Tag: LGBT

Recovering Histories event: 3 student researchers looked at the gaps on Wikipedia and where important histories were not (yet) represented online. CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew

Three students co-authored an application to take part in a Student Experience Grant project over a 14-week time period, learning how to edit Wikipedia and how to fill in diversity gaps on the website:

Eleanor– PhD Student researching LGBTQ+ History.
Sian – PhD student researching Black History.
Kirsty – Undergraduate student researching Gender History.

Each student specialised in a particular aspect of diversity which Wikipedia was lacking coverage on. These were black history, LGBTQ+ history and women’s history. Through these three specialisations each student was able to increase their knowledge in their specialised area, digging through Edinburgh’s history in the matter. For example, Kirsty, one of the students, was able to delve into the University’s rich sporting history and learn about the impressive sportswomen that spent time at Edinburgh University. Kirsty also showed off a poster presentation on the Student Experience Grant project at the University’s GenderEd annual showcase & networking event.

Through the project the students developed knowledge of the gaps on Wikipedia and created worklists of pages in need of creation or updating to improve diversity of representation on Wikipedia. These worklists were utilised in a final end of project event, with 50-60 signups. The hybrid event was held in the Project Room of 50 George Square with students, staff and members of the public taking part in learning new digital and information literacy skills and contributing their scholarship openly to improve coverage of, and understanding about, LGBTQ+ History, Gender History and Black History in Scotland.

This event included many University of Edinburgh students who were introduced to editing Wikipedia, through a led tutorial, and given the aforementioned pre-researched worklists to help contribute to Wikipedia as a whole. The event featured a panel discussion and display of the work of the three primary students involved in the project, educating those in attendance about the disparities within Wikipedia and how they can help improve this as information activists.

Recovering Histories event, CC-BY-SA by Ewan McAndrew, University of Edinburgh

The event also included representatives from University of Edinburgh, University of Dundee, Wikimedia UK, the Devil’s Porridge Museum, Sussex University, University of Cape Town, Swansea University, Birkbeck University London, UCL, University of Leeds, the National Gallery of Ireland, Victoria University of Wellington, Kiel University, ZBW Leibniz, Manchester Metropolitan University, Staffordshire University, National Galleries Scotland, Arts University Bournemouth, University of Kent, Lothian Health Service Archives.

In addition, the structure of the project allowed all three students to specialise in their interests. This allowed each student to delve further into an area of interest/specialisation which was rewarding for all involved. They each created a poster which was printed out to display in the final end of project editing event for all to see.

Event page with worklists created:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh/Recovering_Histories

Main learning points

Gained professional experience using their research skills outside of their main study.
Expanded awareness of information activism as a whole and the role of information in dictating awareness of those often ignored by society.
Had the opportunity to expand their network by making connections with the Scottish Portrait Gallery.
Organised and hosted an edit-a-thon at the University.
Eleanor has subsequently organised her own editathon on LGBTQ+ art on Wikipedia and been in discussions about presenting at the Queering Wikipedia conference 2023.

Scotland, Slavery and Black Histories poster, CC-BY-SA by Sian Davies

Reflections from Sian:

“I have been looking at Black history, specifically focusing on Scotland’s links to transatlantic slavery to try to address the silences on Wikipedia related to this topic. By adding in information to existing pages as well as creating new ones, I hope this work, however marginally, contributes to public understanding of the varied and widespread connections between Caribbean slavery and the making of modern Britain. Examples include adding in details such as William Wright’s, a renowned Scottish Botanist, ownership of enslaved people and how he developed an interest in botany while in the Caribbean, and adding in William Forbes of Callandar’s, a Scottish industrialists, connection to transatlantic slavery through his production of sugar boiling pans sold to planters in the Caribbean. I also developed a new page for Leith Sugar House, to show how some of built environment of Scotland is also connected the Caribbean and the profits made from slavery. “

Gender History poster, by Kirsty Vass-Payne, CC-BY-SA

Reflections from Kirsty:

“Higher Education Institutions, and the student bodies within them, are heavily involved within diversity-based research and movements throughout society. However all too often work fails to extend beyond the reach of the university community. Information activism is an often unappreciated but vital part of diversity and equality movements. Work to increase representation of marginalised communities online helps to make the histories, achievements and movements of communities suppressed in mainstream media available to all. Wikipedia is the perfect website for such work. Further Wikipedia involvement can be vital in transforming this information to a wider community.

