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

According to WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force, 84.5% of the biographies on the en-Wikipedia are about men. The omission of articles about women, sometimes referred to as systemic bias, can be corrected if we focus a bright light on the issue and if the village commits itself to improving the imbalance.

WikiProject Women in Red (WiR) was created to address content gender gap... a form of systemic bias. WiR was launched in July at Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City, Mexico by Roger Bamkin (user:Victuallers) and me (user:Rosiestep). Its mission is to ensure that notable women receive the recognition that they are due for their accomplished historical achievements, which in turn will inspire future generations of women and men. This aim will be accomplished by raising awareness and developing more women's biographies, which presently account for 15% of the existing biographies on the en-Wikipedia. These biographies in turn will highlight the books women wrote, the art they created, the conferences they organized, and so on; those articles also need to be written.

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 (Wikidata entries with no en-Wikipedia article) through a collaboration with WikiProject X. WiR's members update a list of newly created articles. WiR tracks events and published articles related to the project's scope. WiR is young and strong. In its first 24 hours, it dealt with a rename (from WikiProject XX). In its first 2 weeks, the project created almost 500 new articles. In its first month, it encountered a formal merge proposal to become a subgroup of the newly-established, WikiProject Women.

Presentation objectives:

• Review WiR's scope: women's biographies and women's works.
• Review lessons learned during the project's first 90 days to include, project design, branding, organization, talkpage issues, collaboration with other WikiProjects, and membership
• Provide an outcomes projection for WiR's one year mark
• Request the community's support in developing a campaign to further our work. We are hopeful that a village-wide campaign will catapult WiR, addressing strategy, developing best practices, and amplifying communication.

It takes a village:

• GLOBAL FOCUS: In order to reach its goal of increasing the number of women's biographies, the Wikimedia village -- all language Wikipedias, as well as WikiData and Commons -- must embark on a global campaign.
• TITLE: The campaign needs the right title; Wikimedians: name it!
• EXAMPLES: This campaign will be an amalgamation of the global campaign of Wiki Loves Monuments with the woman-minded focus of ArtAndFeminism.
• GLAM, EDUCATION, CHAPTERS, USER GROUPS: WiR would benefit from the ideas, the connections, and the support of these communities. How can we partner with you?
• TECH SUPPORT: WiR's talkpage abounds with discussions centered on tech issues. The WiR tech wish list is long. WiR's articles are generated by humans. Let's address bots before someone starts using one indiscriminately to create thousands of sub-stubs.
• PROMOTION: WiR needs local and global advocacy, branding, and promotion. It needs internal and external branding, promotion, marking coordination. Editors choose what they edit. If they don't know about a particular initiative, or don't understand that Wikipedia considers it to be a high priority, they won't give it significant attention. Other important components are press coverage and social media expertise. This campaign needs to be not only informational but inspirational as today's readers are tomorrow's editors.
• QUALITY: How do we add in quality measures for a project focused on new article creation (Stub-class/Start-class articles)?
• WIKIDATA: Who is creating the WikiData entry for the newly-created Wikipedia article?
• WIGI: Tracking outcomes with Wikipedia Gender Index (WIGI).
• COMMONS: (a) creating articles about notable women who have an image but no article; (b) uploading images to Commons of notable women, creating the biography, and inserting the image into the new article

Join in the conversation at WikiConference USA and/or at Women in Red.

Length of presentation

15 or 30 minutes (30 minutes will allow for interaction with the attendees).

Special schedule requests

None

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

Yes

Interested attendees

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1. Tokyogirl79 (talk) 05:03, 20 August 2015 (EDT)
2. Gamaliel (talk) 19:53, 21 August 2015 (EDT)
3. Ipigott (talk) 08:30, 22 August 2015 (EDT)