2023:Program/Equity and Community Health/F3MRLT-#VisibleWikiWomen Photobooth: Creating a feminist space to document our gender, race, and body plurality at Wikimania

The following is a mirror of what are publicly available details of submission made at the call for proposal platform, Pretalx. Any changes here may be overwritten by a bot while syncing updates from Pretalx (F3MRLT). Changes are monitored and may be updated into Pretalx if they do not change the context of the submission (i.e. correcting typographical errors).

Title: #VisibleWikiWomen Photobooth: Creating a feminist space to document our gender, race, and body plurality at Wikimania

Speakers:

Whose Knowledge?

We are a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet. 3/4 of the online population of the world today comes from the global South – from Asia, from Africa, from Latin America. And nearly half all women are online. Yet most public knowledge online has so far been written by white men from Europe and North America. To address this, we work particularly with women, people of color, LGBTQI communities, indigenous peoples and others from the Global South/Global Majority to build and represent more of all of our own knowledge online.

Pretalx link

Etherpad link

Room: Concourse Area

Start time: Wed, 16 Aug 2023 12:45:00 +0800

End time: Wed, 16 Aug 2023 14:15:00 +0800

Type: Other

Track: Equity, Inclusion, and Community Health

Submission state: confirmed

Duration: 90 minutes

Do not record: false

Presentation language: en

Abstract & description

Abstract

The #VisibleWikiWomen photo booth will be a feminist corner at Wikimania where we invite women and non-binary wikimedians and allies, especially from the Global South, to take pictures, document their participation, and create visual memories through the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. For this purpose, we will bring together a small group of volunteer photographers and feminist wikimedians, and we will upload selected shoots to Commons. As part of our feminist practices, we’ll be sure that everybody is comfortable and empowered in consent.

Description

1. VisibleWikiWomen is an annual campaign to make all women and non-binary individuals, especially black, brown, and minoritized women, visible on Wikipedia and the broader internet. This global campaign, led by Whose Knowledge?, brings together Wikimedians, photographers, feminist organisations, and cultural institutions in an effort to reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia and address imbalances of gender representation in online imagery.

The #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth at Wikimania will document the participation of women and non-binary people, especially from the Global South, in order to make them visible at the event. By uploading their images to Wikimedia Commons, we want to contribute to the online tapestry of wikimedians, and further, the #VisibleWikiWomxn campaign efforts to bring the plurality of race, gender, and bodies online, so that the internet looks as diverse and as representative as the majority of the world.

During the interaction with visitors to the photo booth, we shall share more about the campaign and invite more wikimedians to join/collaborate for the rest of the year by donating images, editing biographies, and holding edit-a-thons in their communities. We also want to offer a feminist hub of care and catching one’s breath at Wikimania.

Further details

Qn. How does your session relate to the event themes: Diversity, Collaboration Future?

In many ways, women’s knowledge and contributions to the world are invisible. When we look at women’s invisibility online, Wikipedia is a wonderful proxy to demonstrate why this is such a crucial issue.

Wikipedia being one of the most visited websites in the world means that who is seen and visible in that space shapes perceptions and narratives beyond the internet. This is also true regarding who is visible and acknowledged as a contributor in the Wikimedia community. In an open and participatory platform where only 18% of editors are women, it is critical to create spaces to put at the center the memories and experiences of those who are the minority as editors but represent the majority of the world. We want to contribute with this much-needed acknowledgment, by documenting and inviting as many wikimedians as possible to join us in closing the visual gaps online and creating a future community that represents all of us.

Qn. What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

Everyone can participate in this session

Qn. What is the most appropriate format for this session?

• Onsite in Singapore
• Remote online participation, livestreamed
• Remote from a satellite event
• Hybrid with some participants in Singapore and others dialing in remotely
• Pre-recorded and available on demand