 The four presenters in this panel were chosen in recognition of their efforts and achievements in pursuit of gender equality on Wikipedia. Adrienne Waterwitz, too, drew attention to the under-representation of women in both the number of articles about women and articles on topics of interest to them. Thanks to Waterwitz and like-minded editors, like the four people in our panels, Rosie Stephenson Goodnight, Annie Reynolds, Cally Brain and Carolyn Phillips, the Wikimedia Foundation energetically supports initiatives to increase the number of female editors. Born in Nebraska on 6 January 1977, the only child of Betty and Nathan Waterwitz, Adrienne Waterwitz registered as a new user on Wikipedia on 18 July 2004. That day, she made her first contribution to Wikipedia in an edit of the article novel under the pseudonym A Waterwitz. Two days later, she added a brief biography to her own user page, self-identifying as a graduate student in English literature, specialising in 18th century British literature. Currently, she wrote, I am working on the relationship between religion and civic virtue in the late 18th century Britain. Over the years that followed, A Waterwitz made over 50,000 edits and because of the high quality of those edits, she became one of Wikipedia's top 10 editors, credited with 36 featured articles, so for anyone that doesn't know, these are articles that make the highest standard of accuracy, fairness, style and comprehensiveness. She was also awarded many barn stars, badges in recognition of her work and other Wikipedia editing awards, all the while under the pseudonym A Waterwitz and all the while not identifying as a woman. On 11 November 2007, A Waterwitz went on record about her identity for the first time in an interview with Wikipedia, Wikipedia witty lama, who some know as Liam Wyatt, for episode 35 of Wikipedia Weekly, titled Secretly Famous. Wyatt introduced her at the beginning of the interview as the wiki authority on 18th century English literature Bar Nun. A Waterwitz is described on the edit page as a grad student who has to hide her activities for fear of jeopardizing her career. In that interview, Adrienne discussed the discordance between being a graduate student pursuing an academic career and simultaneously dedicating her time to Wikipedia editing. When she eventually disclosed her name and gender, she met with obstacles from within the Wikimedia community, receiving responses like, oh, you're a woman, or you can't really be a woman, or you don't write like a woman. When she revealed her gender after working anonymously, there was a lot more skepticism, she said, and a lot of times when I made arguments, I was accused of being hysterical or emotional, things that had never happened before. Following a 2011 Wikimedia study that showed that 90% of Wikipedia editors were male and that the average Wikipedia was a white educated, computer savvy man who lived in the United States or Europe. Adrienne said that disparity caused a lot of perspectives to be left out. She led initiatives to bring Wikipedia into higher education communities. She recruited colleagues and students to help increase female presence on Wikipedia. As a way of improving the representation of women and topics of interest to women, Wadawitz began to participate in or organize editing workshops which became known as editor-thons and these focused on increasing the representation of women. In 2012 she organized a FemTech editor-thon, also known as WikiStorm, at Claremont Graduate University. The event called for participants to help edit, expand and create articles on Wikipedia while developing or honing their digital humanity skills and learning empowering authoring strategies. Meanwhile, she dedicated her expertise in 18th century English literature to improving and creating biographies of women writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Martha Sherwood and Jane Austen. Wadawitz first edited the Mary Wollstonecraft page in June 2006 and made her last edit in October 2013. She is... Sorry. One Wikipedia editor wrote on Wadawitz's Use the Talk page that her article on Wollstonecraft adds up to a colossal achievement. I mean, what we have here is the equivalent of a book. The thoroughness, attention to detail and discerning study of the best sources simply takes my breath away. Any student of Wollstonecraft who clicks Wikipedia will hardly believe they're like in finding such a treasure trove. Wikipedia at its finest. Another Wikipedia witty lama said that Wollstonecraft article made Adrian Wadawitz the single most cited and read Wollstonecraft scholar ever. The Wollstonecraft article's statistic page as listed Wadawitz as the top editor, having made most of the edits. She is also responsible for adding the most text, having contributed 50,074 bytes out of 83,301 bytes. The Mary Wollstonecraft article received the highest rating feature article, and a show was viewed a total of 3,939,295 times between July 2015 and 16 November 2022. Now, we cannot access the stats before 2015, but do remember that Adrian started working on the article in 2006 and stopped in 2013. And so there was a significant amount of views in that time that we just can't capture. So it boasts a daily average of around 1,565 views on the English language Wikipedia. And over the last month alone, the Mary Wollstonecraft article was viewed in 94 other language Wikipedia's an average of 1,000 times per day. On 8 April 2014, while rock climbing in Joshua Tree National Park, Adrian Wadawitz scholar, book lover, pianist, Wikipedia editor, writer and rock climber, fell and sustained fatal injuries. After that day, Wadawitz tribute editor-thons took place online and at various locations in Asia, Europe, North America, South America, Australia and Africa. In 2017, Wikipedia and Matthew Vetter reported that over 280 Wikipedia editor-thons had been hosted since April 2014. In October 2014, a group of editors from around the world of Wikimedia, recognising that only 15.53% of English Wikipedia's biographies were about women, decided to focus on reducing systemic bias in the Wikipedia movement. On 18 July 2015, the women in red Wiki project was born. So I ask you now to join me in welcoming our first speaker in this panel, the co-founder of Women in Red, Rosie Stephenson. Good night. Hello everyone and thank you for having me here. Thank you especially to Bunty, who I've now known for a few years working together on the Affiliations Committee. I'm Rosie Stephenson. Good night. I'm an elected trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation and a visiting scholar at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, where I focus on pre-20th century transatlantic English language women writers and their works broadly construed. I'm also the co-founder of a Wikipedia community called Women in Red, and that's my focus on this stage today. I'm going to talk about what predates women in red so that you understand the connection between what was in the past and what we're doing today and