 Hi, welcome to wiki mania 2022 the session on writing women into wiki history experiences and that's practices I'm Andrew Lee and we will be talking about the efforts in the past year to increase the representation of women in wiki media projects Through three different types of efforts one is through a glam institution at the Smithsonian one is through the wiki women in red initiative and one is with wiki Donna and affiliate that works in Italian So first one hand off to epi kipselis from the Smithsonian Hello, everyone. I am really pleased to be able to share this with you despite the technical problems. We had I Am the digital strategist for the upcoming Smithsonian American women's history Museum This effort started off as the American women's history initiative, but in about a decade We're gonna have a building for people to come to as well But we have a virtual museum to build right now and some of the really critical issues that I'm facing are finding women across our 21 museums our interdisciplinary libraries and our archives one of the First reports that we received when Congress approved for this initiative to move forward Examined us k-12 education standards and there is a woman problem there This report went into detail examining state standards across the US and found that because of the way we framed history Women's stories are completely absent We focus on wars. We focus on politics and guess what women haven't been there for many years Even though they have been there and they have been contributing. They're just not in the official record so This is really critical for women of color White women are there, but right now in these state standards. There are zero women from Asian Pacific Islander identity backgrounds There are reasons real reasons and there are people in our sector who are really trying hard to address this But we don't have the resources to enhance our data. We just don't So the Smithsonian was founded in 1846 What was notable to be collected has changed drastically throughout that history We've also had no female leader of the Smithsonian in its entire history We have the first African-American man Lonnie bunch who's leading our organization and doing an incredible job But when there are women at the head of organizations They do the work and align the priorities with trying to make Conditions better for women who work in the institution to have the say and what is prioritized The Smithsonian collections in and of themselves are not structured to find women out of our 55 million collection items, which I think is the latest number but don't quote me on that You know, we can't digitize everything It's it's an endless task and nor can we create data for everything We're actually kind of behind because that's a hard part of digitization And and finally we don't have metadata standards for gender They just don't exist. However, these are being modeled elsewhere and linked open data And we can start to do that through wiki data. Let's do that So I'm just gonna tell you overall my mission. I'm in the office of digital transformation now is to Transform an old institution to be more digitally relevant My stated mandate is to be in every classroom and household to help people navigate all the challenges we're facing which we're Contributing to the technical issues we have today The American women's history initiative mission is that in order to create a more just and equitable American society Where the role of women in history is well known accurate? Acknowledged and empowering for citizens and this is a hard hard task to do in an old Institution of which there are many old cultural institutions in the world So some of the work we're gonna be doing is to try and bring together the efforts of the cultural sector And I am so thrilled. There are other people doing this incredible work Rosie and Camelia And that Andrew Lee and Kelly Doyle are helping us at the Smithsonian to do this Great. Thanks. That'd be great team setting there as If you said Kelly Doyle is the open knowledge coordinator at the Smithsonian and has worked with the wiki community for many years I am the wiki meeting at large at the Smithsonian and during the time that we've been working We have been very lucky to work with efforts such as those done by Rosie Stevenson Goodnight that you'll hear about later about moving the needle to actually Going from 15 to 19 percent roughly on the number of women's biographies in English Wikipedia on our side, we've been trying to contribute digital assets and Edit the thongs and the expertise of curators and researchers at the Smithsonian to increase the number So since 2019, we've added more than 480,000 words about American women to the collections on Wikipedia through edit the thongs and other efforts and The images that the American women's history initiative has helped upload and contribute to the wiki media projects especially commons has more than 25 million views and What I think is more astonishing is that we now have a summer internship where we have dedicated wiki interns at the Smithsonian and we train them This has been kind of a dream of ours is to actually train interns At the beginning of the summer on Wikipedia and then wiki data commons all these things are having very productive wiki contributions throughout the summer So we've been very successful not and even the interns that are not wiki specific We're giving basic wiki training to to appreciate how Wikipedia helps further the mission of the Smithsonian in disseminating digital content And these are just a sample of the images that we have with uploaded to commons and have put into the ecosystem of the wiki media projects there and then finally one of the things that we are working hard on is creating lists to Help identify gaps in the coverage of women scientists, especially do a project called the funk list and this is something that epi's been Instrumental in helping us further in creating a specific staff position for working with these women scientists lists So if I hand it over to Camelia talk about some of the efforts that you have in Italian language Amelia Yes, thank you. Thank you, Andrew. So I'm I'm Camelia Bowman. I'm the co-founder of the affiliate wikidona user group and On August 4th in 2016. I created the project wikidona in Italian Wikipedia Which was was almost a need because in that moment the female biographies was aware at 