Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism/About

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Background

Art Feminism is a rhizomatic campaign to improve coverage of women and the arts on Wikipedia, and to encourage female editorship. Wikipedia's gender trouble is well documented. In a 2011 survey, Wikimedia found that less than 13% of its contributors are female.^[1] The reasons for the gender gap are up for debate: suggestions include leisure inequality, how gender socialization shapes public comportment, and the contentious nature of Wikipedia's talk pages. The practical effect of this disparity, however, is not. Content is skewed by the lack of female participation. Many articles on notable women in history and art are absent on Wikipedia. This represents an alarming aporia in an increasingly important repository of shared knowledge.

We invite people of all gender identities and expressions, particularly transgender and cisgender women, to address this absence by organizing in-person, communal updating of Wikipedia’s entries on art and feminism. All our materials have Creative Commons licensing, so we encourage you to reference and remix our workflows and training materials to suit the needs of your community.

History

Over the weekend of International Women’s Day, March 6-8, 2015, approximately 1500 participants convened in 75 locations in 17 countries, on 4 continents, to edit Wikipedia articles on women and the arts. During, this day, nearly 400 new articles were created and over 500 articles received significant improvements. The event was covered by The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and ARTnews, among many others. This was a productive and substantial growth from the inaugural 2014 event, which had around 600 participants in 31 locations and created 101 new articles, and improved 90. For their efforts, the organizers of the 2014 edit-a-thon were named to Foreign Policy magazine’s list of Leading Global Thinkers.

Art Feminism is the result of a collaboration between a number of artists, scholars, curators, librarians, and Wikipedians. Specifically, it arose out of two separate conversations between the four founding co-organizers. Siân Evans and Jacqueline Mabey had discussed arranging an event around art and feminism similar to the edit-a-thons geared towards Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) that take place every year on Ada Lovelace Day. Evans’ goal was to engage The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLiS NA)’s Women and Art Special Interest group to build public knowledge and address gender disparities in art research. Mabey mentioned this to Michael Mandiberg, a professor at College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, The City University of New York because of his use of Wikipedia in teaching. Mandiberg had actually had a similar conversation earlier that day with curator Laurel Ptak. At the time, Ptak was a fellow at Eyebeam, a center for art and technology, where she was doing work around cyberfeminism, and he had encouraged her to hold an edit-a-thon focused on art, technology, and feminism.

This project also came on the heels of a very public debate about the potential for structural sexism on Wikipedia. Writer Amanda Filipacchi wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on a problematic editorial practice being implemented by a Wikipedia editor: women were being removed from the “American Novelists” category and moved into a subcategory for “American Women Novelists.” Filipacchi’s piece generated a maelstrom of discussion about gender issues on Facebook and other social media platforms. However, at the same time, Wikipedians were having a conversation about the subcategorization on Wikipedia’s talk pages. While the topic was the same, the tenor and content of these conversations were worlds apart. A goal of the Art Feminism edit-a-thon was to give art researchers and enthusiasts the tools to engage in these debates on Wikipedia.

“The intent is not to disproportionately overstate the roles of women or downplay the achievements of men through a malicious rewriting of history… Rather, this project seeks to revisit gaps in scholarship and canonical history — places in which the accounts of women’s contributions to society may, for one reason or another, simply not exist.” - Rachel Simone Weil quoted in Megan Kallus, “UT School of Information to host feminist Wikipedia Edit-a-thon,” The Daily Texan, March 4th, 2015

Art Feminism is envisioned as an intervention both as feminists and as librarians/professors/artists/art workers/art lovers -- a contribution of our specific knowledge to the Commons.

Lead Organizers and Colloborating Organizations

The 2016 Art Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon is organized by Art Feminism, led by Siân Evans/Art Libraries Society of North America’s Women and Art Special Interest Group, Jacqueline Mabey/failed projects, and Michael Mandiberg, in collaboration with the Professional Organization for Women in the Arts (POWarts) and The Museum of Modern Art, and with support from Wikimedia NYC.

Founding Organizers

Siân Evans is an art librarian, who is the organizer of the Women and Art Special Interest Group of the Art Libraries Society of America. As Senior Implementation Manager for Shared Shelf at Artstor, she has extensive experience in outreach, training and advocacy of library-related software. She is actively involved in the library community, publishing on issues around open access, collaborative cataloging, and alternative access to special collections.

Jacqueline Mabey’s work is shaped both by ten years of post-secondary education in art history and cultural studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, McGill University, and The University of British Columbia, respectively, as well as her multifarious professional experience in commercial galleries and curatorial, public programs, archives, and editorial departments. Her practice is rooted in praxis; she endeavors to create exhibitions, situations, and words that draw out the complexities and complicities of digital materiality. Since May 2013, Mabey has worked independently under the honorific, failed projects. She lives with a small dog next to a large park in Brooklyn.

Michael Mandiberg is an interdisciplinary artist, scholar, and educator. His work explores systems of exchange, ranging from financial markets to the sharing based peer-production of Free Culture; from copies of copies of images, to the disintegration of identities and the displacement of bodies. He directs the New York Arts Practicum, is an Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and is on the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. He lives and works in Brooklyn; his work lives at Mandiberg.com; he is User:Theredproject on Wikipedia.

Laurel Ptak is Director and Curator at Triangle Arts Association in New York City and part-time faculty at The New School. Ptak works across curatorial, artistic and pedagogical boundaries with attention to the social, political contours of art, technology & everyday life. The book, Undoing Property, which she co-edited with artist Marysia Lewandowska was published by Sternberg Press in 2013. Her recent work has been recognized with a nomination for the 2012 Independent Vision Curatorial Award from iCi. Ptak attended the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Co-Facilitators

Friends & Allies

References

^ Glott, Ruediger; et al. (15 March 2010). "Wikipedia Survey – Overview of Results" (PDF). United Nations University.

External links

[UNUniv-WikiSurvey-2010-1] Glott, Ruediger; et al. (15 March 2010). "Wikipedia Survey – Overview of Results" (PDF). United Nations University.

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