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,_…
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Kevin Gorman