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What happens when a WikiWoman meets a WikiLibrarian? An editathon on women’s biographies, of course! Or at least this is what happened on May 4th at Biblioteca Salaborsa, one of the most well-known libraries in Bologna, Italy.

Wikimedia Italia organized its first event at Biblioteca Salaborsa on April 20th, an introductory workshop led by wikipedian Piero Grandesso. Thanks to the work of the librarian and wikimedian Virginia Gentilini, it was possible to renew the collaboration and organize a second event.

We had thirteen participants, some of whom came after attending the first workshop. We created five new articles and improved two existing pages, paying homage in this way to seven amazing Italian women (and also a French one!) who didn’t have the space they deserved on Wikipedia.

It is always a little shocking to discover how many relevant women are missing from Wikipedia. Amongst the pages we created was one about Hortensia, a late Roman Republic orator and one of the very few women who at that time challenged men’s authority by giving a speech in the Forum. She lived during the civil war that took place after Julius Caesar’s assasination, a period when the Roman Republic was struggling with many war expenses. Hortensia debated in the Roman Forum against a tax imposed on wealthy Roman women, arguing that it was not legitimate to demand that women’s properties finance a war in which they had no active role. Eventually the number of women affected by the tax was reduced.

As one can imagine, we study a lot of Ancient Roman history in Italy. Latin literature and language are also compulsory teachings in some secondary schools. But Hortensia’s page, already in other language versions, was not yet on Italian Wikipedia.

Beside the creation of content on Wikipedia, the editathon was also an occasion to put together and share the different skills and competencies of the organizers. The team was composed of Virginia Gentilini, Wikimedia Italia member Ginevra Sanvitale and Commons and Italian Wikipedia sysop Elitre, who worked together, each one according to her area of expertise. We also had a chance to learn and confront a number of related Wikimedia topics.

Finally, the role played by Salaborsa as a center of cultural creation and knowledge circulation was very important.

In 2012, Wikimedia Italia reached out to Italian librarians and libraries for the first time, discovering many possible ways of collaboration. Wikipedia workshops for patrons of libraries are one of these, and they are particularly interesting because of their cultural and social implications. Working on Wikipedia in libraries can bridge the gap between print, traditional resources of information and the lively and active community of Wikipedians. But it can contribute to bridge the Wikipedia Gender Gap too: public libraries in Italy are traditionally used by women more than men, and they can therefore be a perfect place to find women interested in connecting their love of reading to a more participative and empowering way to enrich their cultural life. More women attended the editathon indeed, showing enthusiam and asking for further opportunities to work in this direction.

Librarians in Italy are traditionally mostly women too. It will be interesting to see how many successful ways of collaboration we’ll manage to find, both working directly with patrons inside the libraries, and at a more general level of interaction between bibliographic data held by National Libraries and Wiki Projects. There is such a large amount of useful work to do!

Ginevra Sanvitale, Wikimedia Italia. With the collaboration of Virginia Gentilini
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(This is a guest post by Ms. Netha Hussein, a Wikipedia contributor from India who regularly contributes to Malayalam Wikipedia, among other projects.)

March 2013 was a busy month for women Wikimedians in India, as we conducted various events, such as edit-a-thons and workshops to celebrate the presence of women in Wikimedia projects. The women Wikimedians, members of the Wikimedia India Chapter and the Access to Knowledge Team, brainstormed about the possible events, which we wanted to conduct to encourage women to participate and to increase the quality of articles related to Indian women in Wikipedias in English and the Indian languages. We decided to conduct the workshops and meetups in various Indian cities, in addition to online edit-a-thons.

Women participants of the Wikipedia Workshop, Bangalore

We created a co-ordination page on English Wikipedia and added suggestions for articles to edit. We invited participants to join the edit-a-thon by spreading the word on mailing lists, social media networks and blogs. The Times of India published a feature about the event, which attracted many newbies to participate in it. We also created separate pages for offline events taking place in parallel, and we added a summary of the events to the main page. The participants of the edit-a-thon signed up on the co-ordination page, where we also added the details and status of Women’s History Month events happening in various Indian language Wikipedias.

The inaugural event took place on International Women’s Day (March 8) at Nirmala Institute of Education, Goa. Out of 100 participants who attended the event, 90 were female. Veteran Wikimedians Rohini and Nitika conducted a basic Wikipedia editing workshop. The event also set off the two-day long online edit-a-thon in which fourteen editors participated. Among those who participated in the program were homemakers, students and professionals. Rohini took charge as the Chairperson of the special interest group (SIG) for Gendergap at the Wikimedia Chapter India on the day of the workshop (March 8). She plans to conduct more workshops for women in the future.

