International Women’s Day at the University of Edinburgh. CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew
Since January 2016, I have worked as Wikimedian in Residence with the University of Edinburgh’s course teams to quickly generate real examples of technology-enhanced learning activities appropriate to the curriculum. As a result, students from diverse learning communities and a variety of disciplines benefit from learning new digital and information literacy skills appropriate for the modern graduate. The published outputs of their learning have an immediate public impact in addressing the diversity of editors and diversity of content shared online. For example, World Christianity MSc students wrote new pages about women in religion and on topics such as Asian Feminist Theology.
Many of the training workshops and in-curriculum assignments I have lead and facilitated focused on addressing under-representation of topics on Wikipedia and encouraging more women to become editors. Over the course of the last eight years, I have designed and lead edit-a-thon events focused on such topics as Women in STEM, LGBTQ+ History Month, Black History Month, Mental Health Week, and Edinburgh’s global alumni.
Through my work within the DLAM (Digital Learning Applications and Media) and and Digital Skills departments within Information Services, I have worked with, taught on and helped design learning activities on over 15-20 course programmes as the University’s Wikimedian in Residence. I have also created and shared hundreds of learning resources (video tutorials, webpages, blogs, pdfs, powerpoints, word docs), organised and hosted conferences & seminars, facilitated and lead over 360 training workshops along
and 150 edit-a-thon events celebrating: International Women’s Day; Ada Lovelace Day; Gothic Writers; Feminist Writers; Women Architects; Contemporary Scottish Artists, Scottish women authors; Women in Anthropology, Women in Chemistry, Women in Law and Global Health; Women in Engineering; and Women in Espionage. Over two thousand students and 660 staff have now been trained to edit Wikipedia, with a (conservatively) estimated ~16,000 articles created and improved. Stories that may not have been shared otherwise are now discoverable and being read, added to and improved, as OERs shared with the world for the benefit of all.
Editathon attendees, CC-BY-SA via Ewan McAndrew
Wikipedia has a gender problem. In considering the diversity of editors and content, “the “overwhelming majority of contributors are male” and the vast majority of biographies (81 percent on English Wikipedia) are about men (Ford & Wajcman, 2017). This means there is clear gender bias in terms of the stories being disseminated online, the choices being made in their creation and curation and who is writing these stories (Allen, 2020).
Yet, 69 percent of participating editors at the University of Edinburgh have been women, demonstrating that Wikipedia editing does not have to be the preserve of “white, college-educated males” (Wikimedia, 2011). Addressing systemic bias and under-representation online has consistently been a key motivator for staff and students at the University—working toward building a fairer, more inclusive internet and society.
Changing the “pale, male,stale” nature of our physical spaces at the University with more diverse heroes on display like Brenda Moon, our 1st female Chief Librarian. CC-BY-SA via Ewan McAndrew
The residency has facilitated monthly “Wikipedia Women in Red” workshops for the last eight years and created a supportive setting where students and staff can come together to learn a new digital skill. As a result of the success of this approach, the residency now sits on the Gender@Ed Steering Committee and the Wikipedia Women in Red edit-a-thons are included in the University’s Athena Scientific Women’s Academic Network (SWAN) charter plan to highlight female achievement in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to encourage and inspire new STEM careers and help encourage new role models by changing the online and physical world around them by surfacing the brilliant lives and contributions of women to be where they can be visible and help inspire.
Imagine a gender equal world, IWD2024 event poster by E. McAndrew, all images CC-BY-SA
Global Activism and Women’s Rights- International Women’s Day 2024
International Women’s Day 2024. CC-BY-SA via the Global Justice Academy
Our most recent Wikipedia editathon event took place on the 8th March, between 13:00-16:30 in the Digital Scholarship Centre of the Main Library and was in collaboration with the University’s Global Justice Academy. It was lead by Assistant Wikimedian in Residence Ellie Whitehead for International Women’s Day 2024. It celebrated the lives and contributions of all the inspiring women the world, past and present, who have dedicated themselves to fighting for women’s rights and global justice, by adding those missing from Wikipedia – the world’s go-to site for information.
Dr. Kasey McCall-Smith, Senior Lecturer in Public International Law at the International Women’s Day 2024 event. CC-BY-SA via the Global Justice Academy
The session began by welcoming Dr Kasey McCall-Smith from the Global Justice Academy and Senior Lecturer in Public International Law who spoke to us about women in justice at local, national, and global levels. Dr McCall-Smith spoke about some incredible things being done by female colleagues in the field and helped to set the supportive and inclusive tone of the event.
Together, the attendees created some amazing new pages, including:
- Malgosia Fitzmaurice – Professor of Public International Law at Queen Mary University of London
- Madeleine Chapelle – the first wife of Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a French Neoclassical painter. Chapelle was the subject of a portrait painting and nine portrait drawings by Ingres and often served him as a figure model.
- Marijeta Mojašević – a Montenegrin youth advisor and disability rights activist, named one of the 100 BBC most influential women in the world for her work in youth activism and disability empowerment.
- Helen Robertson – a Scottish-born Australian tailor and trade unionist. She was involved with creating Australia’s first union for women and she led the union’s first strike.
- the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies
and more!
I also liaised with Navino Evans to update the Histropedia timeline of Women’s Suffrage in Scotland with all the new pages written in the last 5-6 years since the Vote100 events in 2018. Our editing events celebrated the Scottish suffragettes with newly written pages about them on Wikipedia and marked 100 years since the 1918 Representation of the People Act when all men over 21 and some women over 30 were granted the vote for the first time.
Overall, it was a brilliant event which encouraged some great discussions and added some great pages onto Wikipedia!
#inspireinclusion #IWD2024
Bessie Watson, the 9 year old Scottish suffragette from Edinburgh who now has a page and an image on Wikipedia and who now has a room at the University named after her on International Women’s Day 2024. CC-BY-SA via Wikimedia Commons (gratefully shared by Capital
Collections from the Central Libraries,
Edinburgh).
References
1. Allen, R. (2020, April 11). Wikipedia is a world built by and for men. Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is changing that. The Lily. www.thelily.com/wikipedia-is-a-world-built-by-and-for-men-rosie-stephenson-goodnight-is-changing-that/?.
2. Ford, H. and Wajcman, J., 2017. ‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap – Heather Ford, Judy Wajcman, 2017. [online] SAGE Journals. Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0306312717692172> [Accessed 24 March 2021].
3. Wikimedia. (2011, April). Wikipedia editors study. Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Editor_Survey_Report_-_April_2011.pdf.
