Edit-a-thon aims to give recognition to more women, arts on Wikipedia
"About 85 percent of Wikipedia’s editors are men, and only around 17 percent of the over 1.5 million biographies on the English Wikipedia are about women.
On Sunday, the Hammer Museum held a Wikipedia edit-a-thon in collaboration with the Art+Feminism campaign. The event aimed to educate more women on how to create and edit Wikipedia content, and how to cover topics that are often overlooked. (Amy Dixon/Photo editor) On Sunday, the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon educated participants at the Hammer Museum on how to write and revise Wikipedia articles, specifically aboutfemale figures, or film and media created by women. The event aimed to increase female contribution on Wikipedia, said Janani Subramanian, the Hammer Museum’s manager of public programs.
Prior to the event, Stacey Allan, the west coast ambassador of the Art+Feminism Campaign, said the edit-a-thon allowed participants to compensate for content that has historically been missing from the web due to the lack of diversity among contributors.
“When you have a more diverse group of people participating in the writing of history, you’re going to uncover different stories,” Allan said. “The more people involved, the more you get a range of perspectives … and that’s a really important thing to have in such a big worldwide resource.”
The absence of female Wikipedia editors could potentially stem from the gender disparity in computer literacy, Subramanian said, and women’s lack of access to resources that are necessary to edit articles. Female Wikipedia editors tend to work on content more centered around distinguished people and the arts, Allan said, while men lean toward geography and the sciences. Hence the Art+Feminism campaign promotes more coverage of the arts as well as an increase in the recognition of cis and transgender female figures on Wikipedia. Better gender diversity among editors will bring different types of information and perspectives to the site, and could even encourage more mindful gender pronoun usage, she said."— Alexsandra Coltun Schneider, Mar. 11, 2019
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
Stay engaged. Use #UCLAarts to stay connected.
