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Carleton University hosts its first edit-a-thon, focused on women in
science
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/10/01/carleton-university-hosts-its-first-e…>
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/10/01/carleton-university-hosts-its-first-e…
On September 20, tucked away in a computer lab in the engineering
building at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, twelve new
Wikipedians learned how to edit Wikipedia. The new editors participated
in the Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering (WISE)
Edit-a-thon
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Carleton_University>,
with the goal of adding more content about female scientists on Wikipedia.
<https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/Carleton_University_Edi…>
Participants at the Carleton University edit-a-thon
Were there not more exciting things to be doing on a Thursday evening in
Ottawa? Sure, there were a lot of other fun events that night, but we
were doing it because we had heard about the gender gap
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/01/wikipedias-gender-gap/> in
Wikipedia, where approximately 9 percent of editors are female. We were
doing it because we knew that the women we were writing about were brave
trail-blazers who are frequently written out of history, and this was
our chance to write these women /in/ to history. We were doing it
because we knew that the only way to change the statistics was to become
Wikipedia editors ourselves and to encourage our friends to do the same.
The host for the night was the Carleton University branch of the Women
in Science and Engineering (WISE) group
<http://people.scs.carleton.ca/%7Ewise/>, and I volunteered as the
primary organizer. There was one small glitch: I had never edited
Wikipedia before and didn't know anyone who had. In fact, none of the
participants had ever edited Wikipedia before, proof, perhaps, that
there were not enough women editing Wikipedia?
I centered the edit-a-thon on a strong belief that we can all
participate if we help each other, which is also how I feel about WISE,
which focuses on encouraging and supporting women in engineering. We
believed the event could also help foster a local community with the
goal of encouraging more women to edit Wikipedia. As an inclusive group,
however, we also encouraged men to attend, assuming they might also help
us write articles about female scientists (one quarter of the attendees
were male).
We created 12 new accounts and, after a brief introduction, started to
work creating and improving articles. Because none of us was an
experienced editor, everyone got into helping each other. There were a
lot of exclamations of "oh, how did you do that?" and "why doesn't this
work?" Instead of having one teacher, we were all teachers. We started
nine articles and improved two others.
One of the trail-blazing scientists we wrote about was Pearl Kendrick
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Kendrick>. She helped to bring the
vaccine for whooping cough
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whooping_cough> from lab-scale to
full-scale production by 1940. Later, upon finding that the version of
the vaccine in England was not as effective as the one available in the
United States, she worked with the Medical Research Council of Great
Britain to help them develop a more successful vaccine.
After a few hours, we all decided to continue working on the articles at
home and fell into a discussion around tea and cookies of what we wanted
to do in the future. Everyone agreed that we need to have more
edit-a-thons. Some felt up to the task of hosting their own, centered on
themes that interested them personally. Most of us were excited to show
our friends what we had learned and to extend our new found role as
teachers beyond our group. I am looking forward to seeing everyone's
articles improve and I'm extremely proud of everyone's efforts.
Many thanks to everyone who came out for the event, as well as to
Carleton University WISE and to Wikimedia Foundation Community Fellow
Sarah Stierch
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2011/12/20/announcing-community-fellow-sarah-sti…>
for her encouragement.
--/Audrey Murray, Carleton University WISE/
* Copyright notes: "Carleton University Edit-A-Thon 03"
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carleton_University_Edit-A-Thon_03.…>
by AudreyMurray, under CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported
<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode>, from
Wikimedia Commons
--
*Sarah Stierch*
*/Museumist and open culture advocate/*
>>Visit sarahstierch.com <http://sarahstierch.com><<
