt in lieu of paying $10 in wire transfer fee to transfer $119 in flight overage cost to Wikimedia (or worse, having both me and Wikimedia pay wire transfer fees to transfer funds to each other). Last grant, I was criticized for over-estimating the flight cost, but then I was more conservative this time and sure enough the price went up, so I'm really not sure what the best course of action is with respect to flight estimates and grant applications. Any advice on this would be appreciated.

Note for future events: When asked, people expressed a strong interest in having healthy snacks in addition to chocolate, so I bought trail mix as well. However, the chocolate was eaten much faster. People are inaccurate reporters of their own eating habits, especially in January. Chocolate was on sale for 50% off so I bought twice as much, which was all eaten before the healthy snacks. Next time, just get more chocolate.

Amount left over

No grant money leftover. Flight cost was more than projected, but was booked directly by Wikimedia.

Anything else

The editathon slides that I've now been using for several years are still at bit.ly/lingwiki and bit.ly/lingwikisurvey. The panel slides that I delivered this time are at bit.ly/lingwiki-lsa2017