what hopefully we're going to be doing in the future. I'm going to touch on Wikipedia's gender gaps, plural, representation, participation, consumption, and so forth. Wikiproject Women's History focuses on women born before 1950. The project was established in February 2011, the month before International Women's History Month. And the idea was that people would stop what they were working on, you know, lakes, rivers, streams, Pokemon characters. And instead, in the month of March, we'd focus on writing biographies about women born before 1950. And several people decided that's a good idea, and I'll go ahead and do it, including me. Women's Scientists was established the next year, November 2012. And in 2014, I established Wikiproject Women Writers, to include women writers, broadly construed, and their works, broadly construed. Part of that was influence, actually, by knowing who Adrienne Waterwitz was, though I never met her and I never had the chance to interact with her. But I thought of myself as a Wikipedia writer. I've been writing since 2007. My mom had been a writer, my grandmother had been a writer, and I wanted to capture those women who also were writers so that they didn't get forgotten by history. But even before these three projects, Wikiproject Women's History, Wikiproject Women's Scientists, Wikiproject Women Writers, Wikiproject Feminism was started in February 2008. There wasn't a real impetus to write those articles, currently only 8,400 of them exist, but it did exist, and it did help when Wikiproject Women Artists was created in November 2013 and then Art and Feminism in 2014. So you can see a lot of work was being done on English Wikipedia related to the content gender gap. Not all of it very tied together, but we knew of each other, and to some extent we worked together, especially in the month of March, not so much the other 11 months. In December 2014, for the first time, an academic study was published that gave us a number. 15.5% of the biographies on English Wikipedia were about women. It was based on a DBpedia dump of October 2014. We, the editors, kind of knew that there had been a problem with the content gender gap. You could look at the category for Australian novelists and see a lot of men's names and very few women's names and so forth, but until then, December 2014, we didn't have a number, and now we had a number. Two months later, February 2015, a gentleman I had never met before then named Roger Bamken left a note on my talk page, and he said, something to the extent, now that we have a number and we know how few biographies, at least on English Wikipedia, are about women, I think it'd be a good idea for us to write a submission, a proposal for this conference called Wikimania and see if it gets accepted, and then we can go talk about the issue. He wrote something like, you don't have to knock the doors open, come do this with me. And it took me a nanosecond to agree that it was a good idea. Luckily for us, the submission was accepted, and now we had a few months to prepare our slide deck. You know how it is when you're preparing your first slide deck for a Wiki event? You do spend months on the slide deck, and then as the years pass and you've done a few of these, you're kind of doing them on the fly, two and three and four days before. But I digress. So Roger and I are on the stage, or at least I am, and you can see him via Zoom or whatever we were using in 2015. And we talked about the content gender gap, and then we did a segue. We said, this isn't only about addressing the content gender gap. We proposed today, right here on this stage, that we do something about it. There are all of these Wiki projects that have been created, women writers, women artists, women scientists, and so forth, that focus on and off whenever you feel like it, improve an article, create an article and whatnot. But what we propose today is that we focus on creating women's biographies, not just in the month of March, but every day. And that we all do it without regard to your gender. No focus on editathons where we're seeking a group of women to get together to sit and write. We don't care what your gender is. Let's just together deal with society as it's given us the resources we're going to need. Let's together write these biographies every day. And the people clapped and we thought, okay, we'll have 15 minutes of fame and that'll be it. We were wrong. People loved the idea. People started writing those biographies. We had no idea who they were. Everyone has their own username. And it didn't matter to us. We had no interest at that time, at least, to hold any in-person events. Now, 33 language versions of women in red later and 193,000 new articles later on English Wikipedia were very happy with the results of having created women in red. Our main page receives more than 12,000 page views per month. In 2016, a year after it was established, women in red was shortlisted by ITU, UN Women for the GemTech Award for Promoting Women in the Technology Sector. Women in Red's talk page is a harassment-free space. Since its inception in 2015, there have been more than 28,000 comments. Mostly, it's people writing and saying, I just started the article on Jane Doe. It's at Articles for Deletion. It's caught in draft space. It looks like it's okay, but I could use some help. Do I add a header? Do I increase the size of the lead? Do I look for more sources? What can I do? It received 3,000 page views in the last 30 days, and that's about average. As I said, women in red focuses upon women's representation on Wikipedia, meaning women's biographies, women's works, and women's issues, you know, suffrage, women's health, and so forth, broadly construed. Participants or editors, like I said, we don't focus on your gender or where you live or if you're available to attend some in-person event or hop on a Zoom call. What we care about is that you write the articles when it's convenient for you. How do we do it? Our members have spent a long time developing what we call red lists, a list that has a bunch of red links. Each of the red links for someone who, theoretically, is notable. There are more than 1,000 of these red lists. Here you see on the left the table of contents for the red list index, and on the right you see a list of some of these red lists. These red lists come by occupation, by geography, by time period, by special focus area, by organization, by educational institutions, by dictionaries, by authority control identifiers, by pictures, by awards, by works, by etc. In so doing, these women aren't lost to history. We've captured their name, and hopefully with their name, there's also some reference, some source attached to it too. Some of these come from Wikidata. Some of these lists are crowdsourced. Some of them are based on biographical dictionaries. Others come from URLs, from websites, like the BBC 100 list that's published every November. Here's an example of a red list. This is a red list of missing articles by educational institution. It'll be