Women in Architecture (WIA) – Write Women in Wikipedia
On March 2nd, Women in Architecture committee hosted an event to “Write Women Architects in Wikipedia”. I sincerely thank David Molinaro, Debra Sands, Jamie Knollmiller, Rakhi Dasgupta for making time to attend this intensive workshop at the end of their work day, and contribute to writing women architects in Wikipedia.
None of us had extensive experience about writing into wikipedia, or hosting an editathon other than my brief stint of writing Kaiser Eames as a part of ArchiteXX’s WikiD Women’s History Month celebration in 2015. The page about Kaiser Ray Eames was later merged into Charles Eames’s page because Ray and Charles to honor their close companionship. Even though I didn’t achieve what I set out to achieve, the merged page shares my contributed information about Ray Eames. I lost motivation to continually edit and enhance my entry once the edits from others started pouring in from various time zones from all over the world.
This time it’s different. We have a wide network of support system to guide us and motivate us.
We are proud to be a part of Art and Feminism (www.artandfeminism.com) at Organizer level. Art and Feminism is a group of students, librarians, professors, artists, art workers, and art lovers who create meaningful changes to the body of knowledge available about feminism and the arts on Wikipedia.
In addition, we are a part of the Women.Wikipedia.Design – WikiD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikiproject_Women_Wikipedia_Design/Team) an international education and advocacy program working to increase the number of Wikipedia articles on women in architecture and the built environment. On behalf of all of us, I would like to thank Justine Clark of Parlour, and Nina Briggs of AWA+D for leading and guiding us through the process.
Personally, I am a part of Women in Red project as well. WikiProject Women in Red (WiR), a WikiProject whose objective is to turn “redlinks” into blue ones within the project scope: women’s biographies and works by women.
While we cannot push diversity for diversity sake, the lack of biographies of women directly correlates to the lack of women writers in wikipedia. The gender gap is at two levels- at adding information, at being added. To contribute our share, Women in Architecture Committee will host Editathons (events to edit information on Wikipedia about Women in Architecture) once every two months at least. This will be an ongoing exercise and a gender neutral event.
You can participate remotely, or you can plan on attending an event. Please send me an email to Sharon Miller if you would like to be added to our list of contributors. We will maintain a database of our Wikipedia contributions.
Click the links below to check out our contributions at the March 2nd event:
Meghana Joshi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Gottlieb (new page)
Debra Sands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutah_Maria_Riggs (added information)
Rakhi Dasgupta: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsa_Leviseur (new page)
Thank you, and we hope to see more you participate in the project.
Meghana Joshi
Chair, Women in Architecture Committee