Organizers subsequently held a series of events at two venues in Bengaluru and one in Ernakulam. Experienced Wikimedians Pavithra and Nikita Belavate led the workshops in Bengaluru. The workshop also served as an occasion for editors living in and around Bengaluru to meet. The Ernakulam event was aimed at increasing the participation of women in Malayalam Wikipedia and was led by Wikimedian Ditty Mathew. Around 40 women participated in the three edit-a-thons. A Wikipedia Academy with 9 participants was conducted in Hyderabad. Led by Anupama Srinivas, the last of all events took place on 30 March, 2012, in Chennai.

Nikita, who led the Bangalore event, said she was filled with happiness watching the exuberance in the eyes of women participants who edited and saved their edits live on Wikipedia. “This year’s Women’s History month makes me once again believe in the power of women and honing it by empowering them, Wikiwomenising them,” said Nikita.

Participants of the Bangalore workshop organized by FSMK

Vishnu Vardhan, the Program Director of the Access to Knowledge team, was with the WikiWomen throughout the editathon, connecting people, planning events and urging them to contribute. He encouraged his mother, wife and female cousins to contribute to Wikipedia.

“I wish more of us took the initiative of involving the women in our life to share their knowledge on Wikipedia and truly make the Wikipedias the sum of all human knowledge,” he said. Harriet, one of the key organizers of the women’s day events, believes that the Indian Wikimedia community has gained momentum in favor of bridging the gender gap because of this event. She urged the Indian community to follow this success and to increase the participation of women in the Wikimedia movement. Though she could not attend the events in person, she ensured her participation in the edit-a-thon by arranging the logistics, monitoring the coordination page and suggesting changes.

The events had good participation from men as well. Among the 14 participants who signed up on English Wikipedia, 5 were men. In Malayalam Wikipedia, 18 out of the 26 participants who signed up for the online edit-a-thon were men. Dileep Unnikrishan, a male participant of the edit-a-thon, and a fan of Wikipedia, participated in the Ernakulam event because he was curious to find out how Wikipedia works. With women participants, he edited three articles and found it exciting to “be a part of the movement that has brought about a knowledge revolution in the world. The best thing I noticed about Wiki is that it has a peer-to-peer way of organization, which makes it warm and welcoming to newbies like me,” said Dileep.

The Indian WikiWomen are planning to conduct similar events in the future to increase the participation of women in Wikipedia and its sister projects. We are hopeful we will bridge the gender gap in the Indian Wikimedia community by conducting outreach programs, increasing awareness about free knowledge programs among women and conducting action-oriented events targeting women.

Netha Hussain

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English

The GLAM movement in Catalonia has been very active the past few years. Edit-a-thons and workshops have taken place in all kinds of institutions, but the one that was held this April in Fundació Miró in Barcelona (Catalonia), co-organized by Amical Viquipèdia, was really special: the edit-a-thon lasted for 35 consecutive hours, split in three session. Moreover, during the first hours of the edit-a-thon, Catalan Wikipedia reached 400.000 articles – a magical coincidence that made the event even more special.

35 consecutive hours editing Wikipedia? It IS possible!

Fundació Miró’s Espai 13 is celebrating the 35th anniversary since its creation. Fundació Miró had already collaborated with Wikipedia back in 2011, when they hosted an edit-a-thon about the Catalan artist Joan Miró. But this time Amical Viquipèdia and Fundació Miró agreed to make a huge celebration to commemorate the event: 35 consecutive hours editing Wikipedia.

First session of the Miró Editathon

During that time, around fifty Art and Philosophy university students from all over the country, and around fifteen volunteer Wikipedians, gathered in the workplace to start or expand articles on 300 artists who have exhibited at Espai 13, Fundació Miró’s space dedicated to promoting young artists’ work.

To start the event, we held a press conference at 12am on Friday, April 12th, 2013. The first shift of participants was already prepared to start working on the 300 proposed articles about the Espai 13 artists – and some of those artists were present at the event too, so the students were able to take freely licensed pictures of them and post them to Wikimedia Commons. The 26 Art and Philosphy students who participated in the first turn, plus the 5 volunteer Wikipedians who were there to help them, stayed until 10pm – that is, 10 hours. The second turn comprised a similar number of participants. They worked admirably during the whole night without rest until 10am next day, when the third shift took over and stayed until the end of the edit-a-thon eleven hours later, finishing at 9pm on April 13th, 2013.

