Mediaboss Marketing

The National Museum of Women in the Arts's recent Edit-a-Thon is part of a larger movement to address sexism on the internet.

Emily Haight

Four years ago, novelist Amanda Filipacchi noticed that female writers were being moved from Wikipedias American Novelists category to a separate subcategory. In a New York Timesop-ed, she wryly suggested that perhaps there should be another subcategory just for men. Within the next few days, angry Wikipedia editors responded by deleting information and sources from her personal Wikipedia page.

Despite the backlash, Filipacchis op-ed made a positive impact, and Wikipedia has since changed its rules about categorizing American novelists. But that doesnt mean that sexism isnt still a problem on the site. In fact, Wikipedias continued gender bias is the reason that the National Museum of Women in the Artsrecently held an Edit-a-Thon to help train female editors and improve Wikipedias content about women and the arts.

The museums meetup on Saturday was part of a larger group of Art+FeminismEdit-a-Thons that take place around the world every March. The Smithsonian American Art Museum also will a hold an Art+Feminism Edit-a-Thon on March 25, and the University of Maryland will hold one on March 28. According to Sarah Osborne Bender, director of NMWAs library and research center, her museum has participated in these Edit-a-Thons ever since they started in 2014.

Its a way for us to involve the community in addressing the gender disparity in the art world, she says. And as a librarian and an information professional, its a way to educate the public about such a popular resource and to show them that they could have responsible power in its creation and maintenance.

Forty-four people showed up to NMWAs Edit-a-Thon. Most were women, and the age range was quite mixed. Some had been Wikipedia editors for years and attended other meetups, while others hadnt even set up an editor account yet. A few said theyd participated in Edit-a-Thons about women in science, and so decided to check out this event too. Others said that theyd simply seen the event online and thought it seemed like a worthwhile thing to do.

For the first part of the Edit-a-Thon, Bender went over some basic rules about writing, selecting sources, and editing, and explained how to navigate Wikipedias interface. Though she gave the participants some guidelines about what kinds of edits they could make, everyone was free to choose whatever they wanted to work on, even if it strayed from the days topic.

Were not so prescriptive about what people work on because I think thats part of the ethos of Wikipedia, she says. As the National Museum of Women in the Arts, we have an interest in women being better represented. But the effort is also to train more women to be editors. According to Wikipedias page about Gender bias on Wikipedia (for real), between 8.5 and 16 percent of the sites editors identify as female. (Wikipedia has a similar diversity issue with race. Two years ago, the White House held an Edit-a-Thon focused on African Americans in STEM.)

One of the projects Bender did suggest was creating infoboxes for female artists who dont have them. Infoboxes show up in the right-hand corner of a Wikipedia page, but theyre also what populates the information on the right-hand side of your browser when you google someone. Lesser-known artists without infoboxes dont get that extra bump, so adding an infobox significantly impacts the information that people first see on Google.

Many of the participants took to the infobox idea, working off of a list of female artists who need them. One editor created an infobox for Ruth Faison Shaw, who introduced fingerpainting to the U.S. education system. Others searched for female artists whose entries needed updates, sources, or more information. The page about architect Olajumoke Adenowo was underdeveloped and not well cited, so someone beefed it up. One brave first-time Wikipedia user even created an entirely new page about Lilian Thomas Burwell, a D.C. sculptor and painter.

Making a page as a new user is actually a pretty big deal. Early on in the Edit-a-Thon, Bender had told the crowd about when she was still a relatively new Wikipedia user and had created a page for Magda Sawon, a gallery owner in New York City. A more experienced editor contested the decision to give Sawon a page, arguing that the gallery owner wasnt notable enough. But Bender remained civil and sought help from another experienced Wikipedia editor that she knew.

That editor vouched for her and the page stayed up, which might explain why Bender is so optimistic about the possibilities that the site offers. Wikipedia is such a great democratic resource, she says. It really lives on the contribution and the oversight of the community.

Visit link:
A DC Museum Tries to Make Wikipedia Less Sexist - Washington City Paper (blog)

The number of women who edit the popular open-source website Wikipedia is much lower than you might think. A Miami University edit-a-thon seeks to change that by teaching female students and staff how to contribute to the site.

