Wikipedian Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz will participate in the first ever Ask a WikiWoman event on January 17

“What’s it like to be a Wikipedian?”

“How did you get started editing?”

“How do you make an account on Wikipedia?”

“How do you upload a photo on Commons?”

…those are just some of the many questions that people often ask those of us who edit Wikipedia and contribute to its sister projects. Do you have questions similar to these that you’ve always wanted to ask a Wikipedian?

Well now your chance. WikiWoman Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz will be answering your questions by participating in the first Ask a WikiWoman online event.

On Thursday, January 17, the WikiWomen’s Collaborative will host Ask a WikiWoman via their Twitter! Participants from around the world will have a chance to ask Adrianne, a Wikipedian since 2004, anything about Wikipedia. The event will take place from 10 AM PST (18:00) until 5:00 PM PST (01:00) via the @WikiWomen Twitter.

How do I ask a question?

To participate, you have to have a Twitter account. Twitter is free to join if you aren’t a member yet. After logging in to your Twitter account, ask your question and include hashtag #askawikiwoman in your question. Adrianne will then answer your question!

Who is Adrianne Wadewitz?

Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz, aka User:Wadewitz, has been a Wikipedian since 2004. She’s a “feminist, scholar, educator, and digital humanist,” and has a deep passion for empowering women to contribute to Wikipedia and for helping to provide women around the world with access to free knowledge. As an educator, she has participated in the Wikipedia Education Program, where she has used Wikipedia in the class room as a learning tool since 2011. With a PhD in English Literature from Indiana University, Adrianne has channeled her passion for literature into her Wikipedia contributions. She was a leading force in bringing articles about Mary Wollstonecraft and the life of Jane Austen to Featured Article status, making them some of the finest articles on English Wikipedia.

“I’m thrilled to be part of the first “Ask a WikiWoman” event,” she said. “Nothing quite demystifies Wikipedia and encourages people to participate as a real person who can answer questions about this strange and wonderful website. I’m a Wikipedian. Ask me anything.”

And we hope you will do just that – ask a WikiWoman anything. We’ll see you on Twitter on Thursday, January 17!

Sarah Stierch, Wikimedia Community Fellow

This post is available in 3 languages:

Español  •  Català  • English

English

In Wikimedia México, we have had success partnering with groups and initiatives that share our values of freedom and the commons. One of those initiatives is Procommons Mexico Lab, a project supported by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID), where our member Alan Lazalde works.

Recently, we developed the idea to conduct an editathon at the Spanish Cultural Center in México, and we welcomed the cooperation of Wikimedia España as our partner in the first editing marathon between two Spanish-speaking countries. This was also an important demonstration of work between members of Iberocoop — an initiative of Wikimedia chapters that share Iberoamerican cultural heritage. The members of the Mexican and Spanish Wikimedia chapters had already talked months ago about doing common projects because of our shared history.

The editathon at the Centro Cultural de España en México

For the members of the Mexico chapter, we had the opportunity to conduct the event at the Spanish Cultural Center in México, an epicenter of cultural activities in Mexico City. I contacted María Sefidari and Santiago Navarro, both members of Wikimedia España, and through our respective channels of communication and social media, we publicized the event to gain more participants, both in person in Mexico and remotely from people’s homes in Spain.

On Sunday, November 18th, at 10 am, María gave a short greeting vía Skype, and then editors from Wikimedia México and the student club Wikimedia Amoxcalli started writing about topics related to the Spanish Cultural Center in México, adding more information and updating what was already existing on the Spanish Wikipedia. We also wrote about its museum, cultural offices and programs.

Throughout the day, we worked on other  topics related to Spain and Mexico: the Knife rebellion, which happened before the War of Independence between both countries; the Spanish soldier Torcuato Trujillo; contemporary artists like María La Ribot and Magda Donato; and the Spanish Ateneum of México. There was also a translation of a new article to the French Wikipedia by El Caro, and several to Catalan Wikipedia, thanks to GLAM promotor Àlex Hinojo and also to Gustavo Góngora writing from Catalonia.

