BIPOC Wikipedia edit-a-thon Sherry Antoine, MPA Executive Director, Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD) | Lead Organizer, Wikimedians of the Caribbean | Director, Internet Society, NYC Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, MBA Visiting Scholar, Northeastern Univ. | Vice-president, Wikimedia DC | Co-Founder, Wiki Women in Red August 1, 2020 | CC-BY-SA 4.0 1 Introductions 2 Today’s Speakers ● Dana M. Lewis: Served as one of the chief personal aides to the Obamas during the Obama campaign and White House ● Alisa Chang: Host of All Things Considered ● Jenn White: New Host of 1A on WAMU public radio 3 Partners / Supporters ● Global Situation Room ● WikiProject Women In Red ● DeLite Media ● Young Entertainment Activists (YEA!) ● Wikimedians of the Caribbean ● The Wikimedia community 4 Wiki Coaches Experienced Wikipedia editors who are here to help you with your questions during the editing portion of today’s event. Thank you coaches! 5 Wikimedia? / Wikipedia? 6 Wikimedia The Wikimedia movement, or simply Wikimedia, is the global community of contributors to Wikimedia Foundation projects. The movement was created around Wikipedia's community, and has since expanded to the other Wikimedia projects, including the commons projects Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, and volunteer software developers contributing to MediaWiki. These volunteers are supported by numerous organizations around the world, including the Wikimedia Foundation, related chapters, thematic organizations, and user groups. 7 Wikimedia The name "Wikimedia", a compound of wiki and media, was coined by American author Sheldon Rampton in a post to the English mailing list in March 2003,[1] three months after Wiktionary became the second wiki-based project hosted on Jimmy Wales' platform, and three months before the Wikimedia Foundation was announced and incorporated.[2][3] 8 Wikimedia "Wikimedia" may also refer to the Wikimedia projects. 9 Wikipedia Wikipedia (/ˌwɪkɪˈpiːdiə/ (listen) wik-ih-PEE-dee-ə or /ˌwɪkiˈpiːdiə/ (listen) wik-ee-PEE-dee-ə) is a multilingual online encyclopedia created and maintained as an open collaboration project[4] by a community of volunteer editors using a wiki-based editing system.[5] It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the World Wide Web,[6][7][8] and is one of the most popular websites ranked by Alexa as of January 2020.[9] It features exclusively free content and no commercial ads, and is owned and supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization funded primarily through donations.[10][11][12][13] 10 Wikipedia ● Wikipedia was launched on January 15, 2001, by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.[14] ● Sanger coined its name,[15][16] as a portmanteau of "wiki" (the Hawaiian word for "quick")[17] and "encyclopedia". ● Initially an English-language encyclopedia, versions of Wikipedia in other languages were quickly developed. ● With at least 6,024,564 articles,[note 3] the English Wikipedia is the largest of the ● more than 290 Wikipedia encyclopedias. ● Overall, Wikipedia comprises more than 40 million articles ● in 301 different languages[18] and ● More the 18 billion page views and counting since 2014 ● around 500 million unique visitors per month.[19] 11 Wikipedia The encyclopedia anyone can edit. ANYONE. 12 Wikipedia: Can we trust it? In 2005, Nature published a peer review comparing 42 hard science articles from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia and found that Wikipedia's level of accuracy approached that of Britannica,[20] although critics suggested that it might not have fared so well in a similar study of a random sampling of all articles or one focused on social science or contentious social issues.[21][22] The following year, Time magazine stated that the open-door policy of allowing anyone to edit had made Wikipedia the biggest and possibly the best encyclopedia in the world, and was a testament to the vision of Jimmy Wales.[23] 13 Wikipedia’s influence ● Wikipedia has been one of the most popular sites on the Internet since its January 2001 inception. ● As of April 2017, according to Alexa, Wikipedia ranks fifth — behind Google, Youtube, Facebook and Baidu. ● The average person who visits the site spends four minutes and 26 seconds per day browsing the 5.5 million English Wikipedia articles. ● 1.5 million articles are biographies. ○ As of July 2020, only 18.53 percent of the biographies are about women. 14 Wikipedia has “rules” (policies) ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_policies 15 Notability ● “If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list.” 16 Reliable sources ● Sources should be “published”, not “oral”. ● Online sources are convenient, but sources do not have to be available online. ● Sources in any language are acceptable. 