14% of all biographies So we started by creating creating Female biographies being active during the discussions on the deleting procedures and Talking about creation of women categories by profession we work We are working on almost most of all on wikipedia where we wrote about Women LGBT class communities different able personalities Athletes emigrate people and communities and We are also organized in the extracurricular Project in schools and courses for professors We are also the local organizer of campaigns intervention campaigns like atom feminism wikidap wikilas for chlorsea woman and the other but also we created new campaigns like inter wiki woman collaboration, which is Recuring event since wiki media 2017 in Montreal that runs these these days because it's Started during the wiki mania and is connected to wiki mania. So please Join the campaign We also ideated wiki love fashion wiki love sports and wiki woman in trying to change We are also Active in wiki quote wiki books commons wiki data and open street map In wiki books. We started a series called Profility don't know which means women profiles from some part of Italy and Luka and yeah, but oh, yeah, and so on and we are collaborating rule with school for All of those biographies that are notable but only locally. So it cannot be written in wiki media We always wrote female biographies in a wiki quote, but we're With the collaboration of wiki woman in red For the she said the campaign we increased Impressively the amount of articles written in wiki quote we arrived the last year to near thousands of articles New articles or increased in two months, which was the best result of this campaign We gave Good water for support I can say by illustrating the times we are living in we We helped to Upload and release with the creative commons licenses many featured Covid images in commons and Three of them were on the top five of the picture of the year in 2020 We are organizing women tracings on the footsteps of notable female Personalities and we started a collaboration with the cosmopolitan group, which is the same female mappers on Open streets map to map to be other centers that are fighting the female genital mutilation in Africa What I want to say that we are present in all the social Platforms from Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube interest Telegram slug even tiktok and which Which Hoping to increase the interest because this is one of the problems we will have participation is one of the problems maybe in Many of our the communities have so being present and do the things Thank you Great. Thank you so much Rosie thought maybe you could talk to us about women in red Oh, thanks so very much for that Andrew and Camelia and Effie So I'd like to say a big welcome to the people who are listening to our presentation And I would like to introduce you if you don't know about us a community called women in red I'm one of the co-founders of that Women in red is a community of editors of all genders We live around the world and we focus on reducing systemic representation bias in the wiki movement women in red was established in 2015 seven years ago at wikimania Mexico City So for us, this is our anniversary. It's a holiday our Community strives to increase the representation of women on wikipedia and elsewhere and this includes new women's biographies, but also articles about women's works such as the paintings they painted the Sculptures they sculpted the schools they founded the conferences they convened This also includes new articles about women's issues think things like women's health women's suffrage and so forth What led us to Establishing this community is that we read an academic paper published in December 2014 That was the first time that we saw a statistic and that was this that in October 2014 Based on the db pedia dump only 15.53% Of english wikipedia's biographies were about women not impressive But now thanks to the efforts of the global community as of august 2022 The percentage is up to 19.3 percent What that means roughly is that out of the 108 1,897,000 plus biographies on english wikipedia About 366,000 of them are about women Since we began our work around the world More than 189,000 new articles have been created by people just like you and me And your next-door neighbor and my next-door neighbor I've been talking about english wikipedia, but women in red exist in 31 other language wikipedia's Each with the same mission Each carrying its own statistics or metrics on how it evaluates its improving of the women's representation on wikipedia We coordinate our work on our talk page Where more than 27,000 General forum comments have been made by more than a thousand unique editors Maybe you On wiki the women in red main page has had more than 18,000 page views in the last 30 days alone Our talk page has had more than 3,000 page views in the last 30 days alone Women in red is a harassment free zone on wikipedia And you're welcome to drop by and chat about women's representation on wikipedia Women in red facilitates about five events each month Each event is at least a month long, but some last a few months and others for a year or even longer Most of our events are online and without a partner institution It's people participating anywhere and everywhere in the world Day or night Women in climate pride women women in stem women in the ancient world women in sports black history month women Indigenous women and so forth We have events that someone somewhere would like to participate in And again, we hope that that might be you We do enjoy working with partner institutions our current collaboration with care international is a big hit Content gender gap goes beyond quantity of articles But also to the systemic asymmetry in the way that three dimensions of analysis Favor one gender over the other that would be metadata language and network structure In this regard women in red offers a series of essays aimed at editors who are new to writing about women's representation Our essays are based on our experience and also learnings from the research conducted by others But how do we know who's missing from wikipedia? Every community has its own practices and when we work with a partner The partner helps by providing more and more new names Women who are notable but missing At women in red we capture those names by creating what we call red lists These are