women who either were alumni or employees of the institution. In this case, it's the National Taiwan University. I looked for the University of Sydney, but no one's created that one yet. Women in red held its first edit-a-thon in September 2015, a couple months after we were established. A Glam organization, Smithsonian, was doing a three-day, what we called Labor Day weekend event on Asia Pacific Americans, and we decided to do Asian Pacific American women. Three days was pretty good. A lot of people were excited, but we thought, okay, they liked this so much, we'll try out other formats. We tried a seven-day event, and then we saw that people liked weekends, so we did 10 days to include two weekends and the week, and then we did a month-long event in November, Women in Stem, with the New York Academy of Science. Finally, after some trial and error, we found a sweet spot. Currently, we run five events at a time, all the time, five different things are happening. One is a multi-year event. We call it hashtag one day one woman, as in every day write an article about one woman. It's the most popular event that we run because people can choose whatever they want to write about. Every year, we also choose something that's an annual event that runs all year. One year it was Women in Stem, one year it was suffrage, this year it's Women in Climate, it's broadly construed. And then we do three events each month that are month-long events. One is always geography focus, and then the other two are whatever the community, women in red community has decided they want to focus on. Currently, we're on event number 247. Here you see an example of parts of the meet-up page for the Women in Science, our annual event this year in 2022. On the upper far left, the top, the header of the meet-up page, these are all on English Wikipedia. We don't do any of this business off Wiki. It's all on Wiki. In the center on the left is a list of the different red lists that apply to this particular event, so that if you click on not just the red list, but it might have a Wiki data link next to it, so it's a Wiki data list and a crowdsourced list and so forth. And these are broadly construed, so think women in farming would fall under women in climate and so forth. The third box on the far left side are the people who've signed up to participate. No one has to sign up. You can just participate. And then top right are some of the articles that have been created. You don't have to add your article up there. Wiki data, we have a bot that does something magic and gives us lists every month of the articles that were created, but if you want, you can add your article on the meet-up page, and you can see that in the top right. And then on the bottom right was the logo that was created by one of our volunteers for this particular event. How much money are we spending on this? I'm proud to say... Ah, you're raising your hand. Okay, go for it, question. Zero. That's right. Women in red, all the work that women in red has done since we've been established has been on a budget of zero. Zero grants, zero, zero, zero, zero. All 100% driven by volunteer effort. Here's an example of this month's geography focus. It's on Central and Southern Asia. Underneath the top left-hand side is a list of the different red lists one can click on, and each will have lots of red-linked names, people you can choose to create your article on. The bottom is the list of people who have signed up to participate. Again, don't have to sign up, but people like to put their names. So sometimes people put their name and they don't contribute one article. That's okay, too. Nobody's monitoring it. And in the top right is the start of the two columns, list of names that have been created so far this month for that edit-a-thon. And on the bottom right, someone created this logo for this edit-a-thon. My understanding is it's a woman from Persia. And so that's what we're using for this event this month. We coordinate these events in a place called the Virtual Ideas Cafe, the Vic. And they're editors such as my colleague, Annie Reynolds, whom you'll hear from next, and Lisa, who's sitting this way, help out with coordinating the events. People discuss and make decisions what we're going to do next, who's going to create the Meetup page, who's going to create the invitation or newsletter. That's what you see in the upper right that's going to go via mass messaging on over a thousand user talk pages. Mind you, I've been talking about English Wikipedia, but as I mentioned earlier, this is being done in 33, so 32 other language Wikipedia's, each language Wikipedia doing it its way, whatever works for it. No one monitors that. We collaborate sometimes, and often we don't. I want to turn from talking about representation, the content, and talking about the editors, the participants, and talk about consumption. Who's consuming these Wikipedia articles? A while ago, I think we used the word readers, but readers only captures some of the people who are consuming Wikipedia. Think about the virtual assistants, Alexa and Siri. If they're grabbing content from Wikipedia, you don't hear, according to Wikipedia, the answer is ABC. So there are other ways that people are consuming Wikipedia, and we have found that social media is one of them. We currently can be found on Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, and looking to expand into TikTok and Snapchat. For those last two, looking for some help, maybe someone in this room. You can see in the center, the photos are from November's board on Pinterest. The images represent women whose image was put into a new article created in November. So you can click on the image, and it'll take you to the Wikipedia article. Or just look at the picture if you want to stay on Pinterest and not go into Wikipedia. Likewise, on the far right is a Twitter image of someone who had a new article created, and you can see there's her photo. There's one or two sentences about her, and then there's a link to her Wikipedia article. I say this, if all you're going to do is just read those two sentences, I'm satisfied. You have consumed Wikipedia, not in a traditional way, but you've done something, and it's better than nothing. A year ago, we've made more than 30,000 tweets. We have more than 11,000 followers who are reading Wikipedia, but they're reading it on Twitter, although I don't want to go there about Twitter right now. But that's a fact. Why we talk about this is that in 2019, the Wikimedia Foundation Research Department did a pilot study on English Wikipedia regarding readership and found that 70% of the respondents were under the age of 30, and 76% of the respondents identified as men. Now, again, this was 2019, this is 2022. It was only English Wikipedia, so it doesn't cover all the other 318, I think there are other ones. But as you can see, that's information that we had and it's useful to do something with it rather than sit and not. So this is what we've done, is had a big focus on social media as a way