Wikipedia:WikiProject Women Wikipedia Design

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WikiD campaign

WikiD: Women, Wikipedia, Design is an international education and advocacy program working to increase the number of Wikipedia articles on women in architecture and the built environment. The project includes running writing and editing workshops in Melbourne, New York and Berlin and providing architecture-specific guides that build on existing resources. WikiD is a collaboration between groups in Australia, Germany and the United States – Parlour, n-ails and Architexx. There is also a German project page.

The idea to develop the wikiD workshop to collectively write women architects into wikipedia was conceived in 2015 by ArchiteXX led by Professor Lori Brown. WikiD: Women, Wikipedia was awarded funds as part of the inspire campaign 2015. You can see our grant proposal here

WikiD project progress

All edits made as part of the WikiD initiative, both during the workshops and subsequent contributions made by new Wikipedia edits, are denoted in the Edit Summary via the hashtag #WikiD. To see a list of these edits, please see #WikiD via the Wikipedia Social Search tool.

Wikipedia writing workshops

As part of the funded project writing workshops were undertaken in Berlin, Melbourne and New York in 2015.

Edit-a-thons are ongoing. For events in Australia please see the Parlour website. For events in New York please see the ArchiteXX website.

2015 November workshops

Please make sure that you sign up as participants on the event pages, or below.

Berlin: Sunday November 8, 2015 from 12noon-6pm

at: Wikimedia Deutschland, Tempelhofer Ufer 23/24 10963 Berlin Germany

Find out more and sign up here

Melbourne: Saturday, November 14, 11am–4pm

Australian Institute of Architects, Architext cafe, 41 Exhibition Street Melbourne, VIC 3000

Find out more and sign up here

Saturday November 14, 2015 12-6pm

Center for Architecture @ Seaport Culture District, 181 Front St, New York, NY.

Please RSVP here for the NYC workshop.

2015 October workshops

The October workshops are part of the global Women in Architecture edit-a-thon.

|Find out more and sign up here |Berlin: Saturday October 10, 12 noon - 6pm

Wikimedia Deutschland, Tempelhofer Ufer 23/24 10963

Melbourne: Sunday, October 11, 1pm–5pm

MADA, Monash University Caulfield Campus.

Find out more and sign up here.

New York: Thursday, October 15, 3:30pm-8pm

Guggenheim Museum

Please register here for the NYC event

London: Thursday October 15, 3pm to 7pm

Architectural Association School of Architecture

2015 September workshops

New York: Wednesday, September 23, 5-8pm

Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Pl, New York, NY 10012.

Please RSVP here for the NYC workshop. This event has now passed – come to the next one on October 15.

Berlin: Saturday, September 12, 2–6pm

Wikimedia Deutschland, Templehofer Ufer 23–24, 10963 Berlin, Level 1, Alphabet room.

Find out more and sign up here This event has now passed – come to the next one on October 10.

Melbourne: Sunday, September 13, 11.30am–4pm

MADA, Monash University.

Find out more and sign up here This event has now passed – come to the next one on November 14.

Please Register

Sign up here to allow us to learn more about how you use Wikipedia during and after this event, so that we can work towards improving it. By signing up, you agree to let us use this information for these purposes. Learn more here.

Register

Please add your Wikipedia username in the event pages for Melbourne, Berlin or New York.

Participating remotely

If you cannot make it to a wikiD workshop in person, please consider participating remotely. Sign up below, and please add any outcomes below. (signatures are created by saving four tildes [~] in a row). If you haven't edited Wikipedia before, create an account and username here.

Stay in touch

• Sign up to the wikiD mailing list to ensure you are kept up-to-date with upcoming events and initiatives.
• WikiD also has a presence on the Parlour website, and on Architexx.
• For details on the Berlin writing workshops refer also to the wikiD German Wikipedia project page
• Connect with wikiD on Facebook

Goals

The principal goal of the project is to increase the number of women in design, construction and the built environment who are active as Wikipedia editors, and thereby to increase the number of articles about female architects and others in the field. We also aim to increase the number of articles on gender equity programs, initiatives and activist projects within architecture. As well as adding new articles, we seek to and to improve the overall quality of existing articles on this topic. This includes articles that have already been flagged as needing attention.

We aim to build connections between enthusiastic new editors who have excellent content knowledge, but are unfamiliar with Wikipedia processes and protocols, and experienced Wikipedians who can provide guidance in navigating this new, complicated world. This will ensure that momentum is maintained and new content successfully added.

These goals relate to the following broader aims:

• Recognise women's achievements in a field that continues to be male-dominated, in both Wikipedia and the real world;
• Expand the information available on professional role models;
• Create new sources of inspiration for girls and students of architecture;
• Work towards countering gender inequalities in the field;
• Facilitate a global network of people to actively pool our resources and efforts.

Background

See also:

• Women in architecture
• List of women architects

Read our grant proposal here. There is a very limited presence of women involved in architecture and the built environment disciplines on Wikipedia, and the entries that do exist are inconsistent in their coverage and quality. This is part of a broader situation in which women are underrepresented as both subjects and contributors on Wikipedia as a whole. See the gender gap page for more on this well documented situation. Despina Stratigakos clearly outlines the context and implications of this imbalance for architecture in her essay “Unforgetting Women Architects: From the Pritzker to Wikipedia".

An additional problem is that many people who have expertise in this area are not familiar with the process and protocols of writing Wikipedia entries, and some find it an intimidating environment. Our grant will create more concerted, organised efforts in educating those with the knowledge required to write effective, high-quality Wikipedia entries.

This project builds upon a successful pilot program established by Architexx, WikiD: Women Wikipedia Design, which saw groups convene all over the world on International Women’s Day 2015 to write women architects into Wikipedia. This was actively supported by many groups including Parlour: women, equity, architecture and n-ails. Writing workshops were held in the United States, Australia, Germany, Canada, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. 50 new entries were contributed from the US, 23 new entries from Australia and more from other countries. These entries were made by a small number of participants, most of whom where new to Wikipedia. However, it generated significant interest among a much wider group, and raised considerable interest in an ongoing program to add women in the built environment to Wikipedia. This project was run using existing very limited resources, and was conducted with entirely volunteer labour.

• Harford, Sonia (17 March 2017). "Project to increase listing of women architects in Wikipedia". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 17 March 2017.

Interested in organising an event?

Our focus for this phase of the project is to hold events in Melbourne, New York and Berlin. We encourage you to attend these events if possible. However, we are also pleased to share resources and knowledge with others who wish to run events in their own cities. You can contact us via email at [hello@archiparlour.org hello@archiparlour.org]. We also suggest that you look at the Art + Feminism Organizer Toolkit for further assistance. The link to this is in our resources section.