Firstly it does not occur to many that they themselves can, and should, contribute their knowledge to Wikipedia. Before entering this project two out of three of the students had not contributed to Wikipedia before. This is often the first, and primary, hurdle to many in being part of the Wikipedia editing community. Herein, raising awareness of the ease at which one can contribute to Wikipedia is vital alongside providing a space in which to edit with support.Through this project Ewan McAndrew assisted the students in entering Wikipedia as editing and taught them the basic understandings and rules necessary to contribute. Although these can be easily learnt online, live teaching can be invaluable in quickly setting up students to edit Wikipedia. Running events on specific topics which include mini tutorials on how to edit are invaluable to adding information on Wikipedia. This is as they target those who are not currently engaged. The more people that are taught to edit Wikipedia, the more who can contribute their wealth of knowledge to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a very large website, and as such the breadth of information that can be added to or edited it never ending. This can be a daunting prospect to many. As such it is much simpler, and more manageable to focus particularly on one area. From here you can create a related a worklist of pages to be added/edited, including details of what is missing. Often half the job on Wikipedia is establishing the gap in Wikipedia as there is often the incorrect presumption that everything is already there. If creating a worklist is untenable there are many project pages/worklists already available that you can work through with students. Examples of this include Women in Red which aims to create pages for women of note.”

Researching LGBTQ+ History poster and the rich important stories to tell, CC-BY-SA by Eleanor Capaldi

Reflections from Eleanor:

“The strand I’ve been exploring on this project is diversifying LGBTQ+ records. These could be of individuals, organisations, projects, either historical or contemporary. Filling in the gaps of LGBTQ+ history is necessary to reflect the diversity of society over time, and to readdress inequalities that have seen these identities suppressed or erased in record. Doing so also has a role to play in validating LGBTQ+ communities as being connected to something larger, this history partly acting as defence against suggestions that being LGBTQ+ is new, and therefore temporary, to be changed. It’s a way to say – we’ve always been here. Given that the historical landscape regarding sexuality and gender has evolved over time, from the law to language, it can sometimes prove challenging to attribute LGBTQ+ identities, even when there are indications. It is a catch-22 – to be accessible on a site like Wikipedia where there needs to be evidence, but for LGBTQ+ lives such evidence may have been erased, or alternatively exist, but as a result of primary sources like oral histories, rather than secondary.

That said there are valuable records that have been created and contributed to, and research projects and efforts to establish and expand LGBTQ+ sources that do exist, and they are increasing all the time. Given Wikipedia’s prominence, their inclusion matters. As such, I’ve been exploring the history of the Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard, the first such telephone support service in the whole of the UK, which didn’t have a Wikipedia entry until it was developed as part of this project. Through researching this organisation, in collaboration with Archivist Louise Neilson at the University of Edinburgh (who hold the Switchboard archives and have recently received Welcome Trust funding to catalogue its contents), it has opened up so many avenues of people and events that were connected to a significant and important part of LGBTQ+ history in Scotland. It is a privilege to be able to contribute in even a small way to place this piece of Scottish LGBTQ+ history into the Wikipedia puzzle. “

New Wikipedia pages about:

Improved pages also include:

In terms of challenges, due to the secondary source nature of Wikipedia there were issues encountered with getting archival information on to Wikipedia, which requires a step in between. Had there been a larger project timeframe there would have been more time to do this. However, due to the short nature of the project archival information was simply used less as it would have been too time consuming to use more.

The legacy of the project

The worklist, gaps and resources identified, still exist and the work will have a further legacy as the work will be continued with other student editors contributing to it either through the student Edinburgh Award for ‘Digital Volunteering with Wikipedia’ (Oct-March each year) topics or through the monthly Wikipedia editing workshops run by the University’s Digital Skills team. This project has been a source of inspiration for students taking part in the aforementioned Edinburgh Award for the kind of ‘knowledge activism’ and the agency it demonstrates students can have.

Moreover, the three students involved in the project dictated the strands of their research according to interests found along the way, and lines of success in research. As such there was always interesting work to be done and it allowed the opportunity to have conversations with, meet and work with people inside and outside of the University; to raise awareness and provoke ideas of what more could, and should be, done in future.

Telling the history of HIV and AIDS activism in Scotland on Wikipedia

By Ewan McAndrew

On February 26, 2021

In Uncategorized

As LGBT History month draws to a close this month, I wanted to pay tribute to a collaboration brought about through Siobhan Claude at the University of Edinburgh’s Staff Pride Network and my colleague, Lorna Campbell, who suggested telling the history of HIV/AIDS activism and awareness in Scotland on Wikipedia.