of reaching people. What else do we do? We have a lot of people who aren't as interested in writing the articles, but they wish to contribute images, images of women, women's works, so the covers of their novel or images about women's issues or things like the school someone founded in 1850. You can see a sampling there across the page. I can tell you that in 2022 alone, up to now November the 17th, 8,952 new images in this year have been donated to Wikimedia Commons by women in red enthusiasts. I don't want to use the word members, we'd love you to become a member. I don't want to say we don't care, but it doesn't matter. You don't have to become a member, just do it, just upload those images. And then they can be added to Wikipedia articles and so forth, into Wikidata. Where else are you going to find us? Wikidata. And so here's what our item looks like for the Wiki project. There's a separate item for the Wikipedia article about women in red, but for the sake of brevity it's not here. On the far right is the list of 33 language versions of women in red. I've been editing Wikipedia since 2007. In that time, I've created more than 5,000 new articles, more than 1,800 of which are women's biographies. I became an admin, though I don't use the tools so much. My sons, though, say to me, Mom, you can't write all the articles. You have to inspire others. I hope this session inspires some of you to consider improving Wikipedia's content gender gap. Thank you. Okay, now I've got a hard act to follow here. I'm Annie Reynolds, and yes, I'm a supporter and I am a member of Wiki Women in Red. I also convene a group called Women Right Wiki here in Sydney. The origins of the Women Right Wiki group were that Spider Red Gold, Walter and ceramicist, and Annika, a lawyer and founder of the Feminist Legal Clinic together sought a grant for some funds to help get the project off the ground, unlike Women in Red, no money. And they won a grant from the New South Wales Writers Centre. Okay, our name, Women Right Wiki, www.worldwideweb. It's a really nice combination of ideas. The logo, again, Spider had a hand in this. In fact, she created it all together. She created the sculptors that she took photos of in the three circles on the left and did that design for the logo, which is on the Women's Library Newtown's website and also on our Facebook page. So the group was launched on International Women's Day. The aim of the group and the reason we received the grant was because it was held in a library, we were going to write bios of Australian and Pacific women whose books were held in that library. And it seemed like a good combination and that's how we started out. We had a series of training sessions and at the end of June, so only three months later, we celebrated with certificates, badges and food in Wikipedia tradition without even having any awareness that that was the case just happened that way. So I can't tell you exactly how I came across women in red, but I do know that I joined in July 2017 and found it to be a really, really helpful community. Partly because being worldwide, someone's going to answer your question while you're asleep. You come back in the morning and bingo, you've got the help you wanted. Other times it happens, almost while you're watching the page and starting out and not knowing any tame Wikimedians, we needed help. So one of the early articles written by one of the members was about a Sydney Uniting Church woman, Dorothy McCray-McMion, and that article began in the editor's sandbox without our realising it was moved by some other editor, we didn't have any idea who the person was, it was moved to draft space and then it languished in draft space and that's when, as Rosie said, people come, knock on the door, say, help, and the great thing was we got help. We got suggestions, editing help and then someone, and I'm not even sure if they were connected with women, someone moved the article to main space and so bingo, another one of our articles was published. Every time any group member published an article, they emailed us all so that we could rush in and help it along in any way we could. Here's Dorothy McCray-McMion's article yesterday, the day before. She's a retired Uniting Church woman. Interestingly, she was interviewed, she was in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago, sorry, at the beginning of the month, and that's why, when I looked up and saw, that's why this article has received 382 page views this month. It would normally be much, much slower, but in the paper, Google, Wikipedia, bingo. So then another experience we had was how articles change and this is the learning process. One of how you write an article but you certainly don't own it. So one of our members wrote an article, Women's Liberation Movement in Sydney and she wasn't too disturbed when it was moved and renamed and became Women's Liberation Movement in Australia because, yeah, still the same continent makes a lot of sense. But we were a little taken aback when suddenly it appeared as Women's Liberation Movement. Oh, sorry. OK, L&M, yeah, fair enough, manual of style. And then it was moved to be in Oceania. Now, we muttered and ummed an ad about this because, OK, it is a women's movement and yes, but it's not really the same everywhere and... But there again, it exists. The redirects work, so we let it go and we said, OK, you're now in Oceania. That's OK. But as I say, that was the learning process of we don't own what we write. We launch it and off it goes. It had some issues with notability. We had an editor challenging a woman's notability because she was a fellow of one of our Australian academies and they said, but why hasn't she been elected to the British Academy? And we said, well, she's in Australia. Go figure. It is a national award. I mean, I'm not that I said that at the time but that's what I'd say now. You know, it has to be nationally notable and our academies certainly are. You know, you get ticked off for being too promotional. Well, I used to write regimes for people and it was hard not to make things sound possibly a little bit better than they should. And also, I learned the lesson of don't canvas from my dear friend, Kerry Raymond early on because when I got sent, an article of mine got sent for deletion, I had been, you know, Kerry had helped me with something else, edited whatever. So I immediately went to a talk page and said, help. And she said, no, can't do this. This is wrong. And you learn. So at the end of the year, the group, and there were only six of us, six of us, the group had written 17 buyers of women and six pages and the pages included the one on the women's liberation movement in Sydney and one on the Ed Narayan Awards, more of which are non. So we created new articles. We upload images. We write women into existing articles, partly particularly where there are a lot of articles about Australian male politicians that are totally focused on their political career. And it's like they, you know, they hardly even, I mean, they might