We coordinated via the IRC channels of both chapters, and kept updating our progress on Facebook and on Twitter with the hashtag #EditMXES. In all, we had event participants in México at the venue and in Guadalajara; participants in Spain from Barcelona, Ferrol, La Seu, Madrid, Palencia, Vila-real and Zamora; and we were joined by the coordinator of Wikimedia Colombia from Bogotá .

By 4 pm, when we ended the editathon, we had written 18 new articles and expanded two more on Spanish Wikipedia. Plus we added seven new articles on Catalan Wikipedia and one new article on French Wikipedia. What had started as an initiative between Wikimedia México and the AECID resulted in a wider collaboration between many countries. We hope to hold more events like this soon.

• Link to the event on Spanish Wikipedia

Iván Martínez, President of Wikimedia México
Translation to English by María Sefidari and translation to Catalan by Santiago Navarro
(more…)

Lakshmi Valsalakumari is an IT professional who wants to expand her horizons. She attended the recent Wikimedia Developers Camp in Bangalore and had this story to tell:

Lakshmi with Santhosh Thottingal, the lead developer of Wikimedia’s font and keyboard tools

I have been an Information Technology professional working with well-known software organizations over the last 15 years. While IT has been keeping me busy, productive and happy, I have also all along harbored an interest in history and the humanities. I have recently decided to pursue these interests full-time, joining a research program at the Centre of Exact Humanities, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India.

With my recent shift into academics and research, I have been referencing Wikipedia quite a bit in the last two to three months, and I have been amazed at the sheer magnitude of information found on it. While I have been reading the Wikipedia pages extensively, I had never yet considered editing it, not even in English, the language I reference Wikipedia most in, and the one I use most on computers.

Editing and contributing content in Malayalam, my mother tongue, had not really occurred to me either—Malayalam being a language I hardly used on my computers—until I attended the Bangalore Wikimedia Dev Camp.

I have tried typing Malayalam using my regular browser, but I have not been very happy with the effect. This was not the way I liked to see Malayalam written and rendered, so I had not made any further efforts to write Malayalam online. At the camp, I met Santhosh and Manoj—avid Malayalam Wikipedia contributors—and they persuaded me to give it another shot.

The first step was to download the Meera Unicode font for Malayalam, then to change my default browser to one of those that can render Meera well (I tried out Google Chrome; Firefox was even better, I was told), and then to try out typing Malayalam using the regular English keyboard.

I liked what I saw. When I typed the suggested key combinations, even complicated Malayalam letter combinations were being rendered the way I would have written them using pen and paper. I tried more and more combinations—ta, tha, tta, Ta, tma, thra, tya, zha—and was pleased with the effect. This was fun!

Demos of how transliteration keyboards for Malayalam work

Soon, I was creating my first article. I noticed that on the main Wikipedia page, an article on Barcelona mentioned Catalonia as a red link, meaning that no further information was available in the Malayalam Wikipedia on it, whereas there was plenty of information on the same subject in the English Wikipedia. Manoj guided me through the steps as I created my first page in the Malayalam Wikipedia, copied the template information over from the English article and saved the heading, trying to get it right in Malayalam. I viewed my saved efforts, and with a sense of achievement, I went to grab a coffee.

Back online with my coffee, I was surprised to find a message on the article Talk page—someone had already posted a comment on the page I had just saved, chiding me for the lack of content and references. “This will drive away people from Wikipedia,” the post read. “Please ensure I get enough content on the page!”

Man, that was fast! I had no idea people were watching and following Wikipedia edits this closely. Manoj encouraged me to type more, so I returned to my effort. While I was getting comfortable with the typing, I was still grappling for suitable words in Malayalam for the content I was reading in English. Manoj suggested Olam, an online dictionary, and sure enough, I was able to find several of the Malayalam equivalents I was searching for.

And so, I typed on. Again, to my surprise, I found people editing the content and giving helpful suggestions even as I was still typing—one person told me to leave native names as such and not translate those, and another formatted some of the changes. By the end of the day, I had posted a decent amount of info, although there remained much more to be added.