17 Neutral point of view 18 Conflict of interest 19 Knowledge gaps & systemic bias 20 Who is reading Wikipedia? ● 2019: ○ WMF Research: “Characterizing Wikipedia Reader Behaviour” ○ Small-scale pilot survey run on English Wikipedia. ● 2020: ○ Approximately 830 million unique devices access the English Wikipedia ○ Approximately 7.8 billion pageviews 21 Who is editing Wikipedia? ● Surveys: ○ 2010, United Nations University survey, women, 12.6% of the editors ○ 2011, WMF, women, 8.5% of the editors ○ 2018, WMF's Community Engagement Insights survey: women, 9%; non-binary, 1% of the editors ● “Our science can only benefit the whole of society if it’s done by the whole of society.” — Dr. Jessica Wade (a British physicist who adds biographies of female and minority scientists to Wikipedia daily) (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/science/jess-wade-wikipe dia-science-women.html) 22 Who is represented in Wikipedia? ● Fewer than 19 percent of biographies on Wikipedia in English are of women, according to Women in Red, Wikipedia’s gender gap-bridging project. 23 Activism 24 25 AfroCROWD ● The initiative to increase awareness of the African Diaspora on Wikipedia. ● Since 2015, AfroCROWD has held monthly events in the Wikimedia community starting first in the New York area with edit-a-thons, and now with organizers and partners in different parts of the world. 26 Challenges ● Notability ○ Example of Wiki Africa ● Distrust based on past rejection ○ Teofilo Colón ● Distrust based on perceived bias ○ some in the target group to rally around World Afropedia and Afropedea ● Lack of knowledge of / trust in crowdsourcing or that wikipedia is crowdsourced 27 Edit-a-thons Edit-a-thons remain an excellent way to train new and growing editors and engaging universities in the Wikipedia community. Fordham University Wikipedia Edit-a-thon with AfrOCROWD on NYC Women’s History Photo by Jim Henderson 28 Outreach ● https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lptQ-_7n4qs : Intro Event types 29 Type of event/ outreach Main Wiki project Best educational medium Best audeinces Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Wikipedia Institution, Library, other Wifi All, especially community and enabled room and online academic staff and students Wikimedia Information talk All Schools, universities, All depending on context but educational conferences especially Educators and organizational leadership seeking to create Wiki curriculum/ events Wikipedia Translat-a-thon All / Wikipedia Computer lab, libary All but especially linguistic, library, and history classes and students, educators and student cultural groups Wikimedia Recordathon Wiki Commons University, institution, other All but especially linguistic, space with an available quiet library, and history classes and room and gathering room students, educators and student cultural groups and oral history and communications or journalism and cultural studies students Wikimedia Table All Festivals, conferences Passing attendees of festivals and conferences 30 Women in Red https://w.wiki/347 31 Women in Red ● An initiative to improve the content gender gap ○ Women and non-binary ○ Biographies, works (paintings, books, schools), issues (health) ● Established: July 2015, Roger Bamkin & Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight ○ We don’t care what your (the editor) gender is, just write the articles! ● 175 online events to date, mostly month-long. Current examples: ○ Indigenous Women ○ BLM/Anti-Discrimination ● Name refers to Wikipedia’s “redlinks” (missing article) & “redlists” (lists of missing articles) ● Social media: Twitter (>26K tweets; >9K followers), Pinterest (page/month), Facebook 32 The role of society "It is not women's inferiority that has determined their historical insignificance. It is their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority." -Simone de Beauvoir (French writer, intellectual, political activist, feminist and social theorist) 33 Article anatomy 34 Exploring Tabs: Article history 35 Exploring tabs: Article history Editor Edit Date username summary ● View all edits ever made to an article by selecting ‘View history’. 36 Exploring tabs: talk page, community discussion ● The article talkpage is where you can discuss the article with other editors. ● Use of the article’s talkpage is optional. 37 Lead paragraph Main photo or Infobox placement Lead paragraphs 38 References; inline citations 39 See also; Authority control; Categories 40 How to edit 41 Edit with Visual Editor (what you see is what you get; mostly) Formatting buttons Edit buttons Edit = Visual Editor, Edit Source = Code ● Choose an article you want to edit. ● Select ‘Edit’ to use Visual Editor; or ‘Edit Source’ for source editing. Unsure if you are in Visual Editor? Select