A chief complaint against Wikipedia is that anyone can change the content, leading to errors or misinformation.

Humanities librarian Erin Vonnahme says that's not the only problem. "There is a sharp gender divide between Wikipedians. There is a demonstrably male majority of Wikipedian editors. Female-identified Wikipedians are, by far, a smaller percentage of the total population."

In fact, according to a 2011 study by the Wikimedia Foundation, just nine percent of Wikipedia editors are female.

"It affects how knowledge is seen; how knowledge is created and shared," says Vonnahme. "What knowledge is considered valuable is also really significant too. If female-identified voices aren't part of that conversation, then automatically what gets privileged and prioritized is skewed."

Vonnahme and co-creator Carly Sentieri say the edit-a-thon is part of a larger effort called Art + Feminism. That group sponsors similar edit-a-thons all around the world throughout the month of March.

Miami's edit-a-thon Tuesday was part of the university's Women's Read In.

"I would love it if we could create some people who are much more comfortable with editing Wikipedia generally and they can do it today and just build those skills," says Vonnahme. "But also apply it to their regular life and feel empowered to deploy their expertise as necessary and when needed and not feel intimidated by the medium."

Original post:
Miami Hosts Edit-A-Thon To Increase Female Wikipedia Editors - WVXU

A Vancouver art gallery is making surewomen get their due on the world's largest online encyclopaedia.

The Belkin Art Gallery is hosting a Wikipedia 'edit-a-thon'. The goal is to create more pages celebrating the accomplishments of women, particularly femaleartists a demographic that the gallery's coordinator AlexandraBischoffsays is widely underrepresented.

"Less than 10 per cent ofWikipediaeditors identify as female," Bischofftold stand-inhost Gloria Macarenko on CBC'sOn the Coast, citing the figures from activist group Art + Feminism. "These events areessentiallyan effort to bolster female representation on thewebsite, and also to encourage more women to become editors."

The 'edit-a-thon' at the Belkin Art Gallery is one of many happening across the globe. The events areaffiliated with Art + Feminism, a group founded by New York-based artists includingUBC alumnusJacqueline Mabey.

"It is an openinvitationfor women to come together and work on pages that they would like to see created for Wikipedia," said Bischoff.

Art + Feminism began organizing the annual 'edit-a-thons' in 2014, after recognizing that the bulk of Wikipedia articles pertain to male subjects, and are edited by male users.

Alexandra Bischoff, program coordinator of the Belkin Art Gallery, says participants in the 'edit-a-thon' will be provided with books and catalogues to research their desired female artists. (CBC)

Bischoffsays the gender disparity "stems from the fact that coding and programming are traditionally considered to be male dominated industries," adding that Wikipedia's interface was long inaccessible for people who were uneducated in the trade.

"Alack of femaleeditorsnaturallywill lead to a skewed representation on the platform, in any field."

Bischoff says many accomplished female artists are notable absent from the platform but the group hopes to change that. The art gallery will begin their 'edit-a-thons' onMarch 18and hopes to create up to 15 new pages.

With files from CBC's On the Coast

To listen to the full interview, click on the audio labelled:Women get far less recognition on Wikipedia than men, and a group of artists are tired of it

Read more:
Women get far less recognition on Wikipedia than men, and a group ... - CBC.ca

Slide: 1 / of 1. Caption: Nicholas Rigg/Getty Images

Major General Dale Meyerrose jokes that he doesnt think much of millennials. But he does largely credit that generation with fundamentally changing the way the US intelligence community collaborates.

In 2005, when Meyerrose worked as the Associate Director of National Intelligence, he was tasked with figuring out how to get 16 different spy agenciesall accustomed to decades of siloed secrecyto talk to each other. In the end, one of his most lasting accomplishments was championing a small grassroots effort led by young analysts that resulted in what would become Intellipedia.