lists of red linked women meaning they don't have an article on wikipedia We have more than 800 of these lists Some are generated by bot using wikidata Others are crowdsourced Others come from biographical dictionaries or based on authority control numbers or from websites such as those websites that focus on award winners Women in red is also a wikimedia commons community Every year our members upload Thousands of images of women There are signatures There are marks There are works to wikimedia commons and then these images can be added to wikipedia articles This is a significant part of our work and to some extent Different people focus on uploading images versus writing wikipedia articles In 2022 our members have uploaded to wikimedia commons more than 6,000 images regarding women and their works Just like different people like to edit wikipedia or upload images to wikimedia commons or Do wikidata work some women in red people prefer focusing on promotion of our work But that I mean mostly social media Our heaviest use platform is twitter where we've made more than 29,000 tweets And have more than 11,000 followers I think some people are reading wikipedia Just by scanning our tweets about the biographies we've created and then maybe clicking a link or two. Maybe Women in red also has a significant presence on pinterest as well as instagram and facebook So far we're not on tiktok or snapchat And at some point we probably will because that's how some people are accessing information There's also a case for accessing content via virtual assistants like siri and alexa So what we're trying to do is reach people in the places where they want to hang out In order for them to learn more about women in wikipedia Did you know that 24 percent of wikipedia readers identify as women according to wikimedia foundation research Care type or characterizing wikipedia research behavior demographics and wikipedia use cases This is based on a 2019 study on english wikipedia Where 70 percent of the respondents were under the age of 30 and 76 percent of the readers identified as men Few women readers few women editors Not so much representation of women in the content on wikipedia Where do we go from here? We need you We need you to come and join us in this work And with that we say thank you. Thank you to all of you for viewing this and learning a little bit more about the work We're doing writing women into wiki history Experiences and best practices We've covered a lot. Hope you've learned something feel free to reach out to any of us to learn a little bit more Thank you so much again for your time Thank you rosie and thank you everyone We have a few minutes for some discussion around the content and looks like we have some very similar themes Camelia, maybe I can ask you first what you said to move from you started with 14 roughly for women's biographies in wiki donna Right What did you imagine that we could make it to where we are now like and also for rosie when we get to you When from 15 percent to 19 percent, what is your reflection on on where we are now and what we have to do? So and we started with 14 percent we are now Around 16 and 5 percent something like this which seems not so so Not so much because it's only two percent of Moving but if you think in italy and wiki b one million Eight thousand articles and I don't know really specifically how how many biographies There are a lot if you think of wiki wiki for women in red They moved five points But wikipedia in english has eight millions articles eight millions and much more so Rosie talked about 3000 and something biographies Written during these years Which is a lot Which is a lot of thinking that we usually have let's say two 10 people who participated in our events Or if we we are doing the contest and we We can I don't know Gauge of the people let's say maximum 20 30 People during the new event. It's a lot of of work behind. It's not easy. So it's not so It's not a few as you can see in from Right, that's a great point and how about you rosie when you see the 19 percent number in 2022 Looking back up to the beginnings of the project. What are your thoughts? I'm grateful to see that we've done what we wanted to do which is Move the needle You know when we started out, we never set a goal. We never said 20 percent 25 33 49 50 51 There is no end goal The goal is just to improve upon the numbers that we started with Which first number we ever saw was something like 14 14.5 15.5 percent And we knew that there were more notable women Than that we knew that That there could be an increase if we just devote ourself to it You know, this is we're not the first kind of start this kind of work preceding women in red there were other wiki projects with women wiki project women scientists wiki project women artists wiki project women writers wiki project women's history These all preceded us, but they all had very Finite scopes that focused on artists or scientists or writers women in red Focuses on any woman of any time period anywhere in the world if she's notable She's missing this article Let's write it in any language That you feel comfortable writing in which means we also do a lot of translations in all different languages English to Italian Italian to English and so forth so I think we've accomplished what we set out to do which was improvement But the job isn't done. We can improve more so Looking forward to how this conversation will go at next wiki mania And hopefully there will be even more articles that we can talk about In some way these projects are connected with wiki mania because also wiki dawn has started a month after wiki mania because I saw your talk during wiki mania in ezinolario, so wiki mania give starting points to these kind of projects Yeah, I think it definitely shows the value of these face-to-face meetups to to spark these types of things fb. What are your thoughts? I I just uh, you know I'm noting the commonality in our shared experiences. I was inspired by wiki women in red. I started Working with the wiki media dc chapter and i'm lucky because in the u.s We don't have a lot of localized chapters, but they approached the smithsonian library of congress national archives, so the big u.s ones to to try and get us to work with them and um, you know, I jumped on board because I I knew that we're public institutions that need to um share our resources they are for the public good