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Abigail Wise, left, and Kassondra Cloos organized group to edit and add Wikipedia entries to make sure more women in the outdoor industry are represented in the online encyclopedia. (Cliff Grassmick / Staff Photographer)

Visitors to Wikipedia in the coming weeks will for the first time be able to find facts on Claire Marie Hodges, the country's first female national park ranger. They'll also be able to read about American freeskier Elyse Saugstad, who survived the infamous 2012 Tunnel Creek Avalanche, or Shannon Galpin, the 2013 National Geographic Adventurer of the Year.

This information is available thanks to a pair of Boulder women whose efforts to highlight influential females in the outdoor recreation industry are part of a nationwide push to edit the pages of history with an eye on gender inclusivity.

"If you're looking for information on the outdoor industry, women are not well-represented," said Kassondra Cloos, an assistant editor at Boulder-based industry publication SNEWS. "We need to fix that."

It was a search for information that led Cloos to spearhead change. Researching a story about Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario, Cloos realized the executive's only presence on Wikipedia was a mention in the entry for her company.

"She works for basically the most powerful company in the outdoor industry," Cloos said. "For her not to be on Wikipedia seemed wrong."

Around that time, another Boulder outdoor media professional, Abigail Wise, shared a tweet about a New York event, hosted by Her Girl Friday, to edit and add pages to the online, user-generated encyclopedia to include more women. Cloos saw the tweet and contacted Wise with an idea: Why not host their own event and focus on women in the outdoors industry?

"We decided to look at who was missing," Wise said. "It was a lot. And the pages that were there were very small."

In a recent survey of 2,100 women conducted by retailer REI, 63 percent of respondents could not name even one female mentor in the outdoor industry. Those who did name role models picked athletes like Serena Williams or public figures such as Michele Obama who, while associated with being active and healthy, are not part of the outdoor recreation world.

"It's important, especially for young girls, to have powerful female role models, so that they can aspire to get outdoors and find their own level of adventure," Cloos said. "The fact that these women aren't on Wikipedia is indicative of a bigger problem; they're not well-known enough to be seen as universally important."

Wise and Cloos came up with a list of 13 individuals and organizations who merited new or longer articles. A small group of mostly outdoor media professionals spent a full day adding new entries and extending others, with some help from Wikipedia volunteers.

The work is still ongoing both women have continued editing in their spare time on nights and weekends. Some pages have yet to go live, and the idea of a follow-up event is still being tossed around.

"Our goal was not only to add pages and expand on pages, it was more to teach people these tools and pique people's interest so this can be an ongoing things in their lives," Wise said.

That might mean extending efforts beyond the outdoor world. Wise has already been contacted by someone interested in doing the same thing for the tech industry.

"We really have the power here to make a difference," Cloos said. "We are literally writing history, and in some cases rewriting it, to make sure women are part of the record and that their contributions have been recognized."

Shay Castle: 303-473-1626, castles@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/shayshinecastle

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Women in outdoor industry seek better gender inclusivity on Wikipedia - Broomfield Enterprise

Nelly Furtado showed off her new look on Loose Women (Picture: ITV)

Nelly Furtado showed off her new look on Loose Women and revealed how her Wikipedia page is affecting her love life.

The 38-year-old has returned to music after a five-year break with new album Ride, and joined Loose Women panellists Nadia Sawalha, Christina Bleakley, Linda Robson and Martine McCutcheon to discuss why she took such a prolonged break.

Speaking on the show about the high-point of her career following 2006s Loose, Nelly said: I craved to be home.

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It was exciting but I took too much on. Being a mother, on the road, and managing a relationship while making music..

She also revealed about going through a difficult break-up last summer, but shes happy to be single now calling out for her Wikipedia page to be updated so she can get back in the dating game.

I am single. Someone here needs to update my Wikipedia its not helping my dating life, she joked.

If youre wondering, nope its still not updated (at time of writing).

Many viewers also didnt even quite believe it was the same Nelly Furtado who flew like a bird all those years ago.

Is that a compliment? Well take it as a compliment (probably not).

The shows had a string of surprising guests recently, having yesterday featured Katie Price with her son Harvey and mum Amy for a full family outing.

You can catch Loose Women weekdays on ITV at 12.30pm.

MORE: Coleen Nolan made an epic faux pas about the Kray twins and EastEnders on Loose Women

MORE: Katie Price appears on Loose Women with son Harvey to hit back against online bullies

Continue reading here:
Nelly Furtado calls for Wikipedia page update as it's 'not helping her dating life' - Metro

Have you ever wished that Wikipedia had a better article on your favourite subject? Or felt that more credit should be given to experts who contribute to this most indispensable of modern information sources? To help tackle these issues, in March 2012, PLOS Computational Biology launched Topic Pages, whose success was followed by the establishment of a Topic Pages Collection in September 2014. Topic Pages are written in the style of a Wikipedia article, and are openly and publicly peer reviewed before being published in our PLOS journals with a second, living version posted to Wikipedia. Since the projects launch, PLOS Computational Biology has published ten Topic Pages, covering a range of subjects from Viral Phylodynamics to Approximate Bayesian Computation. The published articles have been widely viewed on Wikipedia, as well as in PLOS Computational Biology and PubMed, and are well-cited.

From the start, Topic Pages have contributed to filling important gaps in Wikipedias coverage of computational biology content, and have fulfilled PLOS aim of transforming research communication and interacting with researchers and the public in a new way.

