Dreamyshade

I'm Britta Gustafson. I have a website with some projects. I also started a LocalWiki for Isla Vista, CA, part of a separate wiki system that encourages documenting non-notable local topics.

I've been editing Wikipedia since October 2001. In January 2016 I gave a short talk explaining why people should learn more about Wikipedia's history, and you can watch it. There's a community profile about me on the Wikimedia blog, and I contributed to a history of Wikipedia at 20 years old.

Ask me for help with Bay Area editing events

Teaching at a Wikipedia editing event in Berkeley, California. More photos from Wikipedia events.

I like helping with editathon events in the San Francisco Bay Area or virtual, especially ones that work to counter Wikipedia's systemic bias. If you're organizing one, post on my talk page or email me! I can do things like:

• Plan how to set up and manage a Zoom-based workshop — see my videocall editathon checklist. I can also set up outdoor Commons photowalks.
• Promote of the event to SF-area Wikipedians — for example, emailing the Wikimedia-SF mailing list and creating a geonotice.
• Set up a Wikipedia meetup page and Outreach dashboard page to help track attendees and outcomes. Example meetup pages: Black Campus Movement @ Oakland Public Library, May 2021, Art+Feminism SFMOMA March 2021.
• Prepare a list of articles to edit, expand, and create, to help people get started. Example topic lists I've created about areas I'm interested in:
  • Healthcare projects
  • Tattoo history project
  • Tech culture project
  • Anti-circumvention article project
• Give a "secret rules of Wikipedia editing" intro presentation (PDF). You are also welcome to reuse this and give it yourself.
• Mentor new editors by answering their questions and helping them find interesting things to edit.
• If in person: I can create accounts for new editors at events to bypass the limit on number of accounts created per IP per day (I have the event coordinator permission).

I do this work for free for institutions/organizations/groups that have tiny budgets, like public libraries.

Articles

Some topics where I wrote an initial version:

• 2001-2002: I started editing Wikipedia because there wasn't an article for harp. I made one! There weren't many articles back then, so I also made assorted new entries such as Pablo Neruda, Alien and Sedition Acts, and driftwood. This was back when creating an encyclopedia from scratch felt more like a lark than an achievable concept, so why not create a bunch of articles with whatever you learned from your homework.
• 2004: Shrine Auditorium, a landmark in my hometown
• 2006: Joel Sternfeld, a photographer whose work I appreciated
• 2007: Derek McCulloch (comics), the author of an interesting graphic novel about Stagger Lee and American music history
• 2012: Pinboard (website), the independent successor to a website I used to work for
• 2014: Outreachy, a program that supports underrepresented people interested in working on open source software
• 2017: Another editor started Hodgkins and Skubic House (a Modernist house designed for a lesbian couple in 1967) based on my LocalWiki article
• 2022: Afro-American Association (a gap in coverage of the Black Power movement) and Amund Dietzel (a gap in coverage of tattoo history)
• 2023: Weston Havens House, a Modernist house designed for a gay man in 1940
• 2024: Rustls, an open source software project that aims to improve internet security

Draft: Trans Lifeline sources.

Photos

I like documenting local historic buildings and landmarks, so I've contributed photos to Historic-Cultural Monuments in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, San Francisco Designated Landmarks, and List of Oakland Designated Landmarks. I'm also a judge for Wiki Loves Monuments in the United States.

Some photos I've taken

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  Puente Hills Landfill, the largest landfill in the United States
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  Santa Fe Arroyo Seco Railroad Bridge, the tallest, longest, and oldest railroad span in Los Angeles
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  A WWII munitions bunker from Marine Corps Air Station Santa Barbara, reused as a storage facility for University of California Santa Barbara
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  Mescalitan Island, a historic Chumash Indian village site that was leveled to provide fill for the Santa Barbara Airport
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  A free box in the majority-student community of Isla Vista, California
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  An elaborate gas station built in 1929 next to the Ellwood Oil Field in Goleta, California
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  Workers cleaning up the Refugio oil spill in 2015 in Santa Barbara County, California
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  The first Hodgkins and Skubic House is on the left, built in 1957 for a lesbian couple in Isla Vista, California
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  The Lexington Club, a lesbian bar in the Mission District of San Francisco from 1997-2015
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  I. Magnin Building, a former department store in Oakland, California