Women’s-Studies Students Across the Nation Are Editing Wikipedia

This month more than 750 students in women’s and gender studies are getting on Wikipedia. But the students aren’t looking up information. They are editing it in hopes of closing the website’s gender gap.

Under the auspices of the Wiki Education Foundation and the National Women’s Studies Association, 4,614 students have added more than three million words to Wikipedia and edited 9,855 articles since the effort began, in 2014.

But a wide gender gap persists on the site: Only 17.49 percent of biographies on Wikipedia are of women, and the site’s top article categories relate to the military, war, and sports. To counter that pattern, the program provides training to faculty members and students on how to conduct the editing process on Wikipedia. The women’s-studies group has assembled the largest cohort of students editing Wikipedia articles through the foundation, which also teams up with other academic associations.

Allison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, or NWSA, is responsible for overseeing and coordinating the partnership that connects faculty members and students in the field with training, resources, and experts at the Wiki Education Foundation. She spoke on Tuesday with The Chronicle, in a conversation that has been edited for length and clarity.

Q. How did the collaboration begin?

A. Jami Mathewson from the Wiki Education Foundation reached out to me to ask whether NWSA would be interested in partnering with them to advance their goal of closing the gender gap on Wikipedia. And it obviously made a lot of sense for us. They’re partnering with some other associations as well, but it was a really natural fit from our point of view because obviously that’s our content-area specialty, and Wikipedia is certainly a great place to be making an impact. The first year, there were 10 courses participating. The second year, which was 2015-16, there were 60. Last year, 2016-17, there were 77. This year there are 62.

Q. What’s so important about adding these edits and articles to you and others involved in women’s studies?

A. Wikipedia is the fifth-most-visited website in the world. It’s a major source of information globally. And so to have both accurate information around gender issues, but also to just broaden the scope of content on Wikipedia, is important.

There is pretty obviously a gender bias in terms of featured articles on Wikipedia: The most numerous featured articles are articles on war and militarism. And that’s a particular view of the world that I think women’s- and gender-studies students can contribute to correcting and balancing. The other thing I’ve heard when I hear faculty talk about having participated in this initiative is that students are incredibly motivated by doing this work because they can see it has a real impact. It’s a contribution they can make directly to social change by updating and improving these articles.

Q. What kinds of articles do students edit?

A. There was really an amazing class that took place at UC Berkeley, and the faculty member was Juana María Rodríguez. Her students edited 135 articles, which is pretty incredible, over the course of one semester. It really covered all kinds of topics. For example, there was LGBT rights in Nepal, LGBT culture in San Francisco, but then there was one about Sikhism, the religion, and sexual orientation, pornography in India.

The other pretty amazing thing about that course in particular: They created 19 articles. Editing articles is much more common, but there’s a pretty high bar to having new articles created. And so the number of articles that students have created is relatively small versus the articles that they’ve edited. But the fact that those students created 19 is pretty incredible.

And I think particularly because women’s-studies courses are interdisciplinary, as I’ve scanned through the Dashboard and I click to sort of see the articles that students edit, it’s often an amazing range. Some courses are more topical, like art history or something, but in those that are more broadly interdisciplinary, students may edit articles on a whole range of topics.

Q. What do students gain?

A. It’s exciting for students to know that there is a public audience there for their research. These edits are a part of a class assignment, so students have access to a lot of resource material in their university settings. And through that resource material, the articles that they’ve read and the databases that they can access, the journal articles — all can improve articles on Wikipedia. And they can really see the effects of the work that they do; the students themselves can see the page views in the Dashboard, so there’s no question that people are really seeing the work that you’ve done.

[[relatedcontent align="right” size="half-width”]] In this era, this political moment that we’re occupying, digital literacy couldn’t be more important. Students are gaining valuable tools of a higher level of digital literacy and understanding, that you can question something that you’re reading that seems authoritative. One of the things that anyone can do on Wikipedia, but the students particularly become well versed in doing, is you can view the editing history of an entry. And so that’s a way of reviewing how an article has evolved or changed over time — what might have been included or excluded — and to get a better understanding of what other factors might be at work and what’s being represented there.

So students learn a lot about these topics from updating the article, but they also learn about Wikipedia. The site has strict guidelines for how things can be edited and by whom.

The program helps support people who want to make these edits and who don’t have that sort of Wikipedia expertise. So the foundation has people on staff who will help faculty and students navigate the Wikipedian conventions. They have training materials that teach students about neutral voice, which is more the voice that Wikipedia uses even though, of course, we can all acknowledge the bias in Wikipedia.

Q. How is this kind of initiative different from other edit-a-thons or the Global Women Write In days others have done in the past?

A. Those things still of course go on; they are simultaneous efforts. I would say the difference between the edit-a-thons and this sort of initiative — and both have their place — is that this collaboration is sustained over the course of a semester or a quarter, and students are making collective contributions over the course of that time period based on whatever the assignment may be. It’s the integration with the classes, and it’s more sustained. Students in particular have more of an opportunity to develop more and deeper skills in terms of how to do the editing because it is being built into the courses and assignments.

Q. What other kinds of barriers still exist in removing the gender gap on Wikipedia?

A. When we began, there were definitely a couple of faculty who had negative experiences with Wikipedia. It’s part of this broader online culture where women are harassed or challenged, maybe the edits are not always accepted because of gender bias. But I think that Wiki Education has done a great job of acknowledging the potential for this sort of climate issue, and working closely with faculty to address it, and be proactive about it. We can’t hide from the fact that this type of bias exists, broadly speaking, but particularly on Wikipedia.

Corrections (3/22/2018, 11:05 a.m.): This article originally stated that more than 4,600 women’s-studies students are editing Wikipedia this month. That figure refers to the total number of students who have worked on the project since it began, in 2014. Allison Kimmich is executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, not director. The first name of the University of California faculty member mentioned in the article was omitted. Her full name is Juana María Rodríguez. The article has been corrected.