Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Women’s Histories

Date: 30-03-2019

Description: All of us use Wikipedia almost everyday – right from quickly looking up facts and definitions to sometimes even ‘sourcing’ material for assignments. Have you wondered why some pages are more informative than others or why they are not available in other languages? Can you recall instances when a topic you searched for didn’t exist or didn’t provide you adequate information? And did you know that you could improve this content by contributing some of those missing topics and information on Wikipedia?

We organized a Wikipedia edit-a-thon on March 30th to add more topics, sources and images, update and translate articles. The theme for the edit-a-thon was women’s histories. The event was open to all.

Event Date: March 30th, 2019 [Saturday]

Time: 10 am – 1 pm

Venue: IIIT Bangalore campus at Electronic City

More about Wikipedia …

Wikipedia currently contains over 40 million articles in close to 300 languages – thanks to the contributions of volunteers all over the world. Volunteers write, they edit, they add new sources, they translate, they keep articles updated, they take pictures, they create diagrams, and many other things that make Wikipedia what it is today. Yet Wikipedia is far from perfect – not all topics, regions and groups of people are equally represented on Wikipedia. Which is why one might find more details about every episode of Game of Thrones than they would about every candidate contesting in the Indian General Elections. But the good news is we can help change what Wikipedia covers. We can add more topics, sources and images, update articles, and even translate them to other languages! And what more enjoyable way to do this than with a fellow group of volunteers?

More about the edit-a-thon …

To join this global community of volunteers and contribute to Wikipedia, CITAPP is starting up a monthly Wikipedia edit-a-thon series. At these edit-a-thons, we will learn how to contribute to Wikipedia in different ways. We kicked off our first edit-a-thon for this year on March 30th (10 am – 1 pm) at the IIITB campus in Electronic City. Themed around women’s histories to mark the month of March, this edit-a-thon is an attempt to make notable women from various fields, and notable events related to women, visible on Wikipedia: women scientists, writers, entrepreneurs, politicians, artistes – anybody that you feel should be visible on Wikipedia and isn’t already! On the heels of the #VisibleWikiWomen 2019 initiative by Whose Knowledge, and our own #VisibleWikiWomen session in March 2018, we will strive once more to broaden the Wiki knowledgebase on women. Since our edit-a-thon this year will also be the first of a monthly series, we shall be discussing edit-a-thon themes for upcoming months during our March 30th meeting.

CITAPP at IIIT Bangalore is an interdisciplinary think-tank set-up to focus on the policy challenges and the organizational demands made by technological innovation. Of particular interest to the Centre is how technological advances, along with institutional changes that harness the legitimacy and the powers of bureaucracies and market, address the needs of underserved communities.