Just thought I would pop a note here to let people on the list that I was
quite impressed with the Art+Feminism get-together held yesterday (March 8)
here in Toronto, at the Art Gallery of Ontario.
As you can see by the page,[1] there were over 70 people in attendance
(about 75% of whom were women). The quality of the resources was
excellent, and the AGO staff and volunteers were extremely helplful in
locating those resources and bringing them to the editors to build the
articles. I attended primarily as an editor myself, but there was a
special thrill in helping a first-time editor tidy up a few things on the
page in her sandbox and then showing her how to move the article to
mainspace.
I was also really impressed with the ability of the attendees to quickly
grasp the Wikipedia concept, linking to references, following formatting
suggestions, and "speaking" in our patented Wikipedia voice. I was also
fascinated to see how so many of the editors were able to reflect the
feminist attributes of their article subjects in so many cases (e.g.,
"first woman to...",). I came away with the impression that many had
actually caught the "editing bug", and I have some hope that there will be
some editor retention out of this one.
Much to my surprise, I realised that this was the largest Wiki*edia event I
had attended outside of Wikimania. It bodes well for both the Canadian
editing community, and for the narrowing of the gender gap.
Risker/Anne
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Toronto/ArtAndFeminism_2015