We are now excited to introduce Topic Pages for PLOS Genetics. PLOS Genetics Topic Pages will be led by our Topic Pages editor Thomas Shafee, and will expand the reach of the current Collection, encouraging submissions on genetics-related topics that are not yet covered in Wikipedia, or exist as stub Wikipedia pages which can be expanded on. Examples could include oncogene, coding region, DNA transposons, the neutral theory of molecular evolution, and plasmid partitioning, to name a few. Like the PLOS Computational Biology Topic Pages, they will be written in the style of a Wikipedia article and peer reviewed on the open PLOS Wiki. On acceptance, a citable version will be published in the corresponding PLOS journal, with a second version uploaded to Wikipedia, where it will begin a new life and can be edited by other readers.

See here for a personal account from a Topic Pages author, on his experience and description of how Topic Pages work.

We are now inviting submissions for the new PLOS Genetics Topic Pages, and, with Topic Pages for PLOS Computational Biology continuing to grow, look forward to receiving new proposals from you for both of these areas! Please email plosgenetics@plos.org/ploscompbiol@plos.org or visit the PLOS Wiki site for more information or to submit a proposal.

Featured Image: Credit: pixabay.com

Written by: Ann Luk, Publications Assistant, PLOS Genetics

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Continuing to Bridge the Journal-Wikipedia Gap: Introducing Topic Pages for PLOS Genetics - PLoS Blogs (blog)

It may not be too late for a little course correction on how were all consuming and evaluating or not information in a digital environment.

But squeezing some ideological diversity into readers media diets is far from a silver bullet to the problem of misinformation and partisan echo chambers slicing society into isolated realities.

The idea that youll get to truth by, for instance, just reading Breitbart and then Truthout, and somehow will come to truth, is kind of a bizarre idea, Mike Caulfield said, when I told him about friends who, post-election, have been trying to balance out the liberal bias in the media they consume.

The wiki houses student submissions of various claims that have made the rounds online, across lots of different fields in addition to politics, from environment to hate speech to race and immigration to psychology and neuroscience. Students from participating institutions work in public, collectively, to fill out the life cycle of the claim and summarize and weight the viewpoints that have been shared online about that claim, a sort of Know Your Meme of viral information.

The page on the infamous three million illegals voted claim, for instance, includes the following cautious reasoning from students on the veracity of that claim: There are no good reasons to believe this claim, and numerous reasons to doubt it, the student editing the wiki page concluded. The primary reason to doubt it is that zero evidence has been presented. The entire case is a tweet where someone claims to have evidence. You can also check out the pages revisions, find a list of sites that spread the original claim, and browse for links to additional analysis on the claim. The voter fraud claim was labeled highly unlikely a designation that could easily be debated through editing the wiki, Caulfield suggested.

When were after truth, our simple definition, for the purposes of the wiki, is that truth is something generally believed by people in a position to know, that are likely to tell the truth, Caulfield said. But people are getting obsessed with the Are they likely to tell the truth? piece of this, without getting into the question of Are they in a position to know?' (Sites that aggregate and spin someone elses reporting, or rely on sources who werent at an event to weigh on on what happened there? Not in a position to know.)

The wiki is part of the American Association of State Colleges and Universities American Democracy Project, started shortly after the November U.S. election; so far, its been shared only within the AASCU network, though anyone with a .edu email can register, gearing up for a wider launch in June. Several schools are plugged into the wiki so far, and its use case goes beyond teaching media literacy.

Its an idea that fits well into a lot of different classes. You can drop it in a public policy class, you can drop it in a writing class, Caulfield said. One neuroscience class is using the wiki to address suspect psychological science claims. An environmental class is looking at tensions around water use and contributing factors to drought.

The wiki is linked up with a Hypothesis annotation widget to allow students to point to specific lines from anything they link to to back up their fact checks. The process of writing new pages may feel clunky to students (the tech for public wikis just feel years behind the times), and some users write into a Google Doc, which is then ported over into the wiki. The open source DokuWiki software that Digipo runs on is just a temporary solution. Ideally, Caulfield said, hed find a tech partner that could provide an easier-to-use platform, one that doesnt necessarily only involve students.

If other people could build that framework, we could just focus on the pedagogy, getting students to think about this stuff, and people who are much better at the other piece could take care of the technology, Caulfield said. We have to come up with something better than Google Docs.

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This Wikipedia for fact-checking by students makes more room for context and origins of claims online - Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard

Celebrate Earth Day by improving access to information on natural resources and environmental issues in New Mexico.

Outdoor enthusiasts and computer aficionados are invited to help create and enhance webpages at a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Centennial Science and Engineering Library is hosting the event on Thursday, April 20 from 1 5 p.m.

Volunteers will receive training from Wikipedia and can spend a few minutes or a few hours editing, depending on their schedule. Training sessions start on the hour. Experienced editors and librarians will also be available to answer questions.

Free wifi and a limited number of laptops will be provided. Participants are also encouraged to bring their own laptops or tablets. The edit-a-thon is open to the campus community and the general public.

The event coincides with Earth Day, and participants will focus on enhancing pages relating to environmental issues and natural resources in New Mexico, i.e. Ecoregions in New Mexico, Protected Areas of New Mexico, New Mexico Superfund Sites, Solar Power in New Mexico, New Mexico Environment Department and New Mexico Native Plants.

The rest is here:
Wikipedia edit-a-thon in honor of Earth Day - UNM Newsroom