Hi all -

A draft of an individual engagement grant proposal was just posted to meta-wiki focused on improving the English Wikipedia's coverage of topics that lay at the intersection of women and philosophy. If approved, I'll be working on the project, along with Alex Madva and Katie Gasdaglis. Alex and Katie don't have a lot of content edits on any of the Wikimedia projects yet, but we've been talking about trying to conduct a project like this for a number of months, and they're pretty well-versed in issues related to demographic and coverage gaps on Wikipedia, and are also familiar with previous efforts to bring the academy and Wikipedia closer together. Alex is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in philosophy at UC Berkeley, and Katie is finishing up her PhD in philosophy at Columbia.

The basic idea behind our proposal is to engage in a few separate forms of outreach to the academy in an effort to improve the English Wikipedia's coverage of topics that lay at the intersection of women and philosophy, including feminist philosophy, gender and race theory, scholarly work by women and other minority philosophers, philosophical topics that are historically underrepresented or marginalized because of their association with stigmatized groups (including women and minorities), and biographical articles on women and other minority philosophers themselves. We'll be reaching out to instructors in targeted disciplines to encourage their classes to participate in the education program, and developing reusable resources very explicitly tailored towards how to best contribute to Wikipedia as a member of a class that is focused on an underrepresented area of philosophy. (We intend to only have a limited number of instructors and students participate, to ensure that we'll be able to handle any extra workload the project creates and to ensure that we only accept instructors who are excited about the project and are willing to put in enough time to do it right.) We'll also be reaching out to academic philosophers from subfields currently underrepresented on Wikipedia and encouraging them to participate directly (including us hosting trainings, producing material specifically geared towards making their transition in to Wikipedia easier, placing blog posts in appropriate places, etc.) We will also be soliciting feedback from academics about any policy issues they see that could be damaging ENWP's ability to eventually cover underrepresented areas adequately - one thing that has come up so far is the possibility that the academic notability guidelines may be missing criteria that are highly indicative of a philosopher being notable. If anything of this nature shows up, we'll try to get the academic who perceives a problem to make a public articulation of it, so that we can bring their thoughts about it to ENWP's community.

We've been talking about these ideas with a number of professors from several different universities, and a lot of them are quite excited about it. I think that this has the potential to go a long ways towards addressing ENWP's lack of coverage in our targeted content areas, and will hopefully also create an scalable educational outreach model that can be replicated in other underrepresented disciplines and on other Wikimedia projects in the future - we'll be documenting everything we do meticulously. We'd welcome any comments/questions/concerns/etc about the project, either posted here or on the talk page of the proposal.

You can read the grant proposal here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IEG/Wikipedia_on_the_Margins:_Women,_M...

---- Kevin Gorman