Just a quick word of warning... you should expect interference at the " Women's shelter" article from the highly active "men's rights" activists on Wikipedia. They have been pushing the point of view that women's shelters are discriminatory against men, that the women's shelter movement is part of a conspiracy to hide the "true statistics" about male victims of domestic violence, and that women's shelters are just scams to get government money, etc. If the students run into problems, just have them drop a message on the WikiProject Feminism talk page.

Ryan Kaldari


On 6/4/12 6:29 AM, Kissling, Elizabeth wrote: 
Now that there's room in the discussion for a new topic :-), I'd like to ask for help from some of you experienced Wikipedians in bringing a new group of women to the project. 

I'm a professor of Women's & Gender Studies, and for their senior capstone project, I've had a group of WSG majors students working on WP articles for the WikiProject Feminism. They've selected articles from the list of requested articles and stubs from WP:Feminism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Feminism), and have been researching, writing, and revising in their sandbox pages for the last few weeks. We're planning to post the articles in class today (a few make take a little longer, but this week for sure -- it's the last week of the term). 

It's been a wonderful experience for them, learning about how to present research for the Wikipedia audience compared to an academic audience, and to make feminist ideas accessible to larger audience, and more. It's given them a new appreciation of Wikipedia -- most of their professors tell them not to use it, so it was a big shock the first day of class when I announced we'd spend the quarter working on it. It's also been very challenging for many, especially the technical aspects of working with wiki markup and Wikipedia. 

Will those of you who volunteer in this area help shepherd them into the fold? I'm not expecting my students to be treated with kid gloves, but we've watched a few edit wars, and they're nervous. As with any group of students, some are stronger writers than others, and some of these pieces will need more help than others. Here's the list of articles that will soon be added/updated:


American women's firsts
Feminism in Thailand
Feminism & BDSM
Metaformic theory
Women's shelters
Genderfuck
Feminist pedagogy

Thank you for the work that you, and for any help you can provide to my students.