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
Readers of Wikipedia can only read the articles which exist at an given time. If an article is missing, it can't be read. If 84.5% of the biographies on the en-Wikipedia are about men, then Wikipedia is presenting a skewed view of the world's history to its readers. If the percentage is inaccurate and if the error is based on omission or systemic bias, we can "move the needle". All it needs is a bright light focused on the issue and a village committed to change.
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 (Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, user:Rosiestep). WiR's scope focuses on increasing the number of women's biographies 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 women 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 (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 has had its share of struggles. In its first 24 hours, it 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. WiR has weathered struggles, it has created hundreds of articles, but now it needs a village -- the entire Wikimedia village -- to change the history book which aims to contain the sum of all human knowledge, the one called Wikipedia.
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 to include, project design, branding, organization, talkpage issues, collaboration with other WikiProjects, and how membership has reacted to change)
- Provide an outcomes projection for WiR's one year mark
- Make a call for action to the Wikimedia village
The presentation's title, "Women... it takes a village", is apt as:
- WiR requires a global "campaign" involving the entire Wikimedia village in order to achieve its goal
- WiR seeks local and global advocacy, including that of Usergroups and Chapters
- Wiki Loves Monuments and ArtAndFeminism are examples of global campaigns which WiR would like to emulate but needs you to make it happen
What else does WiR need?
- A title -- to be determined by the village
- 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: WiR is ideally coupled with the efforts of GLAM and Education in that we need the ideas, the connections, and the support of each.
I truly believe our society will be judged by WiR's legacy.
- Length of presentation
- 15 or 30 minutes; more time will allow for interaction
- Special schedule requests
- None
- Will you attend WikiConference USA if your submission is not accepted?
- Yes
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