Wikipedia Interventions for Feminist Dialogues on Technology

 Academics nationally and internationally are beginning to integrate work on Wikipedia into their courses; it is a great way to get students to think about public writing, the creation of knowledge, citation, and to hone a few digital authoring skills. Many of the faculty teaching  “Feminist Dialogues on Technology” – the FemTechNet Distributed Online Collaborative Course (DOCC) that is running this year – are going to include Wikipedia assignments. Adrianne Wadewitz and I are leading this area of FemTechNet work and we’ve created this list as a way partially representing the ways one can participate in Wikipedia culture and knowledge production – while there is a lot there, it’s not exhaustive. As we continue working, I’ll be putting up additional resources, but it is worth checking out Adrianne’s extensive work in this area – including this: “How to Use Wikipedia as a Teaching Tool” by Liz Losh (interviewing Adrianne).

There are some basic categories of work:

• Adding information
• Format/design of information
• Participating in discussion
• Policy

Which we can break out into work items:

Create new articles about

• people,
• events,
• works,
• conceptual areas (e.g. history of women in science),
• corporations, objects (e.g. the “corset”),
• lists (e.g. – 18th century children’s authors),
• etc..

Work on existing articles by

• adding sections,
• adding information,
• adding citations,
• citing sources on feminist topics,
• citing women’s work on any topic, or
• citing feminist sources on non-overtly feminist topics (e.g. “history of the novel”).

Clean up existing articles by 

• copyediting (guild has a list of articles requesting help),
• tagging articles where issues exist (this is particularly important as a way of communicating to readers),
• creating links between existing articles (look in category: orphan),
• add a script or bot to your account that will help you do cleaning tasks,
• assess articles (rank from “stub” up – helpful for understanding how Wikipedians are writing in an area)

Below are more advanced work items – ones that can be undertaken once an editor has built up some authority and experience.

Adding Images (requires an understanding of copyright issues)

• find new images to add to Wikimedia Commons – this is a challenging task, especially for historical women
• find images on Commons to add to Wikipedia articles

Participating in conversations (after established oneself as a memeber)

• about the structure of the site,
• deletion discussions,
• possible violations of the civil code and banning,
• policy (see the notice boards on the policy items),
• offering advice about sources etc,
• or the various Wikiprojects.

Help create and sustain the community

• welcome and work with new members (TeaHouse),
• identify and address vandalism,
• work to build consensus by participating in talk conversations,
• vote for various high-level positions, or
• serve on one of the various administrative committees.