Last Saturday, about 600 volunteers in 31 venues around the globe engaged in a collective effort to change the world, one Wikipedia entry at a time.
In the United States, Canada, Australia, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in nonprofits and art schools, in museums and universities, these people—mostly women—set out to write entries, uncredited and unpaid, for the fast-growing crowd-sourced online encyclopedia.
Editors working around the resource table, Wikipedia Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon, at Eyebeam in New York City.
They had answered a call for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, a massive multinational effort to correct a persistent bias in Wikipedia, which is disproportionally written by and about men.
The event, whose epicenter was the New York art and technology center Eyebeam, is part of a larger movement, only now reaching the art world, to upload content to Wikipedia in a proactive manner.
At a time when Wikipedia is becoming increasingly influential, “it’s really tangible to be able to fix something that is visibly wrong,” says Jacqueline Mabey, a co-organizer of Saturday’s Edit-a-Thon with Siân Evans of the Art Libraries Society of North America’s Women and Art Special Interest Group, Michael Mandiberg, an artist and associate professor at CUNY who teaches with Wikipedia, and current Eyebeam Fellow Laurel Ptak.
More than 150 people crowded into Eyebeam’s Chelsea headquarters during Saturday’s event, while satellite venues reported turnouts ranging from 6 to 60.
Volunteers versed in the process, protocol, and ethic of Wikipedia gave tutorials to the newcomers, who were mostly artists, activists, students, and scholars. They learned what constitutes a proper reference, how to create external links, and when and where to put footnotes. They learned that people can’t write about themselves, and what kind of sources are acceptable.
By the end of the day, around 100 new entries were up (around 80 more were enhanced). The new pages, devoted to figures ranging from Australian modernists Ethel Spowers and Dorrit Black to Catalan painter Josefa Texidor i Torres to contemporary artists including Mary Miss, Xaviera Simmons, Audrey Flack, and Monika Bravo, vary widely in scope, grammar, and quality of content. But the Wikipedia team expects that blips will vanish as the hive mind has its work on the entries.
“You have someone you know a lot about? It takes ten minutes,” says Ximena Gallardo C., a gender and film scholar at LaGuardia Community College. “This is the world brain. It’s just starting.”
Nicole Casamento, a former ARTnews intern who runs the website Culture Grinder, attended the Brooklyn Museum meetup, where she created the first Wikipedia page for the artist Senga Nengudi.
“The event seemed like a new kind of consciousness raising that was very goal-oriented,” says Casamento, a masters student in American literature at Brooklyn College. “It was aimed at writing women into history in a new way for the digital age—by giving more women the awareness and tools to take matters in their own hands.”
The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Wikimedia DC and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art have scheduled the next Women in the Arts edit-a-thon for March 30.
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