Notes from an edit-a-thon - Gendergap

24 Jul 2012

A little over a week after Wikimania, where I participated in the “10 women in 10 minutes”
session Sarah led, I have gotten the article my group worked on, [[Adrienne Bolland]],
through DYK to the Main Page queue, with two other editors who worked on it sharing in the
credit. It is currently scheduled to run on July 25, in the evening rotation in Europe,
afternoon here in North American Eastern time where I live and morning on the West Coast,
and early morning July 26 in Oceania/Asia.

I have two takeaways from the experience to offer anyone else participating in, or
running, one of these events.

  1.. Cast a wide net for sources when looking to expand a stubby article. I was attracted
to this one because the Francophone Wikipedia has a longer article on her; unfortunately
it’s tagged as lacking sources. But at least I can read French well enough to figure out
what should have been included in the English article, and that helped to guide us.
Reflecting the multilingual group we were, the final article has sources from not only
French and English (Monash University in Australia has a nice set of pages on aviation
pioneers) but German and Spanish as well (The German book we cited actually seems like a
good source; it seems to be meant for younger readers and thus was at about the right
level for me to read—somehow, when I looked at it, German (which I’ve never formally
studied) came through clearer than it ever has. Unfortunately the Google preview ends
right when the story starts getting good. Perhaps some German reader can find the
hardcover book and see if there’s anything else worth adding). Other sources tapped
include the Air France inflight magazine, a school website in France and the World Postal
Union website (which would seem to be a good, reliable, authoritative source for stamp
information). 
  2.. Not all the work done by editors physically collaborating shows up in the history.
Sitting there putting our heads together, we were able to come to a consensus on whether a
particular source was reliable and, when two of our sources conflicted as to a particular
fact, which to include.
I hope you like the final result as much as I liked writing it (Mme. Bolland makes a nice
feminist role model—after her aviation career, she was in the French women’s-suffrage
movement, then supported the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War and was active in
the resistance during the war. The more I researched, the more I liked her and felt
honored to be improving her Wikipedia article.

Now, I hope, the French article can be properly referenced and the other articles
expanded. User:Maire, who was in our group, promised she would get around to doing a
Polish translation, which left me with Russian among the languages I’d feel comfortable
editing in that aren’t represented yet among the interwiki links. Which I’ll do when I can
figure out how to properly transliterate her first name and which of four possible
pronunciations I can think of for her last name is the right one.

Or someone else here can take up the challenge. It’s worth it.

Daniel Case