Wiki edit-a-thon
Just 18.72% of English Wikipedia's biographies are about women. To make a contribution towards addressing this in the design sphere, Part W worked with Prof. Mel Dodd and The Design Museum to run a participatory workshop tackling the under-representation online of women designers, architects and place makers.
Drawing on The Alternative List project, the wiki-edit-a-thon invited participants to review and develop the digital profiles of female architects and designers who are missing online, or to edit articles that do not reflect their achievements. The workshop began with short presentations and discussion with Founder of Part W Zoë Berman and Professor Mel Dodd, followed by a guided introduction for participants to learn how to edit articles on Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia is the first place many members of the public, students, journalists and designers look to access generalist knowledge on many topics. You can’t be what you can’t see – and so it’s important online resources include significant women, as well as men, so as to offer role models, information and learning about the work of female architects.”
One of the issues that this editing work has revealed for those creating entries is that Wikipedia requires digital or archival citations to justify an inclusion. Due in part to the way that "women's work" has traditionally been recorded and attributed, these are often not available, and our work has also revealed inclusion in the online site requires far more citations and credits for women to be deemed relevant and to be accepted by Wiki admins, than the number of citations required for male counterparts to be granted a Wiki entry.
You can read further about the Wiki-workshop and issues that project has revealed, in this article featured on Dezeen. The in-person Wiki event was run in partnership with The Design Museum, London and was inspired by the important WikiD work that has been done around this issue by the Australian-based group Parlour.
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