Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon Resources – Digital Learning & Scholarship

Here are some tips and resources that will help you take part in our Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon:

Why This Matters:

“Less than 10% of Wikipedia’s editors identify as cis or trans women. And the editors that do identify as women are more likely than men to have their edits reverted.” (read more on this here)

This severely affects the kinds of representations Wikipedia creates, and the knowledge it produces. Art+Feminism is part of a larger effort to create greater awareness around issues of diversity and inclusion in open access knowledge sources like Wikipedia.

Please be aware that including greater representations of women-identifying artists and feminist organizations on Wikipedia can open you up to criticism and pushback from other users who believe some of the project’s subjects fail to meet the sites notability standards, for example. Should this happen, here are resources and tutorials that can assist you. Also keep in mind the words of librarian Jessamyn West at a past Art+Feminism event:

“It’s hard putting yourself out there. With Wikipedia, putting yourself out there can also means putting yourself, or people like you, in there. Because the encyclopedia that everyone can edit, isn’t the encyclopedia that everyone does edit. But it can be. Thank you for the work that you are doing for Art+Feminism. I look forward to seeing the work you do.” (read the full talk here).

New to Wikipedia Editing?

Here are some tutorials from the Art+Feminism site on the various stages of editing Wikipedia that will be helpful as you start your work:

Their editing kit also includes a series of useful video tutorials.

The “Training” tab of our event dashboard also includes helpful training modules. The “Basic Rules of Wikipedia” module is a great place to start.

To Begin:

First, navigate to our event dashboard on Wikipedia: https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/courses/Trinity_College/TrinityArtandFeminism2019

Next, login at the top right corner. If you’ve never edited Wikipedia before, you will be prompted to create a username and password. Keep in mind that your username should be somewhat anonymous to protect your privacy. If you need help, please find one of the organizers who can add you as an editor.

Before you begin editing live on Wikipedia, you may find it helpful to practice in your Sandbox. The Sandbox is a page where you can practice editing citations, collecting research, and creating text without editing Wikipedia directly. Once you are satisfied with your work, you can add it to the relevant page or create a new page. It can be found in your Wikipedia toolbar on the top right side.

To Edit:

Once you’ve logged in and read through some tutorials, visit the Art+Feminism meetup page to find an article of interest and begin editing. You can also find articles to edit on our event dashboard under the “Articles” heading.

For Beginners:

You may want to start with by adding citations to an existing page. This includes pages in need of citation generally, and pages in need of external citation to meet Wikipedia’s notability requirements.

For more Advanced Editors:

You want to work on expanding existing pages. Art+Feminism recommends working on their list of stub pages (a term for existing short articles).

For Experienced Editors:

To create a new page, you can start a draft article at the bottom of this page by first entering the artist’s name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism/Tasks#External_links

Please note: You may not publish a new page to Wikipedia unless you’ve already made ten edits as a user. If you still wish to create a page in draft form in your Sandbox, you can share it with one of the organizers to post on your behalf.