Think of Intellipedia as a Wikipedia for spies. It works the same, except that theres no anonymity for contributors, and nothing can ever be unsourced. Its contents range from Unclassified to Top Secret, though its the lowest rung of Top Secret. Anyone in the executive branchwhich includes the intelligence communityhas enough clearance to access it. According to one intelligence official who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of the community, the Intellipedia that exists today is part wiki, part bulletin board, part internal newspaper. Its a great place to come in and see whats happening in the community as a whole, the official says.

Thats helpful, but its not the game-changing collaboration tool National Geospatial Intelligence-Agency analyst Chris Rasmussen, who was one of Intellipedias earliest and most ardent users, had hoped for. Back in 2006, he and his fellow Intellipedians, as they called themselves, imagined full crowd-sourced intelligence reports, those official documents that land on the desks of high-level government officials and shape foreign and domestic policy. Its fallen well short. Intellipedia helped the intelligence community catch up to Web 2.0, but still has far to go before it lives up to its original promise.

In the days after 9/11, intelligence operatives learned that their aversion to sharing information had allowed warnings about the attack to go unheeded. The spy agencies were operating as they had since the Cold War, when their main enemy was the Soviet Union, a monolith they understood and, more importantly, could predict. Now, not only was the enemy more broadly distributed, there was more information than ever, and no single place to organize and share it.

The idea for Intellipedia first caught on after D. Calvin Andrus, an Innovation Officer at the CIA, wrote an essay in 2005 that suggested the same power of Wikipedia and blogs to aggregate and share information could also support the high-stakes world of spying. The essay spread, and before long, Meyerrose gave the all-clear to set up a server to try it out. It was truly a grassroots effort, bottom up in the analyst community, he says.

What wasnt obvious to the powers-that-be back then, before the iPhone or Facebook existed, was that anyone would use it. Nobody thought it would catch on, Meyerrose says. Looking back on it, Im absolutely certain of all the senior officials I told Oh, this is a good idea, most of them thought that it would die of its own weight.

It didnt. Rasmussen and the other young analysts just kept writing articles and submitting them to the growing Intellipedia library. There was cachet in getting your contributions accepted. When people contested facts in the discussion section, things got hairy. This is tribal warfare, Meyerrose says. By 2008, when he retired, he couldnt go into any field office and not see a shortcut to Intellipedia on every computer screen.

Over a decade since its inception, Intellipedia has grown into a standard part of the intelligence communitys workday. It has a homepage with featured and developing articles, help pages, and requests for collaboration. You can find tips on tradecraft in its pages, and primers on conflicts in certain parts of the world. After news broke Tuesday of a leak of CIA hacking data, you can bet theres a page explaining whats known about that. It runs on Intelink, the internal classified intranet network that links all the agencies and is operated by a team overseen by DNI.

Its the spying worlds office water cooler.

The New York Times reported last week that Obama aides had scrambled to get as much information about the investigation into Russias meddling with the 2016 election onto Intellipedia as they could, knowing that would mean a broad range of analysts across multiple agencies would see it. Which makes sense. Intellipedia can help spark conversation. Its the spying worlds office water cooler.

Rasmussen always wanted it to be more, though. His dream was that eventually analysts could use Intellipediaor something like itto streamline the process of creating National Intelligence Estimates. But when Intellipedians tried to write NIEs on Intellipedia in 2006, 2007, bureaucracy got in the way. Every agency has a slightly different process for writing reports, and getting people to deviate from that for something so radically crowd-sourced proved impossible.

Realizing Intellipedia wasnt ever going to be accepted as an official voice of the intel community, Rasmussen tried to create a more official version of it after-the-fact. He called it the Living Intelligence System, and you can watch his YouTube video pitch about the specifics of how it worked here. Though it won accolades from the community, and became a real opt-in program, Living Intelligence never caught on.

Everyone agreed that the tech was better, most people agreed that the process benefits were better, but they just couldnt make the pivot, Rasmussen says.

But Rasmussen is tenacious. He fervently believes that the intelligence community would benefit from streamlined collaboration. To find a place for it, he just needed a part of the process that wasnt already mired in bureaucracy.

He found it by focusing on a specific chunk of most intelligence reports. Any given report will be roughly 20-percent classified infothe spooky stuff, Rasmussen calls itand 80-percent unclassified context and background that someone reading the spooky stuff needs to know to understand why the hell it matters. Its less sensitive. It represents an opportunity.

