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This Event Is Taking On The Gender Gap — One Wikipedia Entry At A Time

March 28th, 2019

The High museum is hosting an Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thon Saturday from 12 to 4 p.m. to help address the dearth of female Wikipedia editors.

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The High Museum is working to close the Wikipedia editor gender gap.

About 90 percent of the online encyclopedia’s editors are men, according to The Atlantic. So, the museum is hosting an Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thon to change this on Saturday from 12 to 4 p.m. complete with editor training. The event is free with registration.

“We felt that it was very important to contribute our space, our expertise and our access to artworks and references to try and help change that,” Eva Berlin, High Museum’s Digital Content Specialist, said.

Since 2014, the campaign has been updating posts on Wikipedia about transgender and cis women, feminism and the arts through its Edit-a-Thon educational events. This year, the campaign has expanded to include gender non-conforming artists and activists.

Jacqueline Mabey, co-founder of Art + Feminism, said the organization wants to show people how simple it to start a conversation on Wikipedia by contributing in various ways, from adding photos to citations.

“What folks don’t know is not just anyone can edit it, but the best practices, guidelines, content, that’s all decided by the editors,” Mabey said. “Our goal is to make the Wikipedia projects better and more complete and accurate representations of history and the labor that various groups have put into varying kinds of cultural products.”

Susan Richmond, associate director & associate professor of Art History at Georgia State University, said that women can feel deterred from completing Wikipedia entries.

“I think there’s still this tendency for women to feel as though they are not confident in doing that kind of thing. Either they feel like they do not have the expertise on the topics that they are interested in and they feel that they don’t have the expertise on how to actually write the entries,” Richmond said.

She hosted an Art + Feminism event at Georgia State in 2016. She said that the events help to streamline the process of updating and creating new Wikipedia entries.

Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thons are happening all year, around the world, with events happening in countries including Mexico, India and the United Kingdom. Some of the Wikipedia pages created by participants include artists Mary Corse, Deanna Bowen and Ruby Frazier.