Adding women’s voices to Wikipedia
Edit-a-thon seeks to democratize online encyclopedia
Jada Franklin has used Wikipedia more times than she can count. But she’s never been on this side of the controls, writing and editing entries. Until today.
It’s a little before 11 a.m. Tuesday, and Franklin is the second visitor of the day to a small computer room, tucked in the back of a massive library at the center of University of Houston’s campus. She’s here for a Wikipedia edit-a-thon as part of the university’s two-day conference honoring the 40th anniversary of 1977’s National Women’s Conference here in Houston.
The goal of the all-day editing session is simple: to increase the number of women editing Wikipedia entries. Though content on the online encyclopedia can be created and edited by anyone with a fun fact and an Internet connection, only about 10 percent of Wikipedia editors are women, and the share of female-focused biographies only rings in at 17 percent.
By upping these figures on Wikipedia, which is the fifth-most-visited website in America, organizers at the Houston event hope they can help provide greater awareness of women’s accomplishments and contributions to society.
And Franklin is about to be part of that.
Increasing representation
Bethany Scott, coordinator of digital products at the university library, walks over to Franklin’s computer terminal and begins explaining the process. They create a user name for Franklin, and in less than five minutes, the junior majoring in psychology is ready to begin her role as an editor.
Scott has a long list of topic pages that could use some work, many with ties to the women’s movement in the late 1970s, as a nod to the conference’s theme. Some need citation. Others, like the page Scott is editing about the 1977 conference, could use additional facts and fleshing-out. And a few are just a jumbled mess of bad grammar and spelling.
“I think I’ll start with spelling and grammar,” Franklin says. She’d like to get her feet wet before taking on something that carries more weight. But, with three of her classes canceled smack in the middle of her day, she’s sure she’ll have time to wade deeper.
This is the second time this year that UH has hosted an edit-a-thon in the name of upping women’s participation in Wikipedia. During the university’s initial attempt in March, 20 women edited 30 articles and created another eight. All told, they added 8,250 words to Wikipedia; their work has been viewed more than 15,000 times since their changes.
It doesn’t sound like much when you consider that there are more than 5.5 million articles stuffed inside the Englishlanguage version of Wikipedia, and more than 40 million worldwide. But small steps matter, says Rosie Stephen son Good knight, a contractor for Wi kim ed ia’ s gender diversity mapping project. She is also one of the founding members of Wikipedia’s Women in Red movement, which advocates for an increase in female representation on the site.
And the University of Houston isn’t the only organization hosting events like this. In recent years, the number of edit-a-thons focused on recruiting female editors has been steadily increasing, thanks to a concerted effort by grassroots feminists.
“In early 2010, 2011 and 2012, a lot of people started writing biographies about women in the month of March, March being Women’s History Month ,” says Stephen son Good knight, who has made more than 120,000 edits on Wikipedia. “And then in 2014, a survey was done, and a report was published that showed about 14.5 percent of the biographies on English Wikipedia were about women.”
Stephen son Good knight began giving talks about the massive under-representation of female editors and content about women, and requesting audiences pitch in to help women make up more of the entries on the website.
“We’re now at 17.16 percent,” she says. “Because, keep in mind, while we’re writing these biographies about women, all the dudes out there are still writing biographies about men. And in much larger numbers. So for our numbers to go up, we can’t just match them. In terms of numbers, we have to write more each month than they’re writing.”
‘It’s a responsibility’
There are also a lot of blanks to fill in.
“A lot of times, when you find an article about a woman, it’s when they were born, when they’re married and when they die,” says Darah Vann, a graduate student in the history department at UH, as she fixes up the spelling and grammar on a page during Tuesday’s edit-a-thon.
Vann often uses Wikipedia as an entry point in her academic research. But when a page contains only barebones information, it doesn’t do her much good. And when it contains information that doesn’t seem fair or fully accurate, she takes it upon herself to flesh it out with the best scholarly information she can find.
“Wikipedia is the first place you kind of pop in on to check on a subject. So once you pop in on a subject that you know more about, you’re sort of like, ‘Um, wait a minute. That’s not quite right,’ ” she says as she taps away at the page for International Women’s Day. “And just realizing that you can go in and change things and add what you know is liberating — and also scary.”
But even when she finds herself intimidated by the thought of being an authority behind the keyboard on a topic, she knows it’s necessary.
“I feel like it’s a responsibility,” she says. “There are things I know, things that I have struggled with looking up and had to dig really deep to find. And other people should also have access to that.”
Just imagine how robust her grade-school book reports would have been if she’d had immediate access to all the knowledge people are pumping onto the internet these days.
‘Record of humanity’
Stephenson-Goodknight has a copy of a Venezuelan encyclopedia from 1957. She analyzed its contents and found that only 3.6 percent of entries were about women. And though low literacy rates among women for centuries in the past limited the number of primary source materials available about women’s lives, that doesn’t account for a gap that wide, she says.
“I think it’s important that the record of humanity is right,” she says. “So why do we want the numbers to be more balanced? Well, I can tell you — 3.6 percent? That can’t truly be the sum of all human knowledge. And sure, we’ve done better already. If we’re at 17.16 percent, we’ve done a lot better already. But we do can better than that, too.”
On Tuesday, 10 women make their way to the little alcove in the library, editing 15 articles and adding 1,700 words to the “record of humanity.”
The numbers are smaller than they were during the March event, but that hardly matters to Scott, the UH library coordinator. She knows that over the course of time, even small changes like this will amplify as the number of Wikipedia users who access these pages grows exponentially by the day.
“Many of the people who participated last time were doing this for the first time,” Scott says. And that pattern repeated itself on Tuesday. “Now that they have some confidence in this, we’re hoping they’ll try it again sometime.”
Franklin, the UH junior, thinks that’s a real possibility for her. After spending her first hour correcting spelling and grammar, she dives in deeper, checking out articles in need of heavier lifts. She adds citations and smooths the translation of an article from Swedish to English. As her confidence grows, so, too, does her speed. By day’s end, she’s edited several pieces.
“I’d do this again,” she says. “It’s interesting, and I’m learning stuff, too.”