have their life span in them, but there's no mention of any other life outside politics. So we try to, you know, if we find the information and the women are notable, we make sure they get added in and create the red links so that someone later on can come in and fill in the blanks. I also realised that it's good when you're new to make the article look like it belongs, so you work out what categories to add and add them and you, in those days, copy and paste, talk page stuff and update it with the sort key for the relevant woman. So we've always had support from Women in Red and the best way to get it was to put that little, to tag the talk page, even if you don't put it for the year-long hashtag One Day One Woman meet-up. Just putting the double curly brackets, WIR, helps Women in Red to see when alerts come out about possible deletion and so on. And the group, the other great thing about a group is you get together and meet and chat and give each other moral support both on and off Wiki. So COVID lockdown, that threw us a little bit. We couldn't go to the library, so we went online. We continued the same twice a month meetings and for a bit I was trying to put together some training ideas, but it's really difficult. When you've got a really experienced member attending like Margaret and people who have sort of got a bit of an idea, it's difficult to give something to everyone. We were back in the library to celebrate our four years and Catty came along and it was a surprise visit. I don't know if anyone knew that she was coming, but I certainly didn't know in advance. And that was nice and there are a few of us, including me and two of the other founding members and Margaret and Irma, who's known to prove and others possibly. So COVID lockdown happened again. We went online again and I thought, I've uploaded all these images. Why don't I make some quizzes? And this is sort of how they looked. I didn't do any bells and whistles, glamour ideas, just who are, who have we here? And I, you know, this is one of the images that I'd found on Troven uploaded. And I would say, who is she? And people would choose from the list of suggestions. I was thinking of making you answer, but I'm short for time, so I won't put you on the spot. But in fact, she was three of the four things. And it didn't matter that we didn't know who these women were. It mattered that there was an image. We were challenging stereotypes. We were having a bit of fun and finding out more sharing stuff with each other. And to nearly end, I was really honoured last year. I would have felt more comfortable if the award had been given to the Women Right Wiki Group, but such was not to be. I was really honoured to accept an Edna Ryan award for community activism for making a feminist difference by writing women into Wikipedia. So we've got 37 members on my email list. They'd never all turn up at once, even online. But never mind. They're interested. They have some connection. I love the fact that we can go to Wikipedia and find an image like we can edit and use it. And I have Rosie the Riveter as edited on my user page in Wikipedia. Where do we meet? We meet at the Women's Library the second Wednesday of the month from 11 o'clock. If anyone's interested, you're very, very welcome to turn up. Provided you are a woman, the Women's Library is a safe space for women and, as such, women are welcome. And the other... The fourth Wednesday, we're still online. And if you want to join the group, that's my username so you can contact me there. My email address is also available via my user group profile. And I enjoy working with Rosie and have been creating some of those monthly meet-up pages and other things this year particularly because the being a trustee has taken her... some of her focus away from us at Women in Red. So, thank you. And Oren say it's such a familiar sight when you go around with comedienne or Australia sites. You often come across... She shadows me and fixes it up behind me. Fantastic. I'd now like to go to Zoom. To Catty. Well, hi, thanks for having me today. I'm in Bantua, Alice Springs, on the traditional country of the R&D people and pay my respects to Elders past and present and acknowledge them as the first knowledge holders of this place and who have their own complex systems of sharing and exchanging knowledge, of course. I also really want to acknowledge the work of Adrienne as described earlier who has so clearly paved the way for so much of the work so many of us are doing. It's such an extraordinary story and contribution so a real honour to be on a panel named after her. Most of you in the room, I assume I probably know, but I'm the former Executive Officer of Wikimedia Australia and a long sort of many-time committee member. But my editing journey actually began in 2016 here in the Northern Territory. I moved to work here as a radio journalist in 2011 and covering most of Central Australia and became increasingly frustrated by the lack of local Wikipedia pages about places, people and histories. And so again, a monthly editing club. I'm just going to share my screen now and show you some slides. A local editing club where we got together over a two-year period and worked on pages about this really, really remote area of Australia. So we held the first editathons in Catherine, Alice Springs, and the one you're seeing now is in Tennant Creek and lots of monthly meetups in Darwin as well. But it was really this page that opened my eyes initially to the complexity of gender on Wikimedia platforms. On the very far left here, this is Sissy McLeod. She's originally from Boralula and she's the first indigenous woman to receive a medal from the Royal Humane Society. In 1912, her adopted mother, who she's standing next to, who's seated, actually fell off the wharf in Darwin and Sissy jumped in and saved her and was eventually awarded a bronze medal for her bravery in 1913 in the town hall in front of about 100 people. And as they say at the time, it was no light thing for this child without a moment's hesitation in the darkness of night to leap into the sea, known to be alive with sharks and alligators to help the one she loved in that classic kind of colonial storytelling kind of way. But this page was worked on at a Wiki Club event and it kicked off a huge debate about gender and equity and also regional notability about what makes someone notable in terms of their existence in a regional or a remote area as well. So there was lots, this page was heavily contested about notability and it really kind of highlighted to me that this is a person from an underrepresented group in an underrepresented part of the country of an underrepresented gender at a time where all of these people really made the newspaper and were really named and Sissy made the newspaper nationally over decades at a time where it was, you know, which is incredibly notable in what was a very segregated and colonial society in the early 19th century. So if Sissy's not notable, I really, really got wondering why William