The students and the volunteer Wikipedians didn’t just write on Wikipedia – there were parallel activities scheduled in order to get out, relax the mind and get ready for more work on articles. In addition to lunch and dinner at the magnificient gardens of the museum, those activities included a guided visit to the museum at midnight, conferences by Wikipedians, a couple of performances from two of the artists that were being written about, and two yoga sessions –one of them being held at 6am in the morning at Fundació Miró’s balcony, when Barcelona was waking up and the sight was breathtaking.

Catalan Wikipedia reaches 400.000 articles

Nonetheless, the edit-a-thon at Fundació Miró was not the only celebration of the day. As luck would have it, the 400,000th article in Catalan Wikipedia was written during the event. Catalan language is the 75th most spoken language in the world with 11,5 millions speakers, yet Catalan Wikipedia occupies the 15th place by number of articles. Catalan-speaking territories are situated in Spain, France, and Italy, whose languages make a strong influence to its speakers, specially Spanish – most of Catalan speakers are bilingual, knowing Spanish as well.

At 5.23pm, in the middle of a conference about “Open knowledge and the cultural institutions,” a participant announced the good news and we opened champagne bottles in the presence of Barcelona TV, who covered the news live. Catalan National TV also joined the event at midnight and the next day broadcasted a two-minute video about the the event being the longest edit-a-thon ever and the 400.000 articles milestone.

Arnau Duran (User:Arnaugir), member of Amical Viquipèdia
Note: for more information about the edit-a-thon see this page (in Catalan).

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Friday, the 22^nd of March, was a different and exciting day at work as Wikimedia Sverige had its biggest edit-a-thon to date – with 47 participants! Also the participants and the topic of the event were something that we unfortunately don’t always connect to Wikipedia: that is, women and fashion.

Participants in the Wikimedia Sverige fashion editathon.

Wikipedia, as you might know, is very male dominated (only 9 percent of all editors are female!) and the topic of fashion is very poorly represented when compared, for example, to World War II. With this in mind this fashion edit-a-thon was the first in a series of fashion events that will take place around Europe in the following two years, coordinated by Europeana Fashion.

This edit-a-thon in Stockholm was organized in collaboration with Wikimedia Sverige, Europeana, the Nordiska museet, Europeana Fashion and the Centre for Fashion Studies at Stockholm University. It was especially fun that the Nordiska museet and the MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp, as part of the preparations for the edit-a-thon, released hundreds of fashion images to Wikimedia Commons! For MoMu this upload was their first time working with Wikimedia and using Wikimedia Commons.

In preparation for the event, we had organized a workshop about editing in Wikipedia with the fashion students so that the actual edit-a-thon could, after some short presentations, get right down to the business of writing fashion-related articles. To keep up interest, and blood sugar, we served snacks during the day, as well as a lunch. We also took breaks and got inspired with a guided tour of the Nordiska museets’s fashion exhibitions, such as one on the power of fashion Modemakt. In the end, the productive day came together with a mingle with wine and canapés.

Almost all the participants stayed until the mingle, and several didn’t leave until 8 p.m., when the guards wanted to close the museum. At that point the event had lasted for almost 10 hours. Many of the participants also came up to us and thanked us for a nice event, telling us how proud they felt when pressing save and publishing their first edits on Wikipedia. These are the things that make me most happy and proud about this event. The goal with an edit-a-thon is, after all, not just to get more articles, but to get more active editors to Wikipedia and to raise awareness of how Wikipedia works in society.

Of course it’s also interesting to know what the direct outcomes of the event were:

• We had 47 participants that registered their attendance at the Nordiska museet. Of these participants, a total of 30 were women (or 64 percent!)
• 23 new users created accounts, either at the edit-a-thon, or at the preparatory workshop. Some of the editors sat together and used only one account.
• Of the eight uploaded photos from MoMu Fashion Museum in Antwerp, four of these are used in Wikipedia. They are used a total of 12 times on various language versions.
• Of the 362 images uploaded from the Nordiska museet, 57(!) of the images are now used on Wikipedia. They are used a total of 72 times on various language versions.
• Ten new articles were created, from biographies to fashion photography and Sami costumes. In total, 67 different articles were edited during the day. Several participants also published their articles some days after the edit-a-thon.
• Articles were edited in eight different languages (Polish, German, English, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Russian and Italian). Most of the contributions were made to the English and the Swedish Wikipedia.
• 73 photos were taken during the edit-a-thon and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons! Could this be a new record from a single edit-a-thon?
• Also five images from the Nordiska museet’s library were scanned and uploaded and are now used in various articles.

