Engaging diverse communities to profile women of Antarctica: Guest post recaps in-depth engagement of experts to address Wikipedia gender gap while improving coverage of their field
In June 2016 Jan Strugnell approached me with a proposal and a problem. The proposal: Jan had convinced the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) to hold a 'Wikibomb' event for women Antarctic scientists at their upcoming international conference, in which participants would update a large set of relevant articles. The problem: Jan had never edited Wikipedia before. She just knew that improving the representation of notable women on the world’s largest encyclopaedia was important.
She’d heard about my workshops on “Wikipedia Editing for Scientists” and together we composed a plan:
We therefore decided to hold a 3-month-long virtual editathon followed by a final in-person celebration, presentation and recruitment event being held on the 28th of August.
As with Wikipedia as a whole, there has been systemic under-representation of notable women Antarctic scientists. Compounding this is Antarctic science's unique history of exclusion of women. There was a gap of over 100 years between the first man to set foot on the Antarctic mainland (John Davis) and the first woman to do so (Ingrid Christensen). Most science programmes explicitly prohibited women from working in Antarctica until at least the late 1950s (Maria Klenova), more than half a century after the first male scientists. Women scientists have now risen to prominent positions, including directorships of the British Antarctic Survey (Jane Francis) and Alfred Wegener Institute (Karin Lochte). Nevertheless, women remain under-represented in official recognition (e.g, Polar Medals), and public awareness (e.g., Wikipedia biographies). With 60% of polar early career researchers now women, better representation was needed.
We gathered 170 nominations from the Antarctic community over the course of a month via an online form, requesting information and sources, promoted via social media, mailing lists and the official SCAR website.(archive link) We classified the initial nomination forms on a 4-point scale from "no references provided," to "clearly notable with all the necessary supporting references."
At the same time, we were recruiting volunteers to help turn nominations into biographies over the next three months. The Women in Polar Science, Association of Polar Early Career Scientists, and Equal Opportunity Science networks were helpful for recruiting keen volunteers, who then worked to move drafts through the pipeline towards being upload-ready. Our initial enquiries indicated that most of our volunteers were initially intimidated by the idea of editing Wikipedia. We therefore developed a pipeline that allowed volunteers to draft off-wiki if they preferred, and work on-wiki once they felt comfortable, organised in a Google Sheets spreadsheet.
First, we wrote biography drafts and stored them in a shared Dropbox folder, starting with the information provided in the nomination form and researching additional references where necessary. We then swapped the drafts around to edit and proofread each other’s writing. Finally, those comfortable with Wikipedia editing were trained by Skype to use the preloaddraft system on the meetup page to upload the drafts.
We decided that our volunteers only really needed to know about Notability (specifically WP:PROF) and Reliable Sources. We guided the content, length and formatting through the use of MS Word templates to draft articles off-wiki and preloaddraft to then upload them. We used the feedback from Women in Red and Articles for creation editors to bring drafts up to standard before they were published. Our final step was to email the article subjects themselves to request images — one element of a biography where freely licensed material is needed, and where conflict of interest doesn't matter.
We've found that drawing in diverse expertise into a pipeline allowed us to write a large number of decent-quality pages, with some being ranked "B-class" straight away (e.g. Ingrid Christensen). We were also conscious of minimising the common bias towards English-speaking countries - currently, 53% of our biographies. Although the main focus was on scientists, we also profiled politicians, explorers, civil servants, educators and administrators.
As is always the case, not all pages passed Articles for Creation review (AfC), but we found that the volunteers involved understood that this is all part of the robust calibration that the Wikipedia community has to continuously consider for who is notable. We have been particularly proud of how many images we have added. Requesting photos from article subjects directly yielded a >50% success rate over three weeks.
These efforts are being promoted at the SCAR2016 conference and used to recruit further interested editors. We’re hosting a two-hour set of presentations and panel discussions about the new articles and about women in research, followed by drop-in Wikipedia training over the following days of the conference.
Overall, the success of this editathon was based on effectively engaging multiple communities – SCAR members, early career researchers, experienced Wikipedians, and finally the subjects themselves; and on putting people to work in advance of the edit-a-thon itself.
Consequently we would like to thank the Women in Red for their fantastic help, support and advice and the AfC editors whose feedback helped improve the standard of our submitted articles. The SCAR community really got behind the project, nominating a great range of high-flyers. We were fortunate to have a great committee to organise everything consisting of Jan Strugnell, Thomas Shafee, Jenny Baeseman, Nerida Wilson, Craig Stevens, and Justine Shaw. Lastly, of course, the dozens of volunteers who helped on-wiki and off-wiki made this process possible!
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Discuss this story
Thanks to all who participated in this effort. You did this the right way and I'm sure others will follow your example. Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:24, 18 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Under-represented?
What's the evidence that female Antarctic scientists were underrepresented on Wikipedia before? (For better or worse, it seems clear that, post-"Wikibomb", female Antarctic scientists are now highly over-represented on the English-language Wikipedia, with 92 entries vs. 40 for men, judging by the categories Antarctic scientists and Women Antarctic scientists.) Yaron K. (talk) 19:48, 18 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]
References