It seemed inconceivable that Wikipedia had so little on this important history and the people who fought long and hard against prejudice and myths surrounding the virus and did so much societal good in raising awareness and campaigning for treatment. Yet the largest open education resource in human history was largely devoid of any mention of the organisations and activists so pivotal in this history of Scotland.

We contacted Henry Gray at HIV Scotland and a date for an event was set. We would bring people together to edit Wikipedia and formed a worklist of new pages to create so that the generations to come would learn and understand the story of HIV/AIDS activism in Scotland. This is only a beginning so I have created a Navigation Box template to pull all these new pages together, make them easier to discover and to highlight the organisations and people we are still missing. This template has been added to the foot of all the new pages below. There is much more to the history of HIV/AIDS activism in Scotland (and the United Kingdom for that matter) to be told. We hope that this is only the beginning to honour and celebrate the pioneering and vitally important work that came before. Much more to do!

As a result of the HIV Scotland Wikipedia event at the end of January, we now have pages for:

Scottish AIDS Monitor

In 1983, after becoming aware of the spread of an illness affecting gay men in the United States, Derek Ogg set up Scottish AIDS Monitor in Edinburgh, along with Edward McGough, Nigel Cook and Simon Taylor, in order to inform and educate gay men about HIV and AIDS. The organisation was established before the first case of HIV was recorded in Scotland and three years before the first government AIDS awareness campaign. In addition to their original Edinburgh branch, by the late 1980s, the organisation had branches in Highland, Lothian, Tayside and Strathclyde. SAM was funded by private donations and public funding. The organisation was awarded £25,000 by the government’s Scottish Home and Health department in 1988 and also received funding from Strathclyde and Lothian Health Boards.

SAM safe sex condom packet

Initially SAM focused on raising awareness of AIDS and promoting safe sex among gay men, but the organisation expanded its activities to include all groups affected by HIV and AIDS, including homosexuals, heterosexuals, teenagers, drug users, sex workers and prison inmates. The organisation worked with the Genito Urinary Medicine unit at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in order to ensure the information they provided was accurate and up to date. SAM’s activities included advocacy, awareness raising, advisory, support and prevention services. The organisation trained AIDS counsellors and hospital visitors and set up “Buddy” and HIV support groups. They also ran AIDS information phone lines in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, worked with drug counselling agencies, promoted safe sex and distributed free condoms. In 1994 SAM set up Gay Men’s Heath, the UK’s first dedicated health initiative for gay and bisexual men. The organisation was also instrumental in setting up Body Positive Scotland, a self help group for people living with and affected by HIV and AIDS.

SAM ceased operating in the West of Scotland later in 1995, and after funding was withdrawn by Lothian Health Board in 1996, the organisation closed down.

HIV Scotland

HIV Scotland is a registered charitable organisation based in Edinburgh, Scotland, established in 1995 as Scottish Voluntary HIV & AIDS Forum, that works to make policy and advocacy changes for people living with HIV in Scotland, PrEP users, and people at risk of HIV. George Valiotis was the Chief Executive Officer of HIV Scotland between 2012 and 2019 during which a key achievement was a successful implementation strategy for a new technology called HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), for which the organisation was awarded the British Medical Association Medfash prize for making Scotland the first nation in the UK to have it listed on their national health service. Nathan Sparling was appointed chief executive on 1st November 2018, and helped lead the organisation through a strategic review which led to their new 11-year Strategic Plan – #ZEROHIV. He announced he was leaving HIV Scotland in December 2020.

PHACE West

Project for HIV and AIDS Care and Education (PHACE) West was Scottish HIV and AIDS awareness organisation that was active in the West of Scotland between 1995 and 2006.

PHACE West was founded in November 1994 by Ken Cowan following changes in the Scottish HIV voluntary sector, and the following year attracted funding from four West of Scotland health boards. There was a widespread perception of an East Coast bias in the management of the predominant Scottish AIDS organisation Scottish AIDS Monitor, and inadequate West Coast services. A number of SAM staff joined PHACE West, including its director Maureen Moore.

