Submissions:2016/Editatona: Helping close the gender gap in Wikipedia

Title

Editatona: Helping close the gender gap in Wikipedia

Theme

Outreach

Academic Peer Review option

No

Type of submission

Presentation

Author

Paulina Sánchez

E-mail address

psanchez820@gmail.com

Username

psanchez820

Affiliation

Wikimedia México

Abstract

Like other technological and social projects worldwide, Wikipedia presents a gender gap with respect to the participation of women. It has been previously shown that only 1 in 10 editors of Wikipedia is a woman. It is the community builds Wikipedia; therefore it is necessary for the community to include a diverse group of people so that the content is representative of everyone. Even though there isn’t data about the Wikipedia users in Mexico, we know that of the top 5 contributors to Wikipedia in Spanish in 2016 so far, none are women. A few years ago, there has been a movement in Wikimedia to fight this gender gap; put previous experiences and their application in our contexts have been complicated. For these reasons, Wikimedia México along with other local social groups joined to increase the participation of women in Wikipedia and created the Editatona. An Editatona is a women-only editathon where women are given the space to edit articles on Wikipedia that are relevant to them. The topics range from science, technology, history, human rights, etc. Since its inception in 2015, the Editatonas have been successful in Mexico and have also been a model that has grown and has been replicated in other countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, Spain, Perú, and Uruguay, among others. In this talk we want to show what we have learned, the challenges, and other elements that could be helpful and inspiring for other projects with similar goals.

Length of presentation

30 mins

Special schedule requests

None

Preferred room size

100

Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?

Maybe

Interested attendees

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1. KellyDoyle (talk) 18:49, 30 August 2016 (EDT)
2. Anything to help bridge the gaps. Cheers! Checkingfax (talk) 04:46, 1 September 2016 (EDT)