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, is correctable. But the issue needs a bright light focused on it and a village committed 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 (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 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:

• In order to reach its goal of increasing the number of women's biographies, WiR believes we need a global campaign involving the Wikimedia village -- not just en-Wikipedia, but all language Wikipedias, as well as WikiData and Commons.
• The campaign needs the right title; Wikimedians: name it!
• Examples of campaigns which WiR would like to emulate include Wiki Loves Monuments and ArtAndFeminism.
• GLAM, Education, Chapters, and User Groups: WiR would benefit from the ideas, the connections, and the support of these various 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 needs a technical coordinator.
• 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.
• How do we add in quality measures for a project focused on new article creation (Stub-class/Start-class articles)?
• Bots: WiR's articles are generated by humans. Let's address bots before someone start using one indiscriminately to create thousands of sub-stubs.
• WikiData: Who is creating the WikiData entry for the newly-created Wikipedia article?
• 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)