The new organisation had a high-profile launch party in May 1995 at Glasgow’s Tunnel nightclub, featuring a performance by Dannii Minogue. In 2000 it expanded by opening an Aberdeen office, and becoming a national organisation, PHACE Scotland. In 2006 the organisation became part of the Terrence Higgins Trust, as its parent organisation PHACE Scotland completed a merger with the UK’s longest established HIV charity, allowing THT Scotland to provide services in Greater Glasgow and Clyde, Argyll, Ayrshire Arran, Lanarkshire, Grampian and Highland NHS Scotland board areas.

PHACE West provided a welfare rights service, Buddy Support Service and Night Owl crisis line, counselling, and condoms by post for people in rural areas. They ran the HAVEN, a drop in space at Ruchill Hospital. They also produced publications and websites on safer sex aimed at gay men, distributed condoms in LGBT venues, and ran the youth group Bi-G-Les for under-25s.

Derek Ogg

Derek Andrew Ogg QC (1954 – 1 May 2020) was a Scottish lawyer who, through the Historical Sexual Offences Pardons and Disregards Scotland Bill, campaigned for automatic pardons for gay and bisexual men with historical convictions of sexual offences that are no longer illegal in Scotland. In 1983 Ogg established the Scottish HIV and AIDS awareness charity Scottish AIDS Monitor.

Ogg’s activism started with his membership of the Scottish Minorities Group (later Outright Scotland) where in 1974, together with Ian Dunn, he organised the International Gay Rights Congress in Edinburgh, which later resulted in the establishment of the International Lesbian & Gay Association.

In 1983, after hearing about a disease affecting gay men in the United States, Derek Ogg, along with Edward McGough, Nigel Cook and Simon Taylor set up the Scottish AIDS Monitor to educate gay men about the risks of HIV and AIDS. He served on the board of Directors until 1994. In the 1980s much of his activism was around the issues of HIV and AIDS, where along with Scottish AIDS Monitor he was also involved in the establishment of Waverley Care through which the Milestone Hospice, the UK’s first purpose built hospice for HIV patients, was established in 1991.

Ogg was involved in the campaign to end the ban on gay sex in Scotland which was formally lifted in 1981 with the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1980. He was also an activist against Section 28 (Clause 2A in Scotland) which was repealed in Scotland in 2000 and England Wales in 2003. In 2015 he was presented with a special award for Lifetime Achievement at the inaugural Scottish LGBTI Awards in recognition of his activism and legal work. He also campaigned for an apology from the Scottish Government in 2017 to gay and bisexual men who had been convicted prior to 2001, under discriminatory laws against same-sex sexual activity that had since been made legal.

Maureen Moore (activist)

Maureen Moore OBE was National Co-ordinator, then Director of Scottish AIDS Monitor from its inception in 1983.

After leaving SAM, Maureen went on to Chair the Scottish voluntary sector’s HIV and AIDS forum and the Board of Project for HIV/AIDS Care and Education (PHACE West) in Glasgow. This enabled her to continue lobbying for improved awareness of heterosexual transmission of HIV and better education and HIV prevention services for gay men.

In 1995 Maureen took over from Alison Hillhouse as Chief Executive at ASH Scotland where she supported the ban on smoking in workplaces in Scotland and the ban on tobacco sales to under 18s.

She was awarded an OBE for services to healthcare in 2006.

Ken Cowan (activist)

Ken Cowan ( 23 February 1955 to 11 November 1995) was a Scottish AIDS activist and founder/director of PHACE West, the project for HIV and Aids education in the West of Scotland.

Cowan successfully lobbied that patients be included on the carers sub-committee at Ruchill Hospital and was instrumental in the success of the West of Scotland’s awareness strategy for highlighting HIV prevention initiatives for gay men. He was also majorly involved in the development of Body Positive, the self-help agency for those living with HIV.

Cowan was diagnosed with HIV in 1991. He died aged 40 on 11 November 1995.

Eric Kay, in Gay Scotland‘s article on his passing, wrote that Cowan:

“was particularly skilful in fighting against the prejudice and dispelling the myths surrounding the virus. His eloquent delivery on the subject was always compelling, whether he was teaching young children or convincing politicians and Health Board funders. His determination ultimately brought about key policy changes which in turn have radically affected HIV Services in the West of Scotland.”

