Closing the Gender Gap on Wikipedia: Art + Feminism Edit-a-thon
WashU Libraries organized the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon workshop on March 23 at the Kranzberg Art & Architecture Library to guide participants through a collaborative editing session to research and improve articles. Art + Feminism is a global initiative that works to close information gaps related to gender, feminism, and the arts on Wikipedia.
The workshop was led by AJ Robinson, subject librarian for Islamic studies, South Asian studies, and women, gender, & sexuality studies, who guided the attendees through the process of identifying pages on women artists, editing for clarity and to remove sexist language, adding links and citations, and incorporating information from reliable sources to expand the articles. Jennifer Akins, art & architecture subject librarian, and Rina Vecchiola, head of arts & area studies, helped organize the event.
Robinson has created the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon LibGuide as a handy reference guide to assist those who wish to research, edit, and draft articles on Wikipedia. They encourage new editors to “be bold” when they see something that needs updating. “This is a collaborative project, so it’s not required to know the manual of style right away. There is an active community of editors eager to keep improving the encyclopedia. New edits can bring attention to the topic, and someone else might add more updates because of your edit,” said Robinson.
Workshop participants worked on editing and updating Wikipedia articles on diverse women artists and designers, including Myra Greene, Kruttika Susarla, Tomoko Miho, and others.
“I was motivated to come here and learn more about editing and adding pages on women designers and to gain a robust understanding of the content on Wikipedia. I am going to read Wikipedia with more criticality as the workshop has given me new lenses that I didn’t have before,” said Aggie Toppins, associate professor of communication design.
Assistant Professor of communication design Megan Irwin said it was helpful to learn how to create more visibility for pages on women designers on Wikipedia.
Since 2014, over 40,000 people at more than 1,700 events around the world have participated in edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 370,000 articles in over 27 languages on Wikipedia and its sister projects.