Scottish Women on Wikipedia

The Olympia Building at Bridgeton Cross. Taken by Laura Dolan on the Glasgow Women's Library East End Women's Heritage Walk.

Scottish Women on Wikipedia - In a nutshell Where?: Bridgeton Library, The Olympia Building, Bridgeton, 2-16 Orr Street, Glasgow, G40 2QH When?: Saturday, 16 November 2013, 10.00 - 16.00 Cost?: Free Participants?: Everyone is welcome to attend. We plan on having two 'getting going' sessions; one starting at 10.00 and another at 13.00 with some editing after each. Booking?: No booking is necessary. Just come along on the day. You can sign up below if you like. How do I find out more?: Click here to go to the GWL events page for the day. Point of contact: User:Graeme Arnott

About this editathon

The initial suggestion for the name of this editathon was 'Glasgow Women in Wikipedia'. However, this was later improved upon to become something much more nuanced, and which better reflected the main objectives of the event.

The aims of the editathon are,

• to increase awareness of Wikipedia and the other Wiki-projects as sites of user-generated content
• to increase the number of female editors on Wikipedia (these are the Scottish women of the event's name)
• to improve the content of the encyclopedia
• to generate discussion amongst the Scotwiki community about the gender imbalance within the Wiki-community.

The content of the encylopedia will be improved by

• adding new content to existing articles and/or by creating new articles. In particular this will be related to Scottish women's history (the 'Scottish women' of the event's name)
• increasing the diversity of editors contributing to the encyclopedia. In particular this event is aimed at Scottish women, (again the 'Scottish women' of the event's name)
• developing the diversity/breadth of articles in the encyclopedia.

That last bullet-point has encouraged some interesting and on-going discussions. There is, admittedly, a certain essentialist approach to this event, and when I first talked to some of the members of Glasgow Women's Library about the subject of neutrality in the encyclopedia there was an audible laugh. As somebody said to me later 'only a man could think that language was neutral'. This raised a number of points which hopefully will continue both during and after the day. Some of the issues that we've discussed are

• that neutrality is formed within discourse. If the discourse is formed by certain dominant practices then the version of neutrality within that discourse will, likewise, be formed by certain dominant practices.
• that gender is performed through language
• that encouraging women to write about "women's subjects" is its own form of dominance

These issues of bias and dominance might be summed up in Greg Singh's question at EduWiki 2013 'What makes a good wiki?'

Participants

Graeme Arnott (talk) 12:19, 1 September 2013 (UTC)

Glasgow Women's Library (talk) 10:13, 3 September 2013 (UTC)

ACrockford (talk) 14:52, 2 September 2013 (UTC)

Anabel Marsh (talk) 10:20, 15 November 2013 (UTC)

Useful things we discovered

Please put any interesting things you found in this space

Social Media

• Twitter - #SWoW
• Storify - tbc

Computers

A number of computers (six) have been set aside by Bridgeton Library for the event. Participants who bring their own laptop will need to become a member of Glasgow Libraries to access their Wi-Fi. I was told by a library assistant that this could be done online, on the day.

External Links

Links can be placed here which have specific reference to the project

Glasgow Women's Library - Events page

The List - Wikipedia Editathon