Diversifying Wikipedia for the Festival of Creative Learning 2019

By Ewan McAndrew

On February 26, 2019

In Uncategorized

Wikipedia is the 5th most visited website in the world and is an important first stop when looking up any topic – it is truly an incredible resource. But its power can be dangerous. It lacks diversity both in its editorship and its articles. This means that its systemic biases can have a large impact on the way we think. Wikipedia, like most mainstream publishing and media, is very disproportionately white and male. However, unlike traditional information resources, Wikipedia’s users can have a direct positive impact on its content. This is why Information Services held a Diversithon event for the Festival of Creative Learning on the afternoon of 20th February 2019:

“To increase the diversity of voices, genders, and cultures among its contributors and editors, the Wikimedia Foundation has made it a strategic goal to recruit and foster more women, people of colour, and other underrepresented individuals—including LGBT+ populations… the Wikimedia Foundation recognizes that the majority of its Wikipedia contributors and editors are disproportionately male, under 22 years old, and (most likely white and straight) from “the Global North”. They also admit that Wikipedia’s coverage is skewed toward the interests, expertise, and language skills of the people who created it…”— Wexelbaum, Herzog, & Rasberry, “Queering Wikipedia” (2015).

The Diversithon was a Wikipedia editing event held in a social and supportive setting to celebrate diversity for LGBT+ History Month 2019 and Black History Month.

This event trained its attendees in the skills required to contribute to and improve Wikipedia – a useful skill for anyone to have – and focused on creating new articles to include notable Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic professionals; LGBT+ professionals; as well as continuing our work to address the systemic gender gap on Wikipedia where only 17.83% of biographies are about notable women.

The Diversithon in a nutshell:

12 new articles were created.
2 more were drafted.
28 articles were edited.
249 edits in total.
15 editors.
9,530 words added.
9,190 articles views.

Our co-hosts for the event, the student support group Wellcomm Kings, kicked off the event.

Rosie Taylor, Wellcomm Kings convenor and Biological Sciences student, kicks off the Diversithon.

Rosie Taylor, a Biological Sciences student and Wellcomm Kings convenor, presented on why we hold LGBTHistoryMonth, which she had stated she had orientated herself about using Wikipedia. Rosie discussed the history of the Section 28 and the protests against it. This legislation stated that a local authority “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. It was repealed on 21 June 2000 in Scotland by the Ethical Standards in Public Life etc. (Scotland) Act 2000, as one of the first pieces of legislation enacted by the new Scottish Parliament, and on 18 November 2003 in the rest of the United Kingdom. Rosie also provided some context on the Queer Community in Scotland and posed the question as to whether Scotland was indeed ahead of the curve? Homosexuality was, after all, decriminalised 13 years later than in England. She closed by stating there was still a long way to go. Despite the progress being made in some quarters, 1 in 5 LGBT+ people still report to have experienced a hate crime in the past year.

Tom and Henry from the student research project, UncoverEd, tell us what they have discovered about the university’s global alumni.

Tom and Henry from Uncover_Ed presented following Rosie’s talk; outlining the student research project they had been involved in, which focused on surfacing the lives and contributions of the University of Edinburgh’s global alumni. The UncoverED exhibition launched 31 January 2019 in the Crystal Macmillan Building.

From the UncoverEd website:

“UncoverEd is a collaborative and decolonising research project, funded by Edinburgh Global, which aims to situate the ‘global’ status of the University of Edinburgh in its rightful imperial and colonial context. Led by PhD candidates Henry Mitchell and Tom Cunningham, the team of eight student researchers are creating a database of students from Africa, the Caribbean, Asia and the Americas from as early as 1700, and writing social histories of the marginalised student experience. The aim was to produce at least one biography each of a ‘notable’ alumnus, leading up to a website and exhibition in January 2019”.

Roger Bamkin, co-founder of WikiProject Women in Red, was also in attendance and helped support the staff, students and members of the public at our Diversithon to create and improve Wikipedia pages over the course of the afternoon. WikiProject Women in Red is the second most active WikiProject on Wikipedia and its aim is to turn red-linked articles about notable women which don’t yet exist into blue clickable links which do.

“In November 2014, only about 15% of the English Wikipedia’s biographies were about women. Founded in July 2015, WiR strives to improve the figure, which has reached 17.73% as of 18 February 2019. But that means, according to WHGI, only 284,439 of our 1,604,512 biographies are about women. Not impressed? “Content gender gap” is a form of systemic bias, and WiR addresses it in a positive way through shared values.”

The afternoon proved a positive and motivating experience for our attendees and allowed us to make use of Wikipedia’s new PrepBio tool to easily create stub articles from the biographical information stored as structured data in Wikidata. e.g. from the List of missing biographies of nonbinary, trans and intersex people.