We are very happy with the outcome and hope to arrange more fashion edit-a-thons in the future! Perhaps this could be one way of changing the enormous gender gap? We hope so.

John Andersson (WMSE) (talk), Project leader for the Europeana Awareness project at Wikimedia Sverige

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Voluntários do movimento Wikimedia e Wikimedia Foundation organizam primeiro mutirão no Brasil para e com as mulheres

Depois de conhecer a estrutura mínima necessária para criar um verbete em poucos passos, as (e os) participantes do encontro aprimoraram verbetes relativos ao feminismo, em comemoração ao Dia Internacional da Mulher

Conhecimento é poder: disso ninguém duvida. E embora a possibilidade de construir o conhecimento na maior enciclopédia do mundo – a Wikipédia – seja livre e aberta a qualquer pessoa, cerca de 91% dos editores são homens. Como fica, então, a perspectiva das mulheres nessa história?

Primeiro mutirão de edição da Wikipédia para e com mulheres

Para aproximá-las do universo “wiki,” os voluntários dos projetos Wikimedia, com o apoio da Wikimedia Foundation, organizaram uma oficina sobre a Wikipédia e os projetos Wikimedia e propuseram um mutirão de edição da enciclopédia em homenagem ao Dia Internacional da Mulher. Realizado em São Paulo, na tarde de 2 de março de 2013 no espaço The Hub, o encontro reuniu homens e mulheres que tinham algum interesse em colaborar com a edição de verbetes, mas ainda não haviam entrado em contato com a ferramenta.

Participaram do evento cerca de 15 pessoas, que discutiram os critérios para um artigo ser publicado na Wikipédia, as fontes que podem ser consideradas confiáveis e a dinâmica de edição colaborativa. Ao final da oficina, os grupos se dedicaram a aprimorar verbetes relacionados às mulheres e ao feminismo: “Direitos da Mulher” e “Grace Hopper” foram duas dessas contribuições.

“Os passos para a edição de um verbete são simples, e pelo que vi neste encontro qualquer pessoa pode aprendê-los rapidamente”, avalia Fernanda Campagnucci, da Ação Educativa, que editou o verbete sobre os direitos das mulheres – sua primeira colaboração ao projeto. “Mas vivemos em uma sociedade em que a distribuição de conhecimento é desigual e a tecnologia ainda é, muitas vezes, considerada um universo masculino. É com essa visão que precisamos romper”.

Para discutir e superar a ausência da colaboração feminina à Wikipédia, o movimento Wikimedia mantém uma página (Gender Gap) em que reúne informações, referências e ideias sobre o tema além de promover atividades como este mutirão. Com o objetivo de aumentar a participação de mulheres no projeto, novas editoras são encorajadas a participar das listas de discussão e comunidades online, como os portais sobre mulheres e feminismo.

O movimento Wikimedia no Brasil espera que a iniciativa em São Paulo sirva de inspiração para que voluntários de outras regiões do país ajudem o evento a tornar-se periódico em todo mês de março, ampliando o debate sobre a participação feminina na Wikipédia e diminuindo a barreira de gênero. Entre em contato com os voluntários da Wikimedia no Brasil, para saber mais informações. Todos são bem-vindos a participar e organizar os próximos eventos!

Fernanda Campagnucci (ONG Ação Educativa)
Traduzido por Tom e Cristiana Gonzalez

• Veja mais fotos do mutirão de edição com as mulheres

English

After learning the basics needed to create a Wikipedia article, the participants improved existing articles related to feminism, as part of a celebration of International Women’s Day

Knowledge is power: no one should doubt that. Although the possibility of contributing knowledge to the biggest encyclopedia of the world, Wikipedia, is free and open for anyone, about 91 percent of its editors are men. What, then, is the prospect for women in this story?

In order to engage women in the “wiki” universe, volunteers of the Wikimedia projects in Brazil, with the support of the Wikimedia Foundation, organized a workshop about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects and proposed a joint effort for editing the encyclopedia in homage to International Women’s Day. The meeting took place on March 2nd at The Hub and gathered men and women interested in learning and practicing the editing of Wikimedia projects.

About 15 people attended the event, where they discussed the criteria for writing and publishing a Wikipedia article, the sources that may be considered reliable and the collaborative dynamic of editing. At the end of the workshop, the group dedicated themselves to improving articles related to women and feminism: “Women’s Rights” and “Grace Hopper” (“Direitos da mulher” and “Grace Hopper” in Portuguese) were two examples of such contributions.

