 Hi everybody. I'm Rose C. Stevenson Goodnight and some of you know me as user Rosie Stepp. I am here with two of my colleagues who are at least one, Sidney Poor, and the other, Emily Templewood, will hopefully be able to join us unless there's some kind of a technical glitch. Oh, looks like there she is. There's Emily. Hi everybody. Sorry, my computer crashed. Technology works. We are here to speak to you regarding perspectives on Wikipedia's content gender gap. Alright, so what do the three of us have in common? We are co-founders of something called the Wiki Women's User Group. You heard a speaker a little while ago talk about chapters and thematic organizations and that it only takes three people to start a user group while we were those three people. We started it this July at Wikipedia and now our user group has 77 members. So what is our scope? The scope of Wiki Women's User Group is women's issues broadly construed. We support editors. We support content. We support events. There is our URL. So I'm going to go ahead and get started and then we'll hand this off to Emily and she'll hand it off to Sidney and we all have a different perspective. We want to share those with you. Let's talk about the difference between content gender gap and the editor gender gap. Much has been said, much has been written about the editor gender gap. Some statistics say 10%, 12%, 15%, but surely less than 20% of the editors of Wikipedia are women. There are different reasons people think why there are so few of us versus men and we are not going to tackle that issue in this presentation. What we are going to tackle though is something called the content gender gap. What is the content gender gap? Well the content gender gap is what's missing from Wikipedia. What are those articles that aren't written yet? Why they're not written? Who hasn't written them? Should men write them? Should women write them? Those are separate topics. But we want to tackle the subject of there's about 15% of the biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women versus 85% are about men. What can we do about that? Well there's a lot we can do about that and we started to do it. So a brief history. 1957 in Venezuela we had someone write a encyclopedia and 3% of the biographies here. 3% of these were about women. So if I told you that 15% of the biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women you'd say pretty good. Much improvement over this. But I think we can do a whole lot better and why? Well you see there a quote from Simone de Beauvoir. I don't need to read it back to you but it's important it's striking because if women hold up 50% of the sky we should have more than 15% of the biographies about women. And it's not just the biographies like I said it's also women's works and by that I made the art that women created the books that we wrote the conferences that we created and so on. So let's go ahead and tackle that. I'm going to talk about something called wiki project women in red and then when I hand it off to Emily and to Sydney they're going to talk about other projects and about other wikipedia and residence program and grants. So here we go. I've been editing wikipedia since 2007. I've written maybe 4,000 articles maybe a little bit more in that period of time and it struck me that I'm a woman and I'm a writer and we didn't have a project for that. So with the support of some other wikipedia I created wiki project women. I don't know how many articles we initially had in our scope our scope is women writers and works written by women but I can tell you that it was a pretty small number in comparison to the biographies and works written by men and now we have since 2014 just over 25,000 articles within our scope. I'd say that's pretty good. Fast forward to 2015. I'm on page. Fast forward to 2015. Now I was invited by a gentleman called Roger Bamken of the UK to present with him at wikimania 2015 on something unique something that wasn't going on at the time and that was let's create a project and that project like wiki project women writers would be a project just dedicated to writing articles about not just the writers but other women. We had a wiki project scientists wiki project artists and so forth about women but let's do one that is just women broadly red links about women. I was in I bought a hook line and sinker and I said yes I'm in let's write up the proposal and hopefully we'll get to wikimania and hopefully we'll get to talk about it and we did we got to wikimania and we announced it this wiki project just dedicated to coming up with red lists of articles and clicking that red link and writing that article about women. So in our first month well it was only a half a month it was from July 11th to July 31st we had about a thousand articles and now six months later we've written almost nine thousand articles. Now with some of those articles have been written even if we didn't have women in red surely they would have but I have to say that some of what we've done and we've done a lot we've got a great group of writers is important and I think we can replicate it. So what have we done? We found in our second third month of existence that the Smithsonian reached out to us and said we're gonna have an editathon can you support us doing something virtual? We said yes it was on Asian Pacific American women and our team of writers just virtually all over the world we wrote in three days 36 articles that supported the event that was happening at the Smithsonian. The following month or actually later that month in September we thought well we don't need you know an organization to host an editathon we can do this virtually we'll just do it virtually we're going to do it women in leadership so instead of creating wiki project women in leadership we just went ahead and did an editathon virtual online we created hundreds of articles the next thing we did is we got a call from the Guggenheim and we supported the Guggenheim with their women in architecture and design and we created 164 articles virtually online and then we did women in science in collaboration with the New York Academy of Science and we created almost 350 articles in December we went back to doing something by ourselves we've had December religion okay let's tackle it 129 articles we're now in January we just started the one women in music and we created so far 138 articles and we're still working on it when I say we we invite people we spam talk pages we're telling you what we're doing and when we're doing it we've done it for three days we've done it for seven days 10 days 21 days in March it's going to be 31 days when we do art and feminism and we get people excited they might just participate in the one event they might decide I really like this I'm going to participate in a whole bunch of these events you don't have to sign up just write the articles but if you want to sign up we've got a meet-up page for every one of the events we host and we'd be glad to have you put your name as a participant participant or not just do the work so I told you I wrote a lot