16 March 2022
Getting Ready for Black Theatre and the Archive: Making Women Visible, 1900-1950
Following on from last week’s post, have you signed up for our Wikithon already? If you are interested in Black theatre history and making women visible, and want to learn how to edit Wikipedia, please do join us online, on Monday 28th March, from 10am to 1.30pm BST, over Zoom.
Remember the first step is to book your place here, via Eventbrite.
Finding Sources in The British Newspaper Archive
We are grateful to the British Newspaper Archive and Findmypast for granting our participants access to their resources on the day of the event. If you’d like to learn more about this Archive beforehand, there are some handy guides to how to do this below.
I used a quick British Newspaper Archive Search to look for information on Una Marson, a playwright and artist whose work is very important in the timeframe of this Wikithon (1900-1950). As you can see, there were over 1000 results. I was able to view images of Una at gallery openings, art exhibitions and read all about her work.
Findmypast focuses more on legal records of people, living and dead. It’s a dream website for genealogists and those interested in social history. They’ve recently uploaded the results of the 1921 census, so there is a lot of material about people’s lives in the early 20th century.
Here’s how to get started with Findmypast in 15 minutes, using a series of ‘how to’ videos. This handy blog post offers a beginner's guide on how to search Findmypast's family records, and you can always use Findmypast’s help centre to seek answers to frequently asked questions.
Wikipedia Preparation
If you’d like to get a head start, you can download and read our handy guide to setting up your Wikipedia account, which you can access here. There is also advice available on creating your account, Wikipedia's username policy and how to create your user page.
Once you have done that, or if you already have a Wikipedia account, please join our event dashboard and go through the introductory exercises, which cover:
- Wikipedia Essentials
- Editing Basics
- Evaluating Articles and Sources
- Contributing Images and Media Files
- Sandboxes and Mainspace
- Sources and Citations
- Plagiarism
These are all short exercises that will help familiarise you with Wikipedia and its processes. Don’t have time to do them? We get it, and that’s totally fine - we’ll cover the basics on the day too!
You may want to verify your Wikipedia account - this function exists to make sure that people are contributing responsibly to Wikipedia. The easiest and swiftest way to verify your account is to do 10 small edits. You could do this by correcting typos or adding in missing dates. However, another way to do this is to find articles where citations are needed, and add them via Citation Hunt. For further information on adding citations, watching this video may be useful.
Happier with an asynchronous approach?
If you cannot join the Zoom event on Monday 28th March, but would like to contribute, please do check out and sign up to our dashboard. The online dashboard training exercises will be an excellent starting point. From there, all of your edits and contributions will be registered, and you can be proud of yourself for making the world of Wikipedia a better place, in your own time.
This post is by Wikimedian in Residence Dr Lucy Hinnie (@BL_Wikimedian).