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Wikipedia has long been one of the first online stops for college students when they need a question answered. However, a staggering study completed by Wikipedia shows that less than 10 percent of the websites contributors identify as female.

Such a discrepancy in the gender of Wikipedia authors leaves a significant gap in the amount of information available on female artists and many other female figures in general. On Saturday, March 25, the University of Georgia held an event to combat the issue.

The Lamar Dodd School of Art and the Georgia Museum of Art hosted its own chapter of the ongoing, international Art + Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thons, adding to a long list of cities and institutions who have joined the annual cause held during Womens History Month.

The Art + Feminism events are a worldwide series of gatherings, held in collaboration with Wikipedia, in which people come together to edit Wikipedia articles in order to work towards solving the problematic lack of information available about many females in the art world.

Women get most of their information not from themselves, said Lindsay Reynolds, the art librarian at Lamar Dodd. Its important for women to take ownership of research and information.

The editing portion of the event included a variety of resources for participants who may have needed assistance in editing Wikipedia articles. In fact, no experience was necessary for this event, and though participants were encouraged to set up Wikipedia accounts ahead of time, they could even have registered on the website at the event itself.

The edit-a-thon organizers compiled a list of artists, primarily from the Georgia Museum of Art collection, who either have no articles or articles that are lacking in information, and pulled research from various library databases to provide information for participants to add to the pages. However, participants were also encouraged to bring other ideas of female artists.

Anyone was invited to join in on the event, not just students or women. A main goal of the event was for participants to walk away with a greater understanding of how information is presented on the web.

The overarching goal of the edit-a-thon, according to Reynolds before the event, was not only to get information out about female artists, but also to encourage people to use resources such as the art library and Wikipedia responsibly.

I hope its an entry point to understanding that anyone can edit Wikipedia, and represent yourself and your sisters, and that its not so scary, said Reynolds. Its important to know where that information comes from; so many people use Wikipedia and never think about it.

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Wikipedia edit-a-thon boosts coverage of female figures online - Red and Black

The response was beyond what we could have imagined, Art+Feminisms co-founders told Artsy collectively, via email. The call for participation went viral; people and organizations we had no direct relationship with were reaching out, asking to be a part of the project, they said. We thought we would have to guilt 10 friends into attending! We never expected to be working on the project years later.

Now, Art+Feminism has spread to more than 28 countries across six continents. Although their edit-a-thons are primarily planned to occur in March, to correspond with Womens History Month, they continue throughout the year. These events are planned and hosted by local arts organizations and major museums, like the Smithsonian American Art Museum in D.C. and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 2016 alone, participants in Art+Feminisms efforts added roughly 2,000 articles to Wikipedia and improved another 1,000. Artists newly represented on the site span Alice Boyd, a British pre-Raphaelite painter, Margret the Adroit, an early 13th-century Icelandic carver, and Xiao Lu, a contemporary Chinese installation and video artist.

The School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City hosted an edit-a-thon on Saturday, March 18th. It was the schools first event with Art+Feminism, scheduled as part of a wider event series reacting to the election of President Donald Trump in November. We wanted to create something for our students so they could become politically active, or to show them ways in which they could effect change, explained Phoebe Stein, a digital service librarian at SVA who organized the edit-a-thon.

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This Initiative Is Helping Female Artists Gain Equal Representation on Wikipedia - Artsy

While en route to jail following his arrest for driving with a suspended license and no insurance, a Florida man declared, Thats the last time I listen to Wikipedia about driving. It said I would just get a ticket.

Justin Miret, 22, was nabbed Friday evening after a cop spotted him running a stop sign in Port St. Lucie. Subsequent checks revealed that Mirets drivers license was suspended last year and his auto insurance had been cancelled.

Miret began screaming at a patrolman, according to an arrest affidavit, and balled his fists up in an apparent attempt to intimidate the cop. Miret, seen above, was subsequently arrested and placed in the rear of a police cruiser, where he could be heard complaining about the faulty legal advice available on Wikipedia.

Charged with a pair of misdemeanors, Miret is scheduled for an April 11 arraignment hearing. He is free on $1125 bond.

See original here:
Florida Man Blames His Arrest On Faulty Legal Advice From Wikipedia - The Smoking Gun

Participants in Saturday's workshop learned how to edit Wikipedia articles.

FARMINGTON - A workshop on Saturday educatedparticipantsonthe process of editing Wikipedia articles to provide accurate and up-to-date information, specifically focused on women in the arts. The online encyclopedia offers free information in over 250 languages worldwide. Articles are a collaborative effort of the general public, allowing anyone to contribute or edit the information.

Organizer, Abby Flannigan, brought the idea for the "edit-a-thon" back to her hometown of Farmington after learning the skills at a similar gatheringin her college town of Bozeman, Montana. Theworkshop was scheduled to align with others happening around the globe, an event in its fifth year of taking place.

The Wikipedia Edit-a-thon is one piece of a larger movement to bring more female participation to the site. The movement began after a 2010 survey revealed that less than 13 percent of Wikipedia contributors were women, leading to alack of representation on the site. Last year's edit-a-thon brought an estimated 2,500 global participants who edited a total of 3,000 articles related to notable women artists.

"A lot of my students are getting biased information from Wikipedia and using it for papers, which is solidifying it as real history," University of Maine at Farmington Associate Professor of Art History, Sarah Maline said.

Maline helped to organize the event after hearing about the idea from Flannigan. The team, along with UMF freshman Hope Williams, gathered at the UMF Art Gallery to provide free food, childcare and skills to interested participants. Despite the university's spring break, a small crowd brought laptops and camped out for the day's edit-a-thon. The team plans to schedule next year's event when classes are in session in order to encourage more participants.

"As a teacher, it's not about the mechanics of technology, but about the forward thinking use of technology. We are a global society. We need to be looking at the bigger picture and how can we use technology to make a difference in the world," UMF Associate Professor of Secondary Education Theresa Overall said.

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Workshop provides skills to edit Wikipedia articles | Daily Bulldog - Daily Bulldog

With laptops in hand, people gathered in the Harn Museum of Art on Sunday to increase representation of female artists on Wikipedia.

The second annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Art + Feminism was held to represent women and artists in other minority groups. The Gainesville event, hosted by the Harn and UFs School of Art + Art History, was one of many held around the world, said Melissa Hyde, the director of graduate students for UFs School of Art + Art History.

About 40 people sat in the museums auditorium, editing or creating articles about artists for about four hours.

Hyde said by increasing the number of women who create and are the subjects of Wikipedia pages, the website would more accurately represent artists.

Its such an important source for us now, its like the first stop for everybody when you want to look something up, she said.

Ninety percent of Wikipedias content is produced by men, said Eric Segal, the director of education and curator of academic programs at the Harn.

The content itself tends to skew towards male interests, Segal said.

Jennifer Canals, a UF art history junior, said she wanted to attend Sundays event after participating last year.

We have a long history of being misrepresented as women and especially as women artists, the 21-year-old said. I think that its really great that were giving recognition to artists that otherwise would not be getting recognition.

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Harn hosts Wikipedia-editing marathon in name of feminism - The Independent Florida Alligator