“The steps for editing an article are simple, and from what I have observed in the meetup, anyone can learn them quickly,” said Fernanda Campagnucci, from Ação Educativa, who edited the article about women’s rights, her first contribution to the project. “But we live in a society where the sharing of knowledge is unequal and the technology is still often considered part of the masculine universe. It is this vision that we need to break.”

To discuss and overcome the lack of women collaborating on Wikipedia, the Wikimedia movement maintains a page (Gender Gap) to gather information, references and ideas on the subject, in addition to promoting activities like this workshop. With the goal of increasing women’s participation in the project, new women editors are encouraged to join mailing lists and online communities.

The Wikimedia movement in Brazil expects that this initiative in Sao Paulo will inspire volunteers from other regions of the country to help the event become regular every March, extending the debate about women’s participation in Wikipedia and lowering the gender gap. You can contact the Wikimedia volunteers in Brazil to obtain more information. Everybody is welcome to participate and organize upcoming events!

Fernanda Campagnucci (NGO Ação Educativa)
Translation by Tom and Cristiana Gonzalez

• See more photos of the edithaton here

Edit-a-thons are a well-established way to teach new people how to edit Wikipedia or encourage existing contributors to collaborate around a given topic. But organizing a formal edit-a-thon can take some time and energy, especially with larger events like the San Francisco WikiWomen’s edit-a-thons I helped organize in 2012. These events are a lot of fun, and we accomplish plenty of good editing that makes them worth the effort, but I often walk away from them feeling like I just ran a marathon. Maia Weinstock called the planning process for her Ada Lovelace edit-a-thon at Harvard “a whirlwind effort”, and WikiWoman Sarah Stierch and I have agreed that we probably don’t have the energy to organize them more than a few times a year. That’s unfortunate, because we’ve noticed that many women who start contributing at these events enjoy the social nature of editing together in a group and are more likely to make their next edit at another event than at home alone.

What if we started having smaller editing parties, on a more regular basis?

WikiWomen’s editing party, January 2013

Inspired by Piper Klemm’s account of a WikiWomen editing party she hosted with a couple of friends at her house in 2011, I recently invited two of my close friends to learn to edit Wikipedia. My friends are smart, professional women who have a lot of information in their heads and at their fingertips, but somehow they’ve never gotten around to making that first edit on their own. My friend Tracie offered up her living room and wifi, I brought some tasty things to eat and a bottle of champagne to help us toast the new year, and the three of us sat down for a couple of hours to talk, snack, and contribute to Wikipedia. I loved that it took literally 15 minutes of planning: a couple of emails to set the date and time, and a quick stop at the grocery store. We had a lot of fun, and yes, we edited an encyclopedia.

My friends created their accounts, and then we looked around for something interesting to work on. Tracie is a nurse, so I pointed her to WikiProject Medicine’s list of popular pages to find something in need of improvement. She jumped into copyediting the Heart rate article. Liza is a water resources engineer who has been eyeing errors in the 100-year flood article for months, so she dove in there. I’ve been working on bits and pieces for articles related to modern Afghan art and politics lately, and after giving them a few pointers on wiki-markup and edit summaries, I turned to catch-up on my own backlog.

It didn’t take long before we were too absorbed in our screens to talk much. Liza described editing like being in “a wormhole.” In about 10 minutes, my friends went from not being sure how to get started to having a backlog of articles they want to fix. “Everything I go to now, I feel the need to edit,” said Liza.

We didn’t try to complete entire articles, and we probably only added or improved a few sentences each that night. But Wikipedia is made of many edits and every contribution counts. I left satisfied that we have two more WikiWomen involved, since making that first edit is sometimes the biggest barrier to becoming a Wikipedian. Since that evening, they’ve both been watching their articles for changes and Tracie has made a few more edits in recent days. If they aren’t yet addicted to editing on their own, that’s ok. It was so easy to pull this together that I think we can pick a night to make an editing party happen every month. Seriously, all you need are a couple of friends, some refreshments and internet access, and off you go.

Experienced Wikipedians, I’m sure you have that one person who knows everything but still hasn’t tried their hand at editing. And if you’re new to Wikipedia and don’t know any experienced editors yet, that’s ok too, you can still get a few friends together to do this. Wikipedia has introductory help pages, a help desk, and the friendly folks at the Teahouse will be happy to quickly answer questions from new editors in their Q&A forum.

I’m attending my next editing party later this week, and plan to host another one for WikiWomen’s History Month in March. You should too, and tell us how it went in the comments. Having someone there to celebrate when you see your first edit live on the page really is a whole lot of fun, I promise.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants and volunteer WikiWoman