of content over 4,000 articles in the last year or so I've done some concentration on articles about women's conferences you know suffragettes from a hundred years ago women interested in peace conferences from maybe 90 years ago and I had an epiphany I'm putting this out to the universe universe please listen let us convene a conference an international thematic conference on content gender gap let's talk about replicating some of the things we've done well we we haven't done everything perfectly we could use some help but surely the other language Wikipedia's could benefit from what we've learned and from what we've done and we from them let's bring in subject matter experts let's bring in people who understand project management and let's help each other move this forward this is my perspective and now I'm going to turn it over to Emily Templewood for hers thank you hi everybody I'm Emily I don't know if you can see me um oh wow now I can see myself this is exciting um I'm user Kailana in English Wikipedia I've been editing since April 2007 and I was involved in founding the wiki project women scientists and wiki project women's health so I'm going to talk about how we've used those two projects to address the content gender gap and some of the ramifications of the content gender gap on wikipedia and on people around the world um so the content gender gap affects more than just you know articles about dresses or whatever it's a fundamental problem that affects basically any anything that women are interested in or anything that affects women um so in 2012 if I'm getting my dates right we started wiki project women scientists and we started out with about 1400 articles um and I literally just checked we finally hit 5000 this week with 5051 women scientists so this is awesome right we're finally making strides in this one area and writing women back into history as I like to call it is so important because my gender I straddle the generation of growing up growing up with the internet versus not growing up with the internet right I was seven I think seven when wikipedia you know was founded and in the past 15 years you know you know I've grown up and wikipedia has become a really integral part of my generation's life but if you ask my little sister who's 18 oh yeah the internet that's always been there so it's a very different mindset and unfortunately it's kind of like to a mindset of if it's not on wikipedia it doesn't exist and we've all kind of experienced that shock of like searching for something and oh my god that's not an article and as a wikipedia my reaction is okay I'm gonna write that article but to a non wikipedia and that's oh it must not be important so um behind me I have some posters of women and scientists I don't know if you can see them um but I have Barbara McClintock is one of them and her wikipedia biography a few years ago featured extensive discussion about how she never got married and she never had kids and she didn't have close relationships and she was just generally not a warm and fuzzy person kind of neglecting the fact that she made scientific discoveries that completely revolutionized biology so it's important for us to face this content gender gap head on because otherwise we're not telling these stories that need to be told and we're not as the world's premier repository of information we're not including people who need to be included but this also has some really important implications for people all around the world um and women scientists are important historically women scientists are important as a source of inspiration for young women but women's health has really immediate ramifications we've all heard um doc james's paper on you know how the vast majority of doctors and medical students use wikipedia well this has huge implications for women's health because women's health is a huge area of content gender gap that we haven't really addressed yet um so the first thing I wanted to bring up was the world health organization um discusses initiatives for women's health and lists various areas that that need to be like worked on um and from my from my cursory investigation this morning none of them have an article above c-class that's really concerning because women around the world just like men around the world rely on information from wikipedia about their health and if it's specific to women it's more likely to be of lower quality another area where this really affects women um is in the area of trans women's health our articles on trans health are to put it politely a complete disaster um and that is something that needs to be changed and that's why we have this project right so that people can learn about their health and we can empower them um and the last thing I wanted to bring up before we turn things over to sydney i think i'm on contract time wise is the propensity or the um the way that content errors have been perpetuated through this area of women's health um major major errors um that we sometimes find in other areas but women's health is like particularly important um and i just want to illustrate this with with a quick example of of something i found just the other day um so my main women's health writing is in gynecologic oncology so cancers of the uterus of the ovaries the cervix vagina etc and i when i was writing about therapy um pelvic radiotherapy which involves you know irradiating the pelvis to kill any cancer cells that are there um i realized that our article on a vaginal dilator which is an instrument that basically keeps it from collapsing in on itself when when there's radiation that affects the vaginal mucus membranes um sorry science nerd was redirecting to a speculum which is an instrument used during gynecologic examinations to look at the cervix and this really struck me as incredibly harmful because first of all the redirect had been created something like 10 years ago and no one had really noticed and if i was a patient looking up a treatment that my doctor had prescribed for me i would be kind of horrified thinking that you know these two things were the same and they're not so it's areas like this where we we really need to focus on the content gender gap and to add another uh nugget of information wikipedia still doesn't have an article on pediatric gynecology which is really really sad to me it's an important subspecialty and i'm in the process of writing one but the fact that we've gone 15 years without that is shocking and really indicative of what we need where we need to go and how we need to proceed with the future of the content gender gap so i hope that you're interested in joining either wikiproject women's health or women scientists or both both would be nice um and come you know improve an article here checks and terminology there write a biography it all makes a difference and writing women back into history making sure that you know women who use wikipedia zero and midwives and everyone has access to information about women's health is incredibly important um so with that i will turn it over to sydney hello can you can you hear