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Introduction Introduction Maibritt Borgen, Nanna Bonde Thylstrup & Kristin Veel Introdution controversy, as the initiative was both lauded and lamented for its potential to disrupt the tradition- Wikipedia is one of the most visited knowledge re- al structures of the knowledge field and industry sources in the world. The Alexa traffic rankings put (Rosenzweig, 2006; Ford, this issue). The discus- it at number 7, well above the New York Times (104), sions revolved in particular around the authority of the BBC (106), the Library of Congress (1,175), experts versus lay people. Today this polarization and the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica (3711) has given way to closer cooperation between Wiki- (Alexa, 2016). As historian Roy Rosenzweig puts it, pedia and other traditional knowledge-producing Wikipedia has become "perhaps the largest work of communities such as libraries and museums.1 Yet, as online historical writing, the most widely read work the dust settles over the expert/layman disputes, new of digital history, and the most important free histori- contours of contestation have become apparent. One cal resource on the World Wide Web" (Rosenzweig is the political ideology and ideological potential of 2006, p. 52). Wikipedia has become so ingrained in Wikipedia (Firer-Blaess and Fuchs, 2014, p. 87-103; our everyday search for information that users rarely Chozik, 2013, June 27).2 Another is its politics of give thought to the mechanisms and agency under- transparency (Tkacz, 2015). A third is its bureaucrat- neath its production of knowledge: who produces its ic structures (Jemielniak, 2014). But the most per- content? And what visible and invisible structures sistent point of contestation remains its gender gap govern this production? Indeed, we have come to problem. It was known and acknowledged early in take its presence for granted to a degree that editorial Wikipedia's existence that contributors to Wikipedia contributions to many Wikipedia pages are in fact tended to be English-speaking, males, and denizens stagnating (Wikipedia, n.p.; Ford, 2011). of the Internet, and that this concentration might im- ply a systemic bias (Rosenzweig, 2006, p. 117-146; However, the naturalized presence of Wikipedia in Reagle and Rhue, 2011). The Wikimedia commu- our everyday lives was not always apparent. The nity even launched a self-critical project page titled online encyclopedia's initial years were rife with "Countering Systemic Bias" in the fall of 2004 to discuss how the demographics of its contributors af- fected its topical coverage (Wikipedia). Thus, when Maibritt Borgen, PhD, History of Art, Wikipedia was ten years old in 2011, its board decid- Yale University, [email protected] ed that it was time to take stock and learn more about Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, Postdoc its dynamics. And it turned out that only a fragment Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns of the 69,000 editors were female. Upon this revela- Universitet, [email protected] tion, Sue Gardner, then-Executive Director of the Kristin Veel, Lektor foundation, set a goal to raise the share of female Institut for Kunst og Kulturvidenskab, Københavns contributors to twenty-five percent by 2015 (Cohen, Universitet, [email protected] 2011). A goal that has hardly been met today. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling, årg. 5, nr. 1, 2016 3 Studies of the Wikipedia gender imbalance offer supported by a Wikipedia campaign aiming at in- various explanations as to why it persists.3 In 2011 creasing the number of female editors (Wikimedia). Lam et al. confirmed the presence of a large gender More than 100 people attended, working together to gap among editors and found evidence hinting at a write articles of high quality on notable women in culture that may be resistant to female participation. art, science and politics. The second part of the event Further, they found a corresponding gender-oriented was an academic symposium held at the University disparity in the content of Wikipedia's articles (Shy- of Copenhagen, in which the Wikimedia community ong et al., 2011; Gardner, 2011).4 Reagle and Rhue convened with scholars to discuss the problems and (2011) have similarly argued that the gender imbal- potentials of Wikipedia and feminist initiatives such ance in the Wikipedia community has resulted in as the edit-a-thon. gender bias in content: Comparing the biographies of individuals in Wikipedia and Britannica, they The Copenhagen edit-a-thon on March 8 2015 was found that although Wikipedia had a higher num- an autonomously organized "satellite" event under ber of female biographies, the proportion of missing Art+Feminism, a global network of seventy-five biographies for women to that of men was relatively edit-a-thons that took place over the weekend of In- higher. A more recent study found that the gender ternational Women's Day, March 6-8, 2015. More gap is perhaps significantly lower than first assumed than 1,500 