User:Nsenaratna/sandbox/Sorry

Sorry Wikipedia (June 8)

Sorry, for the long statement. Thank you for considering reading it.

On June 7, I was blocked "indefinitely from editing certain areas of the encyclopaedia for failing to communicate".

I agree with your action. The decision to block me was reasonable. The goal of this statement is not to counter/appeal this decision. It is to describe my actions that led-up to the blocking. And also to seek advise on how to proceed.

What I was trying to do

I have access to some datasets about Sri Lankan, including:

1) Administrative Regions, and various Statistics about them (Source: http://statistics.gov.lk) 2) Election Results (Source: http://elections.gov.lk) 3) Information about members of parliament (source: https://www.parliament.lk)

While some of the information about have corresponding wikipedia pages, others do not. For example, the smallest Administrative Region in Sri Lanka is the Grama Niladari Division (GND). While wikipedia has pages for (some) Divisional Secretariats (one level above GNDs), there are no pages for GNDs. Hence, I wanted to create pages for these.

In addition to name, parent, location information, I also had access to some statistics about the GNDs. E.g. Population, Demographics. Hence, I wrote a script that creates and uploads a wikipedia page for GNDs. Note, there are over 15,000 GNDs, hence, my choice for an automated method.

I had similar motives for Election Results and MPs.

Mistakes I made

In retrospect, I should have done a lot more reading about how to create wikipedia content. Instead, I took a "move fast" approach, and ended-up breaking a bunch of things.

• I should have create my pages in a sandbox, and then uploaded a complete version once I had added all the content, and checked it. Instead, (early on) I uploaded a stream of incomplete revisions. For example, several of my articles were in a "title only" state. I moved to a sandbox later on, but my earlier edits were on the "live" article.

• I was not rigorous in the quality of citations. See below for more details.

• Added various categories, without reading guidelines for categories.

• I was not familiar with the usage of "Stub" and "In creation". And in the process created a lot of trouble for admins.

• To make things worse, I didn't communicate with the reviewers and admins, while they pointed out these mistakes.

(PS: There might be other mistakes. This is not meant to be complete)

Problems I face, and need advise on

• The administrative region information I have does not have a corresponding source online. The data resulted from a collaboration between the World Bank and the Sri Lanka Department of Statistics. The World Bank researcher originally uploaded the dataset to https://github.com/alexstorer/srilanka, from where I downloaded the data. The data is no longer available here, but several websites use this data, including http://www.statistics.gov.lk/PopHouSat/CPH2012Visualization/htdocs/index.php. How should I share this data? While I don't have a rigiourous citations, it is clearly useful.

• I used maps from USGS (https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov) to computer the elevation of Sri Lankan locations. To find the elevation, I took the TIFF files for Sri Lanka and extracted the elevations by location. Hence, there is an unreferenced intimidate step between my source and the wikipedia page. Is this allowed? If so how do I reference this?

Steps Forward

I was adding this information to wikipedia more as a hobby, and not as part of my job. So, I'd be happy to completely give-up. But given that the data might be useful, I'd prefer if there is a path forward.

For me, there are several steps forward.

• DO NOTHING + LEAVE. I remain blocked. And the community will eventually clean-up / update my pages.

• CLEANUP + LEAVE. I remove all the content that I've create. Afterwards, cease to add anything further.

• FIND SOME WAY TO ADD THIS DATA. This is where I need your advise.

Please let me know what works best. As I said, I'm happy with any of these options.

Thanks! NSenaratna