The ability to collaborate and build upon previous work is fundamental to the development of human knowledge and technology. Much of the work I do would be impossible without robust freedoms to read, experiment, and tell others about what I found. To protect these freedoms and ensure that others have the same rights, I participate in the free culture movement both inside and outside academia. As an example, you’ll see a lot of my work available under licenses such as the Gnu General Public License (GPL) and the Creative Commons ShareAlike (CC-SA) licenses which guarantee that others can make the most use of it for whatever purposes they need.

Free culture includes free software, and as a developer I contribute to a number of projects with linguistic and non-linguistic topics. I am working to port the Force Alignment and Vowe Extraction (FAVE) toolkit to Python 3 and package it for distribution through the Python Package Index. FAVE is a popular tool in sociolinguistic work, so keeping it working is important for reproducing previous work and maintaining workflows in particular labs. It is also published under a GPL which allows me to make these changes and distribute them to my colleagues for testing even before they get accepted into the main program. I’ve likewise contributed code to MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, and I currently lead a project to extend the software so that Wikipedia and other wikis can create interactive chess content on articles and pages. By participating in this project, I’m not only helping improve the experience of millions of readers, I ensure that the code can be reused and maintained in my absence. The ability to join and work on the MediaWiki software has also taught me about writing production-quality code, and because of the free culture I had that opportunity.

Much of my free time is spent volunteering on the English Wikipedia. In that role I have created or expanded articles on linguistics topics such as Phonetics, Electromagnetic Articulography, and the Linguistics Society of America. I have written a number of articles which have been evaluated by the community as featured articles including Black American Sign Language which was featured on the front page as Today’s Featured Article for November 18, 2016. In light of my content work and other contributions I was elected an administrator in January 2020. In August 2021 I was named to the Wikimedia Foundation regional grants committee which oversees the disbursment of funds to organizations and individuals in the United States and Canada such as the Wiki Loves Monuments photo competition or funding outreach events at universities and libraries.

I also work to bring more linguists and subject experts into the editorial community as content on indiginous langauges and theoretical topics can be hard to write about for those without domain knowledge. With Gretchen McCulloch and others, I have helped organize and provide technical support to #LingWiki events such as the 2019 Year of Indigenous Languages series of edit-a-thons. As part of #LingWiki I have helped organize an annual edit-a-thon at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeeting, and I have provided support to edit-a-thons organized by the Committee on Gender Equity in Linguistics and teh Committee on LGBTQ+ Issues in Linguistics. If you’ve been to an edit-a-thon on linguistics topics, you’ve probably met me! And if you haven’t stop by the next one and say hi!

With expertise and access to a wide array of sources, academics are in a unique position to help Wikipedia editors. Much of what I do isn’t even writing articles, but providing sources for those [citation needed] tags, fixing typos, or leaving comments on the talk page to note what topics still need to be covered. Plus the people are friendly and care about sharing knowledge with others. If you’re interested in volunteering, get in touch on my talk page and I’ll help you out! You may also find my quick start guide for linguists useful too.