Wikimania

Critical issues presentations/Let's Fill the Wikipedia Gender Gap

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Submission no. 31
Title of the submission

Let's Fill the Wikipedia Gender Gap

Author of the submission
  • Natacha Rault
  • Marie-Pierre Vidonne
Country of origin

Switzerland; Switzerland

Topics

Governance, other, Outreach, Projects

Keywords
  • gender gap
  • numeric gap
  • learning to contribute
  • age gap
  • equal opportunities
  • empowerment
  • biographies of Swiss women
  • best practices for beginners
  • Wikimooc
  • representation of women in the numeric world
Abstract

We would like to present our "let's fill the gender gap" project which was partly financed by an IdeaLab inspire grant and the University of Geneva, as well as the future developments planned for this project. The issue we try to address is the wiki gender gap as pictured by the NYT article in 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html).

Given that there are not enough women contributors on Wikipedia, and that the wiki pages referring to women experts tend to give an over weighted focus to their marital life, we organize contributing workshops to address the issue.

We provide a number of six session workshops within an academic surrounding to teach participants how to become a wiki contributor with a special focus on gender awareness. We coach women and male participants in their first steps towards the publication of a wiki article and bring awareness on how to overcome stereotypes that hold women back. The participants are all, male and females working on pages about renowned Swiss women, but in their own area of expertise.

We would like to share our experience, best practices, metrics and first results with the Wikipedia community and inform about future developments of the project, which is being now developed in other regions in Switzerland. We would also like to get in touch with other projects which operated on similar grounds (in fact we have already met Laure Aragon who runs a similar Mexican project called Mukira http://mukira.org/ which gave us so many useful ideas!).

This project has also led us, in our endeavour to provide resources for beginners to participate in the shooting of the first French Wikimooc https://www.france-universite-numerique-mooc.fr/courses/WMFr/86001/session01/about and to generate discussion about the presence of women and underrepresented categories in the Wikipedia community.

More information on the ongoing project can be found here (in French)

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projet:Suisse/Biographies_des_femmes_en_Suisse

or here in English https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/User:Nattes_%C3%A0_chat/Let's_fill_the_gender_gap_Workshops

Result

Not accepted

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