For the past few years, Rasmussen has led a team working to create an entirely new way to crowdsource that 80 percent. It still wont live up to that original dream of fully crowdsourced reportingbut it could get the community most of the way. Itll even, because this is 2017, have an app.

As Meyerrose would say, the millennials will love that.

Read more here:
The Wikipedia for SpiesAnd Where It Goes From Here - WIRED

Rola Nashef(Photo: Detroit Free Press file photo)Buy Photo

Knowledge is power,but a leadingsource of instant information, Wikipedia, has a well-known problem with female empowerment.

The overwhelming majority of volunteereditors for the free online encyclopedia are men. That raises the potential for incomplete, male-skewing content. As the New Yorker noted last year, the compiled history for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Wikipeida is double thesize of what exists for renowned American female author Toni Morrison.

Related:

Your International Women's Day shopping guide to women-owned businesses

Can't skip work? Women can still flex might on A Day Without A Woman

Counter-protest group: Go to work, skip A Day Without A Woman

On Saturday, people will gatherin Detroit and Ann Arbor to try to bring a little more gender equity to the world of Wikipedia,specifically on the topic of women and the arts.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit and the University of Michigan will each be hosting aWikipedia edit-a-thon. The eventsare part of an internationalcampaign launchedby a group calledArt + Feminism.Since 2014, theseedit-a-thons have drawn almost 5,000 participants to nearly 300 events across the globe.

MOCAD's edit-a-thon will run 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Saturday, while thethe University of Michigan Library's edit-a-thon at the Shapiro Design Labof the Shapiro Undergraduate Library will be noon-5 p.m. Saturday.

Both sessions are free and open to the public and will feature training for newcomers to the Wikipedia editing process. Those interested in participating need to bring their own laptops.

"A lot of this, it'sabout learning how to participate in that (Wikipedia) community," says Meghan Sitar, director of connected scholarship at the U-Mlibrary,who participated in an edit-a-thon at New York's Cornell University in 2016.

Sitar is coordinating what's believed to be the first event of its kind in Ann Arbor for these Art + Feminism efforts tied to Women's History Month."People tend to know it can be edited, but not how it can be edited."

The U-Mgathering is expected to draw a diverse mix of people from the community, including peopleinterested in learning more about Wikipedia,arts experts and college students."It definitely brings together a learning community," says Sitar.

In Detroit, the focus will be starting the process of establishing entries for fiveprominent women and one female collective in the local arts scene: philanthropistMaggie Allesee; former dancer and dance historianHarriet Berg;writerMarsha Music; filmmaker Rola Nashef; the late gallery owner Suzanne Hilberry, who played a vital part in the creation of MOCAD,and Corazon del Pueblo, asouthwest Detroit dance company focused on Mexican dance and culture.

MOCAD education associate Augusta Morrison, who's organizing the Motor City edit-a-thon, stresses thatanyone from "all gender identities and expressions" can come to the event.It will feature a training session with Morrison and Angela T. Jones of Super Woman Productions, who ran a2014 edit-a-thon in Detroit.

There are several factorsthat are thought tocontributeto the lackof female Wikipedia editors, including the lack of free time for women juggling many responsibilities and the culture of the Wikipedia editing process. A 2015 exploration of Wikipedia's gender bias inAtlantic magazine posed the challenge this way: "Wikipedia is suffering from a cyclical kind of sexism: A lack of female editors means that its content can be hostile to women, which in turn drives away potential female editors."

The Saturday events won't fix the Wikipedia gender gaps. But they will be a step toward that goal. Says Morrison:"The idea is not that we'll have these polished essays at the end of the day, but we'll have started the process."

If you're interested in attending a session,RSVP to the Detroit event on the MOCADFacebook pageorregister for the Ann Arbor event at the U-Michigan library site.

Contact Detroit Free Press writer Julie Hinds: 313-222-6427 or jhinds@freepress.com.

Read or Share this story: http://on.freep.com/2mrAKFk

Read more:
Detroit, Ann Arbor to participate in Wikipedia edit-a-thon - Detroit Free Press