It’s called “internet time”––that is, the experience you have when you hunker down in front of your computer to work on a project and hours just fall away like minutes.
Internet time is precisely what happened yesterday at the first Wikipedia-A-Thon hosted in the Electronic Literature Lab. Seven ELL Affiliates sat down at 10:15 a.m. to work on Wikipedia entries for electronic literature authors and works. The next thing they knew, it was 3:00 p.m, and it was time to wind down and report on progress. As we learned during everyone’s report, much got accomplished during that time.
Author sites that needed to be updated, like Judy Malloy’s, Rob Kendall’s, J.
Yellowlees Douglas’, David Kolb’s, and Sarah Smith’s, were tweaked or material planned for addition. Research was begun for the creation of author pages for Mary-Kim Arnold, John McDaid, and Bill Bly. Entries for all authors’ works were begun. I produced the beginnings of a page for Smith’s King of Space.
Participating in the event were ELL Affiliates Scott Rogers (PLU) and Lori Ricigliano (U of PS), who both drove in from Tacoma, and WSUV faculty Ted Fordyce, Will Luers, and John Barber. Nicholas and I led the event, with much assistance from Greg Philbrook, our tech guru, and three of our four undergraduate researchers, Veronica Whiney, Mariah Gwinn, and Katie Bowen.
With months of planning, Nicholas and I felt the event went smoothly, but we did realize that we should have provided the participants with a template for the entries. This bit of structure will help in future Wikipedia-A-Thons we are now plotting to host.