me yes sydney we can hear you okay good so um um hello i'm sydney poor i go vote by the name of flow night on wiki and i chose my name because um it's kind of to honor florence nightingale so this kind of is very nice transition from emily's talk into my talk because i also have a very strong area interest in women's health in my work as a wikipedia in residence with cockham collaboration i am kind of working with emily on this topic but really what i'm planning to talk about today is really not um you know what has been accomplished so much in terms of the content is kind of one of the ways we can go about doing it and over the past 15 years one of the things that's happened with the wikimedia movement is that we have developed what i consider a pretty robust grants program but unfortunately too often the grants have not been focused on things that have could improve the the gender content gap now that has changed over the last few years because of the interest of people that are in the grants program as well as people like emily and others that have stepped up and volunteered to be on some of the grant committees that that evaluate grants so really what i would like to do is talk about in general the the types of grants that are out there and available and they include the projects and event grants which is pretty much anybody that has kind of aligned with our mission can go there suggest a grant and can can really begin working on you know something that would improve content for women there's also individual engagement grants which is really something that's focused towards individuals working on a project over a time period that's very specific and would have funds available for project management support as well as grants that are annual plan grants that would be available for organizations usually that are affiliated with wikimedia foundation and that they would get funds for over a year's time through all of these programs people have in the past and can going forward have programs are specifically addressed towards the the gender gap one of the special programs that we did last year was the inspire campaign and through this campaign we were able to address of the gender gap in a very major way and we were able to come up with 16 different projects that were made to address either the content gender graph or the lack of women editing as well I want to particularly highlight one that I think is a very special one to my heart because it is involving the state of West Virginia which is where I was born and raised a university there saw a very strong need to adjust the content lacking about women from West Virginia and women in general and they're very strongly committed to our movement and in changing it so they wanted to come to us as partners so they are have hired someone named Emily excuse me Kelly Dole to be our first wikipedia residents this addressing the gender gap and she was started last fall and she's working internally at West Virginia University to inside the classroom as well as holding editathons and other events to get content onto wikipedia so one of the key things is really figuring out how to get all of this working together so that we have the projects for example that Emily is suggesting for women's health so we would be able to have you know Kelly you know going to her university's medical people and explaining to them about what they can do to help with the women's health and so really it's a matter of pulling this all together and supporting it with good funds and this is a way that I see that we can go forward to addressing the content issues that are serious issues that are causing us to have the biases that in our content today and that's really all I have to say right now and but if I think we want to have time for questions if anyone has any questions and it probably be easy as if Rosie you know we hand it back to Rosie let her handle the question and answer period thank you Sydney and Emily really appreciate what you had to say do we have any questions yes Lila first thank you so much for giving the overview of the of the challenges and what what you guys are doing to solve them this is I believe an extremely important topic for us how can you go over a little bit how can people find the gap article so what how can they plug get involved more easily and find the kind of content that needs to be filled in because a lot of times we don't know where the gaps are sure so Lila so Lila asked how can we let people know what those articles are the ones that are missing or the ones that need improvement I'll make sure that I go to the event page that's listed there and I'll put a link up for women in red and I'll make sure that somehow you'll also be able if you link to this YouTube you'll have access to our three user names are part of this but once you get to the women in red project for example you'll see a nav box at the bottom of it and that nav box has links for red lists so we have people who crowd source and put together red lists of different of different sorts for women in music women in leadership women in science women in social science women writers and Tartic women researchers we have a red list for that indigenous women we have a red list for that so we have people who that's what they like to do they like to come up with these lists of names we sort them by country and just click one of those links and start writing the article often the people who are crowd sourcing and adding these names to these red lists are also putting references down so that helps you from the get-go you might have three reference links that you can use to help you write that article you'll also see in that nav box links for the different events that we've held you'll see how the meet-ups are structured basically giving you pointers to red lists and two categories that you might want to use but the short answer is go to WP colon women in red and if you go to the bottom of the page you'll see lists of red links click on any of those lists and it'll take you to pages where you can see missing articles and like I said it's crowd source so add more names to that please thanks Lila any other questions yes we can we use the question microphone please it's on that same topic where I think Emily mentioned that there were really important articles that weren't written or had hardly received any attention but I think the guy who was talking about bots showed it a nice grid of top and then top importance and then class quality class and I think it was like 15,000 or something or top and start you know and it's like those are like our most important articles and nobody really works on them it's a lot easier to work on a biography or to work on a you know some a military battle we get a lot of attention on military battles architectural buildings but working on really hard articles like that it doesn't doesn't get it done enough and it's not a content gender thing in a lot of ways it's a it's an overall thing in the Wikipedia yeah thank you very much Ben alright so is it time for Brita Brita you're up thank you everyone