Fourth Annual Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon Follow-up

Purchase College Library was one of over 300 satellite locations to host the fourth annual Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Saturday, March 11, 2017. The day-long event, co-organized at Purchase by Kim Detterbeck, Art Librarian, and Marie Sciangula, Assistant Director of the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center, aims to address the gender imbalance of Wikipedia editors, contributors, and content. Organized around International Women’s Day, the Edit-a-thon was designed to generate coverage of women and the arts on Wikipedia and to encourage female editorship – a response to the well-known gender gap. Wikipedia’s gender trouble is well-documented; in a 2011 survey, the Wikimedia Foundation found that less than 13% of its contributors identify as women. This lack of women’s participation has led to an alarming dearth of content about women and art in the world’s most popular online research tool and the fifth most popular website worldwide. Art+Feminism’s Edit-a-thon impacts the gender gap through crucial improvements to art and feminism related subjects on Wikipedia.  

Fifty-four participants (students, faculty, and staff) attended the event, most of whom were students from Professor Titia Hulst’s Women Artists in the Twentieth-Century course and Professor Elizabeth Guffey’s Design History & Theory: 1750 - Today course. Experienced Wikipedian Mike Feist (User:ɱ) was on hand to provide guidance and training to those new to working with and editing Wikipedia. Mike provided training on basic editing, creating citations, adding images, adding internal and external links, and creating new pages.

Purchase College Library’s Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon ranks #3 worldwide in terms of participants and #2 with regard to words added to Wikipedia. A total of 119 articles were edited, ten articles were created, and over 300 edits were made. Throughout the day, attendees edited the Wikipedia pages for over 100 artists including Sally Mann, Ana Mendieta, Sadie Benning, Elaine de Kooning, and Jacqueline Winsor, among many others.

Check out our Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2017 Spotify playlist!

And consider joining us in 2018 for the Fifth Annual Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon!