Public Historian. Archivist. Tea Drinker.
This week Carly Ciufo and I launched the ActiveHistory.ca museum theme week. This week was designed to encourage conversation between museum professionals and historians, while highlighting the labour of museum professionals.
It was a pleasure to work with Carly as a co-editor and we are both very please with how the week turned out. A huge thank you to all of our fantastic contributors. Continue reading Active History Museum Theme
Jessica Knapp and I are pleased to announce that we will be holding the second annual Canada Wide Wikipedia Edit-a-thon for Canadian history on October 24, 2018. We’ve written about the logistics of the event, how you can become involved, and how classrooms can participate over at the Unwritten Histories blog. Many thanks to Andrea Eidinger for her support and for sharing her virtual space with us.
Know you want to participate? Check out the Hacking History Facebook event or signup using the Wikipedia Outreach Dashboard.
Last week I helped organize an Art+Feminism edit-a-thon in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Art+Feminism is a “campaign improving coverage of cis and transgender women, feminism, and the arts on Wikipedia.” This year marks the fifth year of the Art+Feminism initiative and since 2014 edit-a-thons have taken place around the world, improving over 11,000 articles in the process.
The event organized in the Soo was focused on increasing content on Wikipedia related to Indigenous folks and Northern Ontario artists. We had a small but enthusiastic group who spent the day editing, laughing, and talking gender. I was inspired by the effort everyone put in to learning new skills and improving Wikipedia. Our work even garnered some media attention – local journalist David Helwig covered our work and the new articles created as part of our day.
I love the spirit of community that can be fostered during edit-a-thons. Many of the participants were folks who I had edited Wikipedia with before and it was great see their progress as editors. We also used this Art+Feminism event to celebrate the successes of our community – the majority of the edits and new pages created were about people we knew, had met, and admired. Two of the new pages were about Algoma University alumni and two new pages were about artists who had worked with the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre.
This locally driven page creation reminded me of why I love Wikipedia – it has the power to shape narratives, uplift voices, and can be a collaborative/community work space. Editing Wikipedia also has the power to act as an education tool – teaching folks about collaboration, clear writing, citations, and narrative building. The more I engage in editing Wikipedia with students and community members the more I am encouraged by the results. Editing Wikipedia combines a huge range of skill sets and can change the way we think about the past and community success.
I’ve written previously about my use of Wikipedia as an outreach tool for the GLAM sector and the possibilities of connecting archives to users through Wikipedia. I’ve also been thinking a lot about using Wikipedia as a form of awareness raising about Indigenous history, marginalized communities, and women. Many people have written about the systemic under representation of women and minorities on Wikipedia. Given that today is International Women’s Day I wanted to talk a bit about women, Wikipedia, and my personal approach to editing.
There are a handful of really great initiatives that encourage focused editing to increase female representation on Wikipedia. For example, the WikiProject Women in Red initiative aims to turn red links (names/topics without Wiki pages) into blue links. The Women In Red initiative focuses on women’s biographies and works by women and hosts theme months where they focus on specific subsets such as women in science, Indigenous women, women in academia etc. The project has some resources for new editors and an ongoing work list if you’re interested in contributing.
My other favourite women’s oriented Wikipedia project is the Art+Feminism initiative. Art+Feminism aims to encourage more women to be engaged in editing and to increase and improve content relating to feminism and the arts. Art+Feminism has a ton of great resources (including a really well done video series) that can be used to introduce new editors to the basics of Wikipedia. The project page also has a lot of advice on hosting an edit-a-thon and for community based organizers. I used a lot of these resources when thinking about organizing the first edit-a-thon on campus in 2016.
Personally, I’ve being trying to be more thoughtful about what pages I create and contribute to. Wikipedia can be a huge rabbit whole and for someone who has a desire to ‘fix all the things’ I can sometimes unintentionally spend hours editing. But my time is finite and I want my edits to be meaningful. I’ve actively being trying to contribute to and create pages that relate to Indigenous communities and more specifically to Indigenous women.