Jackman, who's the man in the other photo is, he's a white guy who won exactly the same medal and did nothing else of note. And so it was the first time I really began to realise how different the rules were for men and women on Wikipedia and without these debates, how rarely we were going to see growth in terms of underrepresented people on Wikipedia. So this was the page that really got the fires burning for me. So since then I've supported a range of gender equity programs in Australia, including Franklin Women, which is this is an image of here that many of you in the room have been involved with. UNSW, WEMISA, and also last year's 24-hour Aida Love Lace edited on that many people on Zoom were involved with. And these all focused on women in a broad range of sciences and have taken place some annually, sometimes biennially around Australia. But the program I want to talk about today is about Know My Name, which was a gender equity on Wikipedia project in partnership between Wikimedia Australia and the National Gallery in Canberra. And I want to talk about it because it's one of the biggest glam partnerships we've ever been a part of. And I think it probably is responsible for one of the biggest national simultaneous editathons that we've ever done a few years ago. So essentially in 2019, I saw a post on Instagram about this new initiative called Know My Name and was so bold just to direct message the director, Nick Mitrovich, as you do, making the case that it's great that the gallery was doing all these gender equity exhibitions and other initiatives. But if you're in a gallery and you see work, but you go home and you look them up and you can't find them, then how big an impact are you making? And so we began a long conversation and what grew out of that is a partnership around a Wikipedia project as part of the project. Little did I know what I was getting myself into at the time. So a little more about Know My Name and a big call out here to our main National Gallery collaborator, Jesse England, for all the work that she has done on this program with us. But essentially it grew from a realisation that the collections and opportunities offered to male and female artists was far from equitable and this was true across the sector. So an audit found that only 25% of its collection of Australian art was created by women. So to its huge credit, the National Gallery was very open and transparent about this and it kicked off this sort of transformative initiative to address this historical gender bias within their institution and collections. And so it was an all of institution project, a long-term commitment and it flowed across all aspects of the gallery's work, programming, strategy, fundraising, all aspect. And it also saw two major survey exhibitions, the first of their kind of Australian women that were spectacular in Canberra over many years and also a very significant publication, a kind of Bible if you like of Australian women's art. And it was a real call to action across the section. So why is it that Wikipedia was such an important part of this? Well, we know that because the content is free and open, it permeates out across the internet and third-party providers of all kinds use the content. And so this means that any content on Wikipedia that is absent or invisible or even problematic ends up in really highly visible locations. It's amplified out across the web with all its issues and its existing bias and knowledge gaps. Wikipedia really mirrors our society and it mirrors the dominant viewpoints. And so that's why initiatives like Know My Name are so important to give female creators their rightful place online. And improving equity on these platforms were also improving equity and representation across the broader internet as well. So what did we achieve? Well, we've now held three editor-thons alongside the major exhibitions at the National Gallery's Secret Library, as I call it. It was the first time they'd opened their library publicly for an event like this. And so we held editor-thons there and we've done so three times now as well as that. We held sort of simultaneous editor-thons on the weekend of International Women's Day at major institutions in Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Alice Rings, Perth and Hobart, all on the one weekend. It was massive. And this occurred on the 8th of March 2020. Yep, the best-laid plans. So this is maybe one of the really good things about the pandemic, if there are any, is the kind of boom in online participation that occurred around that time. So essentially this program that otherwise may have been just a one-off or perhaps a yearly thing became a monthly thing and the participation was quite extraordinary. So the National Gallery formed a kind of wiki club that was really driven by a volunteer, Linda Paskell, who had never edited Wikipedia before but got massively passionate about this project and of course the ever-prolific Kerry Raymond who did extraordinary work on this wiki club month after month after month all through 2020 and into 2021. And so what were the outcomes overall? So it keeps growing but of course the program created over nearly 120 new pages. The target was 100 and editing 440 existing pages as well. Over 2,000 new references, of course and engaged with 188 volunteers. So, you know, numbers only ever tell part of the story but for mine, I think one of the things this program really did is it raised the profile of Australia's extraordinary women Wikipedians, many of whom are here today who are so prolific and so skilled and have such expertise. People like Pru Mitchell, Linda and Kerry, who I mentioned, Margaret Donald, Bunty Averson, Louise Mayhew, Caroline Phillips who you'll hear from in a moment, of course Annie Reynolds who's on this panel as well and they're doing hugely significant work here in Australia. So know my name is one of the most significant Glam partnerships that we've ever undertaken. I think it's fair to say but it was also so extraordinary because it was approached from both sides. So not only were we getting together to edit Wikipedia but the publication that they made also became this kind of essential resource that we could then use to help make the case around notability for a lot of these artists. And so that kind of two pronged approach of using that, you know, the profile and the expertise, curatorial expertise of an institution like that at the same time as approaching it from both sides. It's probably conversations around conflict of interest we could have there but the way that they're doing that work in multiple ways made this project really, really successful and it really helped particularly with artists that are just so underrepresented in newspapers and also in terms of culturally diverse artists who are even more poorly represented. So this became a really critical reference material for the project as well. So lots of challenges of course like any project I do like to talk about them because they're the learnings, they're the juicy