Advanced FAQ: Adding Infoboxes to Wikipedia Articles
Advanced Lesson Plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism/Advancedtraining Infobox Template for Artist: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...
By: Art Feminism
Originally posted here:
Advanced FAQ: Adding Infoboxes to Wikipedia Articles - Video
Grameenphone and Wikipedia: Journey so far
Grameenphone joined hands with Bangla Wikimedia with an objective of enriching Bengali content in Bangla Wikipedia. As there is lacking of Bengali article in Bangla Wikipedia, therefore the...
By: Grameenphone Ltd
Excerpt from:
Grameenphone and Wikipedia: Journey so far - Video
MWC 2015: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on The People #39;s Operator
By: The Drum
See the rest here:
MWC 2015: Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales on The People's Operator - Video
Wikipedias goal is to democratize the consumption and creation of knowledge. But dig into just who is creating content on Wikipedianot to mention what kind of content theyre creatingand youll find Wikipedia is far from the egalitarian ideal it set out to be.
About 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are men, an issue so well documented it has its own Wikipedia page. The issue has roiled the Wikimedia Foundation for years. Its studied the problem and set goals for bridging the gap, goalseven Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says the Foundation has completely failed to meet. The lack of diversity is so deeply rooted that the National Science Foundation commissioned two studies of why this bias exists.
The problem is, because Wikipedia is runin theory at leastby and for the people, only the people can correct the imbalance. A growing group of socially minded Wikipedia editors are taking up the cause with a slew of edit-a-thons that aim to enhance the coverage of women, minorities, the LGBTQ community, and other underrepresented groups on Wikipedia.
Case in point: on Saturday, to coincide with International Womens Day, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will host the second annual Art+Feminism edit-a-thonpromoting the representation of women in the arts on Wikipedia. Last month, to commemorate Black History Month, theWhite House held an edit-a-thon to crowdsource entries on African Americans in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Last summer, the Wiki Loves Pride edit-a-thon convened editors to cover prominent members of the LGBTQ communities. And those are just a few examples.
I think its been fascinating how many edit-a-thons there have been, says Katherine Maher, chief communications officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. You might think that the nonprofit behind Wikipedia would try to distance itself from the sites critics and events that call attention to its shortcomings. But the organization appears to be getting behind the edit-a-thon movement.Its something we definitely support and encourage, Maher says.
Last years Art+Feminism event, she says, was one of the most successful, attracting some 600 people in 31 locations around the world. Its founders, including Wikipedia editors Michael Mandiberg and Dorothy Howard, launched the edit-a-thon in part because of the outrage over the categorization of American women novelists on Wikipedia, in which editors gradually removed female novelists from the overall American Novelists category and dumped them in their own subcategory. As Mandiberg remembers it, conversations spiraled out of control on social media, with people furiously wondering why Wikipedia would do such a thing.
I was like, Wikipedia isnt just one thing, he remembers. So Mandiberg and his co-founders decided to launch an event that would help raise awareness of some of the glaring holes on Wikipedia, and the need for people with diverse backgrounds and knowledge to fill them. This is a consciousness-raising effort, he says. We dont expect to solve the gender gap in one day of editing.
Theories abound for why Wikipedias diversity problem exists. For starters, Maher says, Wikipedia grew out of the open source technology community, which, has long been predominantly male. She also points out that content on Wikipedia has to be backed up by secondary sources, sources that she says throughout history have contained a bias toward white men.
Wikipedia reflects society as a whole, and historically, women and people of color have not been represented in mainstream knowledge creation or inclusion in that knowledge, she says, noting that encyclopedias of old were mostly written by European men. The more that mainstream media content originates from diverse communities, she says, the easier it is to include in Wikipedia.
Art+Feminisms Howard points to so-called leisure inequality, the phenomenon of women tending to have less downtime than men to, say, edit Wikipedia pages. That, coupled with the often abusive relationships between editors, evidenced by the recent controversy over the Gamergate Wikipedia page, can make Wikipedia a less than welcoming place for women and other minority groups looking to get involved.
Read the original here:
Meet the Editors Fighting Racism and Sexism on Wikipedia
Wikipedia knows it has a gender problem. Every time you see a new study, news headline, or snarky blog comment calling out Wikipedia's male-heavy demographic breakdown, you should know that the Wikimedia Foundation is aware of the issue and is trying to figure out ways to fix it. Now they're asking users for help.
The Inspire Campaign is a new initiative by the Wikimedia Foundation designed to diversify its army of editors and make its quest to document "the sum of all human knowledge" less of a white-dude sausage party. The non-profit has allocated $250,000 in grant money, which will be awarded to those who submit the best ideas for improving diversity on Wikipedia.
"The solutions themselves need to be diverse," says Siko Bouterse, director of community resources at the Wikimedia Foundation. "The challenge of getting more women to contribute in Bangalore is very different from the challenge of getting more women to contribute in Harlem, which is different from the challenge of getting more women to contribute in a village in Thailand. There is no one-size-fits-all solution."
A United Nations University study from 2010 found that only 13% of Wikipedia's editors are female, while other surveys have yielded an even lower number. Whatever the exact stats may bethis isn't an easy thing to measure, since Wikipedians don't self-report gender upon signing upsuffice it to say that the vast majority of Wikipedia editors are men. This appears to have an impact on the site's content. Last month, European researchers used computational linguistics to uncover an anti-female bias in the language used across Wikipedia.
Since Wikipedia is an encyclopedia covering millions of topics, the controversy around its editor demographics has a way of intertwining itself with larger gender-related controversies. Most recently, edit wars have erupted on the Wikipedia entries for Gamergatewhich led to a controversial decision to ban some editorsand Chelsea Manning, the transgendered WikiLeaks whistleblower formerly known as Bradley (a fact now acknowledged by her once uncertain Wikipedia article).
More broadly, Wikipedia's demographic breakdown makes it harder to achieve the objective record of human knowledge that the site so ambitiously declares as its goal. African-American history, for example, is underrepresented on the site, as are details about many other parts of the world.
There have been a number of efforts to address these biases, often in the form of brief spurts of editing called edit-a-thons. Some focus on things like beefing up coverage of female scientists, while others aim to correct the dearth of information about black history.
While the Wikimedia Foundation welcomes these spikes in participation, it acknowledges that they're not going to be enough to tip the balance. "More women editing does not necessarily mean more content about women on Wikipedia," says Bouterse. "It's much more complex than that."
Through the Inspire Campaign, the organization aims to reel in 500 new participants and as many as 100 ideas for diversifying Wikipedia in the long run. Until March 31, 2015, anyone can submit ideas through the Inspire Campaign wiki and the best onesas determined by a panel of Wikimedia volunteerswill be given a slice of the $250,000 that the foundation has set aside for this initiative.
One of the ongoing challenges of fixing Wikipedia's gender gap is going to be measuring progress, which can be very nuanced. The Wikimedia Foundation is looking at new ways to track the progress of these initiatives but warns that nobody should expect things to change overnight.
Excerpt from:
Think Wikipedia Is Sexist? They Want To Pay You To Help Change That