Specifically, I’ve been working on cleaning up the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women page which still needs a substantial amount of work (Read: please contribute!). Similarly, I’ve also being contributing to the Walking With Our Sisters page, and the Aboriginal Healing Foundation page. In terms of biography pages I’ve recently tried to focused my edits on the Indigenous women who have inspired me and who’s academic work has been essential to me rethinking my approaches to scholarship and relationship building. These women matter. They are doing hugely important work that deserves to be acknowledge. Some of the pages I’ve worked on so far have included Christi Belcourt, Shirley Fletcher Horn, Gail Guthrie Valaskakis, Madeline Dion Stout, Eve Tuck and others. I’ve also started to think about how I can contribute to pages related to queer*, trans, non-binary, and 2spirt folks as these are communities which are also vastly underrepresented on Wikipedia.
The #1Lib1Ref (One Librarian, One Reference) initiative is running January 15 – February 3, 2017. The project targets librarians and information professionals and encourages them to engage with Wikipedia by improving citations and adding citations to existing pages. The skills required to add citations draw on a lot of the research and reference skills that librarians excel at and adding a citation is an easy way to start editing Wikipedia.
Earlier this month via Arcan-L Danielle Robichaud reminded the Canadian archival community that archivists have similar skills and resources which can be used to contribute to the #1Lib1Ref initative. Danielle suggested that archivists include citations from:
I whole heatedly agree with Danielle and would encourage both librarians and archivists to become involved. I have been working away at contributing citations to Wikipedia pages relating to residential schools, Indigenous activists, and members of the Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association.
New to Wikipedia and unsure where to start? The #1Lib1Ref page has a basic outline of the steps required to add a citation using either the visual editor or source editor in Wikipedia. You can also check out the visual editor guide or the short introduction tutorial. More importantly I would just suggest diving in and trying things out. Citations are a really easy way to improve Wikipedia and the learning curve is relatively easy, even if you have never edited a page before.
On a citation spree and want to get folks at your place of work or a group of information professionals involved? There’s a “Coffee Kit” page that provides guidelines for organizing an event around #1Lib1Ref. There are also lots of other suggestions of other ways to engage your library/archive with the wider Wikipedia community.
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_Haviland#cite_note-Russell-1
[ii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Thiele#cite_note-KWRBrief-9
[iii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system#cite_note-Bryce1906-38
Yesterday the Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre held it’s first “Rewriting Wikipedia” event aimed at increasing content relating to Indigenous Women on Wikipedia. I’m really happy with how this event turned out. We had about ten participants of varying skill levels and the afternoon was filled with good conversation, ideas, and skill building. Many of the people at the event hadn’t edited Wikipedia before so this was an opportunity to talk about why editing is important and what can be gained by contributing. It was also simply a good outreach event highlighting the range of work that happens in an archive.
I also learned some new things during the session. I tend to primarily use the source editor on Wikipedia but many of the event participants were more comfortable using the visual editor. Working with them and the visual editor gave me a better understanding of the intricacies of using the visual editor for article templates and citations. In between helping people I also spent some time working on a Wikipedia page for Chris Derksen who is an amazing two-spirited Indigenous artist.
We have plans to hold another Rewriting Wikipedia event in the fall, possibly focused on a different topic. We might also run a how-to workshop beforehand open to those who want to learn more before participating in the edit-a-thon. That way there can be a more focused emphasis on skill building in addition to generating content. I’m excited by the range of possibilities that exist with this type of event and the possibilities for grassroots community based history on Wikipedia.
My most recent post “Digital Outreach and Wikipedia in the GLAM Sector” can be seen over on Activehistory.ca. This post looks at why Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) might engage in Wikipedia editing and different possibilities for GLAM organizations interested in editing Wikipedia as a form of outreach.