Group edit-a-thon tackles gender imbalance

Hamilton gathering aimed at updating Wikipedia content on some of city’s prominent women

Hamiltonians armed with laptops are taking to the web to help right the gender imbalance on Wikipedia.

An edit-a-thon was organized at CoMotion on King Tuesday night as part of Art + Feminism — a global initiative to update content about feminism and art on the online collaborative encyclopedia.

“There are some issues in Wikipedia’s past that they’ve done admirable work to rectify over the years, but there’s definitely unequal content about women,” said Erin O’Neil, a Ladies Learning Code volunteer who organized the event.

Part of the reason for that is because only about 10 per cent of Wikipedia editors are women, according to a 2011 survey from Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit foundation that runs Wikipedia.

Fewer women still are “super” editors — those equipped with more editing permissions because of a longer editing track record.

“People are just naturally wanting to write about what they know about, and that means there’s more content about men on there,” said O’Neil.

The feminist edit-a-thon offers women and men a chance to get comfortable with the process of editing, she said.

Art + Feminism encouraged groups to think about what their specific site would focus on, O’Neil said.

People were asked to come with their own ideas, but one local angle she suggested was the McQuesten women. Thomas McQuesten, whose family had deep roots in Hamilton, has a Wikipedia page, but his mother — Mary Baker McQuesten — and his sisters do not.

While Tuesday’s event at CoMotion on King wasn’t likely to “move the needle significantly”, O’Neil said she hoped its impact would be felt by what people take away from the exercise about Wikipedia.

“I think that if people can leave tonight realizing: one, that it’s not complete — it’s a work in progress — and two, that they can be part of that progress,” she said. “I hope it will start some reverberations in the city.”