I was happy with my day’s work. I had never imagined that using Malayalam on my computer and editing the Malyalam Wikipedia content would be such a pleasant and enjoyable experience, one that I was actually looking forward to!

Another point I must mention here is the sheer volume of Malayalam content that I have started seeing online, on Wikipedia pages and elsewhere. This must be due to the attention paid to this field of languages, literature and culture online by movements like Wikimedia. In 2005, I remember searching online for a well-known Malayalam lullaby Omanathingalkkidavo by Irayimman Thampi, but could not find anything. I had then resorted to the memories of my immediate relatives to try and pen the forgotten lyrics. Now, when I search for the same, the amount of material that comes up on that lullaby is amazing!

My heart-felt appreciation to Wikipedia and all its online community members who have made all of this possible. I hope to be part of this movement myself and do my bit toward furthering easy availability of multi-lingual content online

Lakshmi Valsalakumari

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is developing technologies that make it possible to speakers of all languages to contribute to Wikipedia in their language as easily and naturally as possible. Lakshmi’s story is an example of how these technologies enable people to develop reference and educational content that makes Wikipedia useful to people in the whole world. These technologies are deployed in Wikipedias in most languages of India, and more languages and projects are being added all the time.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

WikiWomen Day participants

Sunday, 28th October 2012, was “WikiWomen Day” in Pune, India. The day brought together women from a variety of educational backgrounds, castes, creeds, religions, and age groups. The purpose of the gathering was to both educate women about the huge gender gap that exists within Wikipedia and to encourage women to contribute.

The workshop was held by “Wikipedia Club Pune” in PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus, Pune, India. The workshop began at 10:00am with approximately 25 attendees. The first session explained the issues surrounding the lack of women editors. This session was an eye-opener for attendees about the huge gender gap within Wikipedia. Next, we offered a “How to get Hands-on on Wikipedia” program. The majority of attendees didn’t know how to edit Wikipedia, therefore, they had to start from scratch with tasks such as creating a username, and learning about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and its principles, such as the Five Pillars. After a thorough review, we presented the basics of editing.

Later in the afternoon, there was a breakout session where everyone got an opportunity to interact with one another while enjoying a lunch of burgers and soft drinks. Following that, there was Indic language session where attendees were introduced to the multi-lingual aspects of Wikipedia. After that was the “Collaborative Contribution” session where we put our newly acquired skills to work. In this session, we expanded the “Helen Keller” article in Marathi. This page was originally started by an anonymous editor with a single line of text. Within a half hour, the entire page was developed, telling a comprehensive story of her life. This collaborative experience was marvelous and my favorite session of the day. After this session, we distributed participation certificates to everyone and encouraged our motivated attendees to continue editing Wikipedia.

Last but not the least, the workshop ended with the cake-cutting ceremony, which was also the launch for “Wikipedia Summit India 2013,” to be held in January. The Summit will focus on Wikipedia’s gender gap and provide action-oriented workshops focused on closing the gap.

-Ketaki Pole (User:Ketaki Pole)

Students regularly use Wikipedia, and so do teachers. Whether we’re looking for information related to a class project, seeking an illustration for a paper, or reading background material so we can better understand an assigned text, free knowledge shared digitally is now a major component of education. Because Wikipedia is such a ubiquitous and influential source of information for my students, I feel quite annoyed when I find gaps in coverage and participation.

Alverno College students use Wikipedia to share information about Milwaukee public art.

Missing information is what initially motivated me to become an editor. I wanted my students to be able to find information easily about public art, about the monuments and sculptures they walk past everyday on campus, in city parks and in their home towns. After writing a few short articles about sculptures I knew well, I realized that trying to fill the gaps myself would be a long, lonely process. Then I realized that my students could help.

Since 2008, I have used Wikipedia regularly in my courses. Working in collaboration with editors involved with WikiProject Public Art and WikiProject Lights Camera Wiki, my students and I have developed hundreds of Wikipedia articles about public artworks, and we’ve created and contributed more than 50 short videos through Wikimedia Commons to illustrate article content.