learnings. And so of course the complexities of writing about living people is something we've all probably experienced and were certainly an issue for this project. There were lots of errors and misinformation that had permeated out across news stories that were used as references that artists disputed and there was a lot of conversation and complexity around that. Conflict of interest as I mentioned, notability and the broader challenges of editor-thons, copyright infringement, overwhelm all of those issues that we've experienced. Anyone who's run an editor-thon is probably experienced. So I just want to leave you with a couple of provocations I suppose and some of the things I've been thinking about as our thinking around this space gets more complex over time and it's perhaps an obvious point but I think we need to say it that editing in the gender equity space on Wikipedia is still really challenging. The culture is still predominantly white male and centered in the global north. It can be very personal. It can be very confrontational and that often has left me with questions around should we be encouraging people and particularly people from vulnerable or underrepresented backgrounds to be engaging in spaces that we know are not always safe for people and so that's why some of the work that we're doing here in New Zealand is so important because it provides a support network around that but there are moments where I have wondered about whether there's sort of the ethics I suppose of encouraging people and being on these platforms that are not always safe for people. So we need more diverse editors obviously but not just in terms of content. I think it's also broadly because of that culture shift that needs to happen on the platforms and the culture is a significant barrier for ongoing editors. I think we can be honest about that. It turns people off their experience of dealing and talking to other editors. I think it's fair that we say that as much as technical or other challenges that new editors have. So we've talked today that possibly 10% of editors are women. I think it's really hard to know sometimes because I know for myself I don't identify one way or the other but we know that it's low and sometimes I think these editors set up an idea that as a woman your job is to edit women's content and really we know that in fact we need women to edit all kinds of content because bias is ever present in the language we use and the depth of content the citations we draw on it runs really deep. So this is not just women's work this is all of our work to do which is a point that Rosie made earlier as well. Language really matters. We've got to think about language all of the time in our editing. A woman is often a socialite or a wife not an entrepreneur or a business person so I think interrogating our use of language is critical. But then I think we also just need to keep contextualising the sort of campaigns that we're a part of in terms of this much bigger sort of ecosystem of reckoning with gender bias across our society. We know that it's much harder to make the case for women in terms of notability because they win awards less they're elected less they hide less into senior roles they're less present in our media in our journals, in our national collections so that's also why the work of No My Name in terms of their publication was so critical. And the last is just extending our thinking a bit beyond this idea of gaps which Heather Ford and the team at UTS are really thinking deeply about at the moment and it's something I find myself thinking about too that we know there's less voters we know there's less representation in references but another area I think needs a lot more investigation is kind of about policies on Wikipedia and so this and I'm in no way would call myself in any way an expert on Wikipedia policies but I thought I would just share this because I think it raises really interesting questions so this is the notability policy for people who play rugby union Siobhan might recognize this one we've talked about it in the past so it specifies that women must have been represented in a women's national team in at least the semi-finals of the women's rugby World Cup so this is not the case for men who just have to go to the World Cup so this raises this you know the kind of argument about targets and quotas and affirmative action to one side for a moment that question of should all policies be equal is a really complex one should the notability requirements be the same for men of women or in what way should they differ to kind of balance or address the broader sort of systemic bias issues that we have and I guess this is the final reason that I think we need more women you know people who identify as women in gender diverse editors to notice these things to ask questions about them and also to have these sorts of debates that I think we need to have more of as well thank you so much thank you Patty and we're over to Caroline Phillips okay so I'm coming to you from Nam in Melbourne from the office of the women's art register and so this is for under the here and just like to acknowledge our indigenous history in this area and I'd also like to say thank you so much for asking me to be on this panel I'm a bit overwhelmed to be following up on such three legendary speakers so thank you very much and I appreciate we've gone a bit over time so I'll just try and be really quick as well I'm here to talk about my work with art and feminism and in running Wikipedia editor funds with the women's art register so we began this activity well first of all the women's art register is an archive of the documentation of women's art practice and we've been going since 1975 so it's a living archive of women's art history with just incredible grassroots artists running background and we had our 40th anniversary in 2015 and as you've heard earlier that was just a short time after the groundbreaking studies about the dark of women on the internet and on Wikipedia and we heard about this art and feminism movement and women in red was just about starting I don't think it had actually started when we first looked at this so we thought we really needed to get involved in this so that we can join this movement and we see it as a way that we can amplify the archive that we have here onto the digital realm and to make it more accessible and also to empower our members and artists and women editors to do research about other artists and to just literally get the names of our archive onto the record so yeah you've heard a bit about art and feminism already so I won't go over it all but basically they're looking at their 10th anniversary this year which is really amazing effort and it was started in the states through librarians and people interested in the arts it wasn't actually started from visual artists themselves and the primary activity that they started with is the annual art and feminism which is hosted around International Women's Day and that's what we did in 2015 but it's