Submissions:2015/Women... it takes a village

Title

Women... it takes a village

Theme

Advocacy & Outreach

Type of submission

Presentation

Author

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight

E-mail address

rosiestep.wiki@gmail.com

Username

Rosiestep

Affiliation

Wikipedia; WikiWomen's User Group

Abstract

Wikipedia readers can only read the Wikipedia articles which Wikipedia has at an given moment. If an article is missing, it can't be read. If 85% of the biographies on the en-Wikipedia are about men, then readers are mostly reading about men's "thumbprints" on our world. This gender imbalance is called systemic bias. WikiProject Women in Red (WiR) was created to address this issue.

WiR was launched in July at Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City, Mexico by Roger Bamkin (user:Victuallers) and me. WiR's scope centers on increasing the number of women's biographies -- "moving the needle" -- from 15% to a larger percentage of Wikipedia's biographies. WiR also seeks to increase the number of articles about women's works, broadly construed, to include the books they wrote, the art they created, the conferences they organized, and so on. WiR maintains lists of crowd-sourced redlinks organized by occupation, nationality, and such. It provides curated groups of redlinked articles to work on through a collaboration with other women's WikiProjects, such as Women artists, Women scientists, and Women writers. It encourages translation from other language Wikipedias through a collaboration with WikiProject Intertranswiki. It streams a Wikidata feed of articles with Wikidata entries but no en-Wikipedia article through a collaboration with WikiProject X. Its members update a non-automated, permanent list of newly created articles. WiR tracks events and published articles related to the project's scope.

In its first 24 hours, WiR was renamed (from WikiProject XX). In its first 30 days, after having created hundreds of new biographies, it encountered a formal merge proposal to become a subgroup of the newly-established, WikiProject Women. It has endured a lot, it has accomplished a lot, but now it needs a village -- the entire Wikimedia village -- to move it forward.

The objectives of this presentation include:

• Review WiR's scope, why we need to address women's biographies and women's works.
• Review lessons learned during the project's first 90 days, for example, project design, branding, organization, talkpage issues, collaboration with other WikiProjects, and the affect of all of this on membership)
• Provide an outcomes projection for the one year mark
• Make a call for action. WiR seeks community, local and global advocacy, including that of Usergroups and Chapters, to promote a broad campaign (its name TBD by the community), following the likes of Wiki Loves Monuments or MonmouthpediA, supporting WiR's scope.

The presentation's title, "Women... it takes a village", is apt as WiR needs a global "campaign" involving the entire Wikimedia village in order to achieve its goals. The campaign needs:

• Community support from editors. Editors choose what they edit. If they don't know about the campaign, they won't work on it. If they know about it, and if it is presented in an attractive way, and if it is fun, they may decide to participate.
• Tech support: The WiR talkpage abounds with discussions centered on tech issues. The WiR tech Wish List is long. We need tech support.
• Outreach: The campaign needs promotion and advocacy through the press and social media. Today's readers are tomorrow's editors; the campaign's promotion has to be both inward and outward facing.
• GLAM: The WiR campaign is ideally coupled with the efforts of GLAM and Education in that we need the ideas, the connections, and the support of each.

At its center, WiR deals with systemic bias. Its legacy will be judged by the number of additional women's "thumbprints" (articles) added to the sum of all human knowledge. Like it or not, we will be judged by our efforts dealing with this issue.

Length of presentation

15 or 30 minutes, depending on the conference's schedule

Special schedule requests

None

Will you attend WikiConference USA if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

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