WikiWoman Netha Hussain has written a blog for the Huffington Post UK
about the gender gap and how women can get involved in editing
Wikipedia. Great work Netha! She also gave a shout out to the Ada
Initiative.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/netha-hussain/wikipedia-towards-closing-gender-gap_b_2654019.html
Wikipedia: Towards Closing the Gender Gap
Most of us know Wikipedia as the free online encyclopedia, written
collaboratively by millions of volunteers from around the world. I amone
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Netha_Hussain>of those writers for
the last 3 years. It was by writing articles about medical sciences that
I started contributing to Wikipedia. Later, I was intrigued by the
enormous volume of information available on Wikipedia, and was curious
to find out who actually write them - which made me delve into the
editor demographics. It really made me upset when I figured out that
only around9%
<http://grouplens.org/system/files/wp-gender-wikisym2011.pdf>of the
contributors to Wikipedia are women. In fact, I knew that so few women
write on Wikipedia, but I hadn't expected the figure to be as low as 9
percent.
Diversity of opinion is the essence of any encyclopedia. Having equal
representation from women will bring in wider perspectives, and increase
the neutrality of the articles on Wikipedia. With men creating most of
the content for Wikipedia, certain subjects might be covered more than a
subject that may be of interest to women. Women not writing on Wikipedia
mean that certain subjects may not be receiving the attention they
rightfully deserve.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the not-for-profit organization that hosts
Wikipedia, had recognized this problem sooner than I did. The Wikimedia
Foundation has launched various programs to bridge the gender gap, and
the latest addition to the list is theWikiWomen's Collaborative
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomen%27s_Collaborative>.
The WikiWomen's Collaborative was created in September 2012 by women
around the world who edit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, and
want to encourage others to do the same. The project was aimed at
helping women and transwomen to support one another and engage in
programs that help the Wikimedian community to bring in new women
editors. A variety ofevents
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:WikiWomen%27s_Collaborative/Final_report>,
like edit-a-thons, interviews and wikiwomen parties were conducted as a
part of the collaborative.
In May 2012, aWikiWomenCamp
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomenCamp>was organized for women in
the Wikimedia movement to get together and discuss about the various
issues related to being women involved in the Wikimedia community with
like-minded women. Over 20 women from different countries participated
in the camp to brainstorm solutions for existing problems that concern
women, and suggest future plans to collaborate with one another. It is
customary to conduct aWikiWomen's luncheon
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiChix_2011_Lunch>atWikimania
<https://wikimania2013.wikimedia.org/>, the global gathering of
Wikimedians, exclusively for the women participants.
Organizations like theAda Initiative <http://adainitiative.org/>, named
for the world's first programmer Countess Ada Lovelace, support women
working with open knowledge projects like Wikipedia by creating
resources for women in open stuff, conducting conferences and advising
organizations on supporting women.
Many outreach programs were conducted in women's universities all over
the world to encourage students to participate in the Wikimedia
movement. The Women's History month edit-a-thons conducted every year,
attracts both male and female editors to write biographies of notable
women on Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation has set a goal to raise the share of female
contributors to 25% by 2015. Given the good response from the community
to various events conducted for women, it is likely that the foundation
will achieve its goal within the set time limit.
//If you would like to get engaged in various activities for women in
Wikipedia, you are welcome to write tome
<mailto:nethahuss...@gmail.com>or join ushere
<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomen%27s_Collaborative>.
//
--
*Sarah Stierch*
*/Museumist and open culture advocate/*
>>Visit sarahstierch.com <http://sarahstierch.com><<
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