of the united states So that's why we adopted smithsonian open access, but when I released smithsonian open access right before the pandemic I knew the vast gaps in representation for people from american indian communities for people from black american communities For latino-american and women's history. These are our two new museums latino-american And american women history And we have 55 million collections and we can't find the women so I work at the largest museum and education complex which has relatively better resources than other institutions Now that doesn't mean that we have the resources currently to do that, but I think we can make a compelling funding case For starting to figure out the infrastructure that we need to share our things more at scale And that is exactly why we brought andrew for smithsonian open access and Why I need partners like the ones in the room because It's not a smithsonian only problem We've got to work across so many data sets to pull out women We also have to address the tools that sideline women We use artificial intelligence and data science at the smithsonian To describe collections because we don't have the manpower or the woman power Actually, it's more women power in this case. We have more women doing this work. That's less paid than a lot of other roles So, how do we help them? How do we help them keep up with the backlog? But also do the work they really are skilled at to develop these standards That would help these communities be more seen in our cultural heritage These are people's memories People need to see themselves In cultural heritage if we don't do that we're causing harm. That's all I have to say Yeah, that's a great point Epi and something that I think we we sense but maybe we only got numbers about recently is we saw that The readership of wikipedia also has a gender imbalance, right Rosie? And that was kind of astonishing at least to me We kind of assume that oh everyone uses wikipedia and we all kind of find it useful But we need to increase the number of women's biographies or participation when you start to look at the readership numbers It's also askew much more male than than female and that's worrying because that means that we're not finding content that's resonating with women perhaps in wikipedia as well What are your thoughts on that Rosie when you saw that that readership number? I was surprised. I have to say I was surprised. I thought that that number would be balanced Which just goes to show that if you If you don't have access to this kind of information, you really don't know But once you do you should share that should the people know the only question I really have about that though is that you know are women accessing wikipedia in different ways and by that I mean just like I said, you know if you if you write on On a social media platform, let's say twitter or instagram You you put a photo of a woman and you put a little bit about a wikipedia article Does that count? I think it does because I'm one who's very inclusive. Does that mean you're reading wikipedia? You're reading about a woman who's on wikipedia. If you only read a little short blurb about her on twitter or instagram Or you know, we've got people who are making Tiktok videos about some of our wikipedia pages all different kinds of pages and All of that in my opinion counts. You're just accessing wikipedia in a different kind of way And maybe you don't have a whole story, but maybe you come back later and follow the link Um, I don't have all the answers to that. I don't think anyone does But I think it's worth exploring and I think it's worth learning a little bit more If you how about if you use seri or alexa and you ask a question and it replies with an answer directly from wikipedia Is that a different that's a different form of consumption than reading but does it count? I think so Right right and that it's it's interesting that we we have this session called writing women into wiki history But we're also talking about a whole range of other things as you said with interests with images with wiki data And voice assistants. So maybe next year's session will be about the broad range of impact Beyond just writing because we're just getting started with this impact chameleon one last Yeah, even for me. It's surprising because what I see around me. It's a lot of interest A lot of interest for women biographies and Uh, people ask me and say me look this article is missing this biography is missing in italian We have in english. We have in french, but we have not in italian or even uh, they They said look is this article is not, uh, well written as on the Lead section is written that Was the wife of some man is not Is not not not not because she's that the the wife of that man So a lot of times I I go to change this This first of this leading the section and right now we have a discussion on italian wikipedia about this A man Which started the discussion saying it's time to finish this this way to to write female biographies which was Which was great because Let's remember what rosie said that we are not addressing the women We are addressing everybody because Women history is not Uh Only about history of women. It's about the history of the world. So it's Something that It's up to us and it's important for all I just want to add one quick thing because you reminded me of something camellia Why are more women not writing on wikipedia? like us Because I've had a child a young child and your knife kids the same age during the pandemic I don't have Enough time to do this in the evenings because guess what? All the stuff that's been waiting during the day is there so It's not easy as women to do this. We don't have the side time because unfortunately Um, we're still holding a lot of the household duties So we can make these faces very friendly and I so appreciate all the work that all of us do for that Like real hard work to do that But women don't have the time, you know, that's studied and research. There are stats on this. So that's part of the issue It's systemic We certainly can make it easier for people and we're going to keep trying to do that Great. Well, thanks so much for the rich conversation And we hope folks will get involved and take a look at wiki women and red wiki dana and the efforts that we have out there so thanks again for listening and Feel free to get in touch with any of us. Take care