Getting the Last Laugh

A year spent adding America’s forgotten burlesque comediennes to Wikipedia

Amy Barlow

Rhode Island College

History Camp Boston

March 16, 2019

Opening Act - RICH Mini Grant - 2018

Jack Cameron in Tramp, Tramp, Tramp (Bert's K.C., 1925)

Kammerer and Howland on the Loew's circuit (Unity NY, 1915)

Mollie Williams postcard (Strand NY, 1924)

Rose Sydell in the New York Clipper, October 22, 1910

Wikipedia's Interrelated Content Policies

• No original research (NOR)
• Verifiability
• Notability 

Wikipedia's Software and Technoculture

• Coded editing, reference conventions, and manual of style
• Review periods, article destabilization, and deletion
• "Source this" brogramming culture

Citing on command in the Wikipedia Help Forum at 10pm on September 9. 2018

Actionable Steps

• Ask yourself if the subject is truly worthy of its own article.

• Use and cite secondary sources for context even if they don’t include direct references to your subject.

• Add more references than you ever thought necessary.

• Register for trial subscriptions to expensive databases - newspapers.com, ancestry.com. Or visit academic libraries and pilfer content from their databases.

• Locate material for External Links as further evidence of notability.

  • Scour digital libraries: dp.la, NYPL digital collections, college and university digital repositories, internet archive, etc.

  • Digitize artifacts. Apply creative commons and other types of open access licensing and upload to Wikimedia Commons.

  • Add content to other open and crowd-sourced sites, for example IMDB.

Discussion