2019:Diversity/Foo

Diversity/Foo

This is a sample submission for Wikimania 2019

Title

Wikipedia + the 17.82%

Description

Struggling with issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion, this session will focus on Wikipedias gender gaps: the low percentage of female editors (9% in 2018) and the equally-low percentage of articles about women, their works, and their issues (17.82% as of April 2019). Gender gaps have persisted on Wikipedia for years since researchers first began reporting their findings. Although Sue Gardner, Wikimedia’s prior Executive Director enumerated "Nine Reasons Women Don't Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)” in 2011, and made a pledge to increase the female editor base to 25 per cent by 2015, the goal wasn’t reached and the problems persist, albeit various communities of Wikipedians around the world are working to improve Wikipedia’s gender gaps. This session will include an overview on the topic, enumerate the findings of the 2018 WMF Gender Equity Report, and provide updates from recent research.

Some critical issues include:

• Partnerships with like-minded institutions and organizations
• Creating a strategy for development of Wikidata-based redlists
• Mapping existing activities across languages
• Adapting quantitative metadata to Wikidata, such as inclusion of occupations and authority controls
• The value of uploading 'images and including them in Wikipedia articles
• Developing an understanding of the impact of our achievements

This is meant to be a participatory and interactive session, so a portion of the time will be dedicated to hearing from attendees about their experiences and needs. We welcome other collaborators to get in touch with their case studies and examples.

Camelia Boban at WikiGap Rome, 2018

Greta Doci introducing Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight at Wikimedia Diversity Conference, Stockholm, 2017

Links:

• Wikimedia Foundation's Gender Equity Report 2018. (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_equity_report_2018)

About the speakers

• Camelia Boban - Camelia is the co-founder of WikiDonne User Group, and the Coordinator of the movement strategy's Diversity Working Group.
• Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight - Rosie is the co-founder of WikiWomen's User Group and Women in Red. She is a member of the movement strategy's Community Health Working Group.

Relationship to the theme

This session will address the conference theme — Wikimedia, Free Knowledge and the Sustainable Development Goals — in the following manner:

Partnerships (SDG 9, 17) with diversity organizations and institutions around the world are an excellent way to reduce inequality and access to knowledge (SDG 4, 5, 10) that currently exist not only in the world, but within our own movement.

Session outcomes

At the end of the session, the following will have been achieved:

Attendees will:

• Understand the historical and current systemic bias issues of content and participatory gender gap on Wikipedia.
• Develop a working knowledge of how WikiCommons and Wikidata provide benefits to our work
• Learn best practices and methods of utilizing social media to promote our achievements
• Share ideas and experiences
• Connect with experienced and new Wikipedians working on these type of projects.
  

Session leader(s)

Usernames

• Camelia Boban
• Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight

Affiliation/country

• Italy, WikiDonne User Group, Affiliations Committee
• United States, Wikimedia DC, WikiWomen's User Group, Affiliations Committee

E-mail contact

• camelia.boban@gmail.com
• rosiestep.wiki@gmail.com

Session type

Each Space at Wikimania 2019 will have specific format requests. The program design prioritises submissions which are future-oriented and directly engage the audience. The format of this submission is a:

• Discussion-based training

Length of session (if other than 20 minutes, specify how long)

40 minutes for presentation and demonstration

Supporting work (optional)

(Feel free to provide links to existing work related to your session- wiki pages, web sites, blog posts, presentations, Youtube videos, social media. This may help the program committee determine session selections.)

• add here

Requirements

The session will work best with these conditions:

• Room: Any type of room with projector

• Audience: 30-50, those working in the gender diversity space

• Recording: Yes, recording allowed