My deepening involvement with Wikipedia as a movement put me in touch with another gap: gender. Fortunately, my students also help with that. I’ve now introduced close to 100 students to editing Wikipedia, and all of them are women. (One of my students was even previously featured on this blog!)

My students are not typical Wikipedia editors–and not just because of their gender. Many are working women who have returned to school after starting families and careers. Many are graduates of under-funded public school districts that lag in access to digital technology. Many do not have their own computers and rely instead on smartphones and campus labs. While all are familiar with what Wikipedia is, none of them has prior experience editing it, and few have participated in online communities beyond Facebook.

Getting students started editing Wikipedia is easy, but keeping those students connected to the open knowledge movement as active contributors is more challenging. To participate consistently, students need motivation, opportunity and encouragement. For an initial editing experience, a class project provides the motivation of a focus and deadline, a computer lab offers the opportunity of access and the close-knit community of a classroom provides the structure and encouragement.

Alverno College, where I teach now, contributes a unique support in the form of its innovative ability-based curriculum. At Alverno, students work to develop eight core abilities, including the problem solving skills they need to navigate new technologies and the habits of effective citizenship they need to engage in the “good faith collaboration” that Wikipedia’s norms require. Beyond my classroom at Alverno, students receive support through initiatives like the Wikipedia Education Program, Campus Ambassadors, and the Wikipedia Teahouse.

A few of the women who learned to edit in my classes are barnstar rock stars and I like to think that many more are getting ready to shine. Today, I’m motivated to teach with Wikipedia because I want to learn how to better support women to share their expertise and build community around their intellectual interests. I’m grateful to the organizers of the WikiWomen’s Collaborative for bringing needed attention and resources to the vexing problem of gender inequity among editors. I’m optimistic that this effort will bring me in contact with models to inspire my students to continue editing and fill the gaps. Keeping women active as editors is one important way to create a more welcoming environment within the movement.

Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, Alverno College, Milwaukee

On September 20, tucked away in a computer lab in the engineering building at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, twelve new Wikipedians learned how to edit Wikipedia. The new editors participated in the Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Edit-a-thon, with the goal of adding more content about female scientists on Wikipedia.

Participants at the Carleton University edit-a-thon

Were there not more exciting things to be doing on a Thursday evening in Ottawa? Sure, there were a lot of other fun events that night, but we were doing it because we had heard about the gender gap in Wikipedia, where approximately 9 percent of editors are female. We were doing it because we knew that the women we were writing about were brave trail-blazers who are frequently written out of history, and this was our chance to write these women in to history. We were doing it because we knew that the only way to change the statistics was to become Wikipedia editors ourselves and to encourage our friends to do the same.

The host for the night was the Carleton University branch of the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) group, and I volunteered as the primary organizer. There was one small glitch: I had never edited Wikipedia before and didn’t know anyone who had. In fact, none of the participants had ever edited Wikipedia before, proof, perhaps, that there were not enough women editing Wikipedia?

I centered the edit-a-thon on a strong belief that we can all participate if we help each other, which is also how I feel about WISE, which focuses on encouraging and supporting women in engineering. We believed the event could also help foster a local community with the goal of encouraging more women to edit Wikipedia. As an inclusive group, however, we also encouraged men to attend, assuming they might also help us write articles about female scientists (one quarter of the attendees were male).

We created 12 new accounts and, after a brief introduction, started to work creating and improving articles. Because none of us was an experienced editor, everyone got into helping each other. There were a lot of exclamations of “oh, how did you do that?” and “why doesn’t this work?” Instead of having one teacher, we were all teachers. We started nine articles and improved two others.

One of the trail-blazing scientists we wrote about was Pearl Kendrick. She helped to bring the vaccine for whooping cough from lab-scale to full-scale production by 1940. Later, upon finding that the version of the vaccine in England was not as effective as the one available in the United States, she worked with the Medical Research Council of Great Britain to help them develop a more successful vaccine.