participants in seventy-five locations (Hill, Shaw and Sánchez, 2013). And while a differ- worldwide created nearly four hundred new articles, ent study suggested that the gender parity is due to while over five hundred articles received significant an overall lack of internet skill (Hargittai and Shaw, improvements. In Copenhagen, participants cre- 2015), yet another found that while the gender gap ated forty-seven new articles for the Danish Wikipe- remained a problem, it was perhaps lodged in a dif- dia, improved eight articles significantly, and wrote ferent area than previously assumed. This study sug- eight articles for the English Wikipedia (https:// gested that women were actually covered well in da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:We_can_edit-a- Wikipedia, but also revealed that a more deep-seated thon_København_2015). gender bias persisted in terms of how many times articles from women link to men. The study also Art+Feminism began in New York in 2014 as a noted that articles about women overuse words like cross-professional collaboration between artists, "woman", "female" or "lady" while articles about scholars, curators, librarians, and Wikipedians (Ev- men tend not to contain words like "man", "mascu- ans et.al, 2015). The organizers facilitated the world- line", "gentleman" or, in other words, that Wikipe- wide network of "satellite" edit-a-thons by providing dia editors consider maleness as the "null gender" easy access to a set of training materials through dig- (Wagner et al., 2015). The research landscape on the ital platforms, a social media platform that connected gender gap in Wikipedia thus reveals it as a thorny all posts under the hashtag #artandfeminism, and an social issue, and also as a methodological challenge outline of the facilities that would create a successful in terms of quantitative estimations, as many of the edit-a-thon. quantitative studies rely on old material and use un- certain variables.5 Our Copenhagen edit-a-thon created a temporary community of like-minded people; its attendees iden- Despite-or perhaps because of-the controversies the tified as female and male allies, sympathetic to the Wikipedia gender gap offers valuable lessons for un- cause. In such community-building, Art+Feminism derstanding the problems of archival bias, not only in and our event reflects what has been referred to as a Wikipedia but in crowdsourced archives more gener- "fourth wave of feminism" (Rampton, 2015). Fourth- ally. This special issue of NTIK argues that archival wave feminism revisits core strategies from the and activist theory provides a productive theoreti- "second wave" of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s: cal framework for critiquing such bias. The issue the idea that organizing "safe spaces" around such originates from a two-day event held in Copenhagen shared agendas can facilitate a dynamic and an inter- on March 8 and 9, 2015, on the topic of gender and action that can further combat sexism and discrimi- Wikipedia. The first part of the event was a feminist nation on societal level. Art+Feminism responded edit-a-thon that recruited female and male editors to to what it has called a "desperate need for informa- write about women on Wikipedia. This event was tion activism in the realm of gender politics on the 4 web" (Evans et.al, 2015) but it did so by organizing a a new set of questions for knowledge production in valuable form of offline organizing: that of bodies in the digital age. Therefore, as this issue is an archival real, physical spaces. The infrastructure we adapted intervention into Wikipedia research and a way of for our event equally reflected hands-on needs: to re- making Wikipedia speak to broader archival issues move the obstacles to participation by providing free in the digital age, an edit-a-thon suggests that physi- access, childcare, and food. The goal was to get peo- cal spaces might be a catalyst for online change. This ple there, get them involved, and get them excited. special issue of NTIK (published digitally as well as in print) and the symposium are, consequently, our Much organizing of feminist Wikipedia interventions efforts to move beyond and critically reflect upon revolves around the notion of skill and access. To the numbers game we ourselves created. It should be begin editing in Wikipedia you must be familiar with seen as a way of articulating and bridging the types the Wikipedia interface; you must have a Wikipedia of spaces in which knowledge production currently username, know basic Wikipedia coding, and be fa- take place. miliar with the often opaque criteria of notability and other requirements that prevent one's article from Now, in 2016, Gardner and Wikipedia's 2011 tar- being speedily deleted. We provided face-to-face tu- get percentage of female contributors has hardly torials with experienced Wikipedians throughout the been met, and the continuing lag should come as no day and had experienced editors on hand when ques- surprise.
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