Through our combined efforts, over the course of an afternoon, the following pages were produced:

Outcomes

Jane Pirie (1779-1833) opened a girl’s school in Edinburgh and was accused of lesbianism with the school’s co-founder Marianne Woods. The story of the court case was the inspiration for Lillian Hellman’s play “The Children’s Hour”.
Lisa Middleton is the 1st transgender person to be elected in California for a nonjudicial position. Lisa was included in the 2016 Pride Honors Awards recipients from Palm Springs Pride with the Spirit of Stonewall Community Service Award.
Xheni Karaj is a LGBT rights activist and co-founder of the Aleanca LGBT organization. Xheni, together with Kristi Pinderi, were among the first activists to launch the LGBT rights movement in Albania. Translated from Albanian Wikipedia.
Clara Marguerite Christian (1895-1964), was born in Dominica and was the 1st black woman to study at the University of Edinburgh. Her university experience speaks to the “double jeopardy” of “navigating both race and gender within whiteness”, embodying “the simultaneous invisibility and hyper-visibility” of being a black woman in Edinburgh during the 1910s”.
Jabulani Chen Pereira is a queer South African activist & visual artist. In 2012, Pereira founded Iranti (South African LGBT organisation), a non-governmental organisation focusing queer human rights issues primarily through visual media.
Annette Eick (1909-2010) was a Jewish Lesbian writer. During the 1920s, a liberal time period in the Weimar republic, Eick wrote poems and short stories for lesbian magazines. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, she had to give up on journalism and started working as a nanny. In 1938, she was granted a visum to live in the UK and fled to London after surviving an attack by Nazis on the farm she was staying at during the Reichkristallnacht. Her parents were murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp. In London, Eick worked as a nanny and housekeeper and met her partner Getrud Klingel. They moved to Devon, where they opened a nursery and Eick started writing again. Her collection of poems, Immortal Muse, was published in 1984 and turned into a short film called The Immortal Muse by Jules Hussey in 2005. Eick became known to a wider audience through the documentary ‘Paragraph 175’ from 2000, which told the experiences of five gay men and one lesbian woman (Eick) that were prosecuted under the paragraph 175 which criminalised homosexuality.
Elizabeth Kerekere is a scholar, artist & activist within the LGBTQ+ community in New Zealand. Kerekere has been an active member of the Green Party, promoting suicide prevention, anti-violence, healthy relationships and housing for all.
Jessica Platt is a professional hockey player and an advocate for transgender rights. She plays for the Toronto Furies in the Canadian Women’s Hockey League (CWHL) and was the first transgender woman to play in the CWHL.
Cornelia ‘Connie’ Estelle Smith (1875–1970) was a black music-hall entertainer and actress who was a member of the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre. Appearing in theater and film, she was best known for her performances in All God’s Chillun Got Wings (1946), You Can’t take it With You (1947), Kaiser Jones(1961), and as the sorceress Tituba in Arthur Miller‘s The Crucible.
Gisela Necker (1932-2011) was an early lesbian activist active in Berlin from the 1970s until her death. She was a leading member of Homosexual Action West Berlin (HAW), co-founding its first lesbian group in the early 1970s. She later helped to found the Berlin women’s centre and the Lesbian Action Centre.
Les+ Magazine was started in 2005 by a group of young Chinese lesbians. The slogan of the 1st issue states ‘After the darkness fades away, I’ll be holding ur hand, walking under the sunlight with pride, boldly & happily living our lives!‘.
Lala is a non-derogatory Chinese slang term for lesbian, or a same-sex desiring woman. It is used primarily by the LGBT+ community in mainland China, though the term has origins in the Taiwanese term for lesbian, lazi (Chinese: 拉子).
NEWLY drafted to Wikipedia: Mala Maña is an all-female vocal group from New Mexico, fusing contemporary & folkloric rhythm of the African diasporas with Latin American music. Can you help finish the article so we can publish it?
NEWLY drafted to Wikipedia: Marsha H. Levine is the founder of InterPride, an international organisation for Pride committees. She was Parade Manager of San Francisco Pride from 2000-2018. Can you help finish the article so we can publish?

Diversithon editors at work

If you want to know more about the Diversithon or would like to suggest a Wikipedia event yourself then the Wikimedia residency is a free resource available to staff an students at the university. Message me at ewan.mcandrew@ed.ac.uk

Supporting the University of Edinburgh's commitments to digital skills, information literacy, and sharing knowledge openly