actually branched out into quite a lot of other activities now because they've recognised that well firstly I'll just say that I was a regional ambassador a couple of years ago for the Oceania region and they're really genuinely interested in including people from all around the world from different backgrounds and different levels of education and access and representation and really because we all recognise the limitations of it being largely an academic exercise that appeals to a lot of librarians and academics and can be of putting for a lot of people so yeah they started this program of regional ambassadors and I really like to continue but I just found I've just spread so thinly being an artist myself and working on the Women's Art Register and doing so many things that I thought I just can't keep doing that but I still run we still do run Editors Fonds with the Women's Art Register so in a sense I'm still doing the same work anyway and I'd like to give a big shout out to everyone at Wikimedia Australia for hosting our events because I was really the first person that started editing and I didn't really know that much about it and I didn't know how to run an Editors Fonds and it's been so fantastic to have members of the committee crew and Alex and Amanda and Katie's been in that online event and just really imparting Annie's been as well imparting the skills and the knowledge of how to actually conduct it you know good editors and to know about all the intricacies of categories etc and all these things to help train our participants just back to art and feminism there's some of the other things that they do they've had a program about multilingual global communities they've recently started this series of art commissions which is creating new visual materials that can be uploaded on to Wiki Commons and used for campaigns about racism safe spaces and various initiatives that are important to them these are the art projects that have gone up so far things like an article about internalised misogyny there are various issues that are directly commissioning Indigenous artists and other artists to create new works they also provide a huge amount of resources to help people in editing Wikipedia but also to run events as well and just very supportive of people around the world running events so we jumped on this initially and got all our women's art register events on there to help people in Australia to also link up to art and feminism and I think it's just another layer of where the data gets countered in a broader conversation about what gets countered and what gets used for research and reported back to the powers that be and so here's some of the Australian events that have been recorded through art and feminism were involved in the 2020 event and I remember saying I don't think we're going to be allowed out next weekend we literally did it just before the lockdowns so here's some information about the women's art register as well although I'm no longer a regional ambassador I still continue to run art and feminism events and through the women's art register and we're a national membership organisation as well so it's not just about being in Melbourne and it's really fantastic for us to be able to hold an event we're located in the Richmond Library and so we can have our events in the library space we can pull out our files and people can sit there and open the files and have direct citations from newspaper articles or publications in the archive when they're running their articles we've also shared spaces with the historical society which is located next to us as well that's the Richmond and Burnley Historical Society and I love this photo because everyone's just so focused they're just like I've got to get this down I've got to record this information we've done some wiki Wednesdays which were online events during the pandemic and that was really great as Katie mentioned that it was one great thing out of the pandemic that suddenly there was this broader community that could communicate online some of our stats here from the Editor Thon in 2021 and just some photos of I think this is last year's one or the year before at the Richmond Library and it's really great as well for us to partner with the local library here and so we have walk-ins off the street we have our members that we know so we have a friend of a friend of told them and they come along and these are some photos from the one at the NGV which was the 2020 event that Katie oversaw the national event which was really fantastic and we weren't that competitive but we were all like oh we've got to get the best stats we were conscious of that and it was the first time that we'd been at the NGV which was a really great experience for us as well doing our Editor Thon in the great hall and thanks to crew again for facilitating that session I guess the other thing I wanted to say was that it's just been a really great platform for us to not only enhance the archive, amplify the artists that are already in our archive but we have over 5000 women artists representing our archive and talking about the you know my name and the campaign of naming 5 women artists we're just like 5 is that all like we can name 5000 artists and we really would love to have them all online and that might take a few more years but we've been able to partner with so many other groups like there's a group called WikiD which is about women architecture and parlor which is also a network of architects with the historical society as I mentioned the library and Wikimedia Australia so it's just really giving us a great platform to really strengthen our community and just spread the word I guess and get people out there editing and just empowering people to actually take that on for themselves and just I guess really feel empowered that they can make that contribution as has been said today it can just be a few words that you write an incredibly incredible contribution from people like Annie but it's all really important so thanks very much I'll leave it there, thank you Thank you so much, thank you Caroline thank you we've run out of time for the discussion bit but it's sort of okay because the impression that came through very loudly listening to the four of you speak is how interconnected your projects are how supportive the community around them is clearly the Australian community is very supportive and clearly the women in red they're 24 hours a day, they're day and night you can just call on help when you need it which is great the other thing is just how creative how diverse and how far-reaching WikiDee I hadn't heard of them, fantastic I'd like to say thank you to all four women for really impressive work that they do fabulous presentations especially for the work that they do which is just wonderful and it's a tribute to Adrienne and it's a tribute to Adrianna it's a tribute to Rosie that women in red has inspired all these others it's just ripples in the pond and it's fantastic so thank you to all of you it is such inspiring work