After a few hours, we all decided to continue working on the articles at home and fell into a discussion around tea and cookies of what we wanted to do in the future. Everyone agreed that we need to have more edit-a-thons. Some felt up to the task of hosting their own, centered on themes that interested them personally. Most of us were excited to show our friends what we had learned and to extend our new found role as teachers beyond our group. I am looking forward to seeing everyone’s articles improve and I’m extremely proud of everyone’s efforts.

Many thanks to everyone who came out for the event, as well as to Carleton University WISE and to Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellow Sarah Stierch for her encouragement.

–Audrey Murray, Carleton University WISE

Are you a woman who edits or is active in the Wikimedia community? Or do you want to contribute to Wikipedia, but you just aren’t sure how to get started? WikiWomen from around the world have come together to form the WikiWomen’s Collaborative to support you and to support each other as we edit Wikipedia and her sister projects.

The WikiWomen’s Collaborative is a social media initiative, led by Wikipedia volunteers in partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation, which seeks to engage and inspire women to edit Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Commons media repository, and related projects. This initiative was inspired by the realization that in order to impact Wikipedia’s gender gap we must build strong networks of women who are motivated to take action. We want to find and connect more women around the world and encourage them to contribute to the sum of all human knowledge by editing Wikimedia projects.

Here’s how you can get involved:

WikiWomen’s Luncheon at Wikimania 2012

• Like the WikiWomen’s Collaborative on Facebook and visit our page to share resources, tips on contributing and connect with other WikiWomen
• Join the conversation on our WikiWomen’s Twitter feed
• Read and write for the WikiWomen blog channel. Share your editing experiences, what inspires you to be involved in the Wikimedia movement and what you’re doing about it. Sign up to contribute to the blog here

We’re so excited to have WikiWomen around the world involved in this project: to share with you why we love editing, why it’s important that women contribute and some of the easy and fun ways to get involved in the movement.

Sarah Stierch, Community Fellow

When good people get together in a friendly, well organised setting like this weekend in Pune, many great things happen. Several MediaWiki developers had come to provide the many people new to MediaWiki with their expertise and guide people into its inner workings.

Many people worked on Wikimedia mobile and the SmartPhone software, others worked on MediaWiki and its extensions. Bugs got fixed and functionality got extended.

One of the surprises was two people working on the localisation for the Mongolian language. The inclusion of a web font that will support the Dzonka language is another.

Dzongkha is the official language of Bhutan and according to Ethnologue, the script used is either Tibetan script, Uchen style or the Tibetan script, Umed style. These scripts and styles are also used for the Tibetan language, it is not only Dzongkha that stands to benefit.

One of the highlights of the work on the SmartPhone app is support for scripts that are written from right to left, this is now “beta” functionality. The result of more people looking at the code was that several bugs received the attention needed to make them go away. Scrolling was one area that got attention; this results in a smoother user experience.

New input methods have been created for Punjabi transliteration and for an Gujarati input method to be included in Narayam. The continued collaboration with RedHat engineers ensures that our work benefits both MediaWiki and RedHat/Fedora. We do realise that there is still a lot to do and it is not only documentation. Additional work was done on the “visual on-screen keyboard” that was started at the previous hackathon in Pune, it still needs more testing and design work.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

The American Sociological Association (ASA) has started a “Wikipedia Initiative”, inviting its members to enhance Wikipedia articles, and to incorporate Wikipedia editing into their classroom teaching, in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation’s higher education program. In a feature article for the scholarly society’s monthly newsletter, ASA president Erik Olin Wright described the initative as a “call to duty”.

Follow this series of brief news on enhancing Wikipedia participation via RSS, on Tumblr, or on Wikipedia.

For the past few months, the “Moodbar” function has invited new users on the English Wikipedia to indicate how they feel about their first editing experiences, and why. Today, the Feedback Dashboard was launched, an experimental live stream displaying these comments. Take a look to find out what makes new editors Happy, Sad, or Confused!

Follow this series of brief news on enhancing Wikipedia participation via RSS, on Tumblr, or on Wikipedia.