There’s an old proverb: Action is the proper fruit of knowledge – which is why 1X57 is offering a free workshop (drawing upon our days of running training for the Intellipedia Sabbatical) in DC next week for women and girls to learn how to edit and contribute to Wikipedia.
Less than 13% of the Wikipedia editors are female. Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Executive Director, shared Nine Reasons Why Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words).
The reasons listed are not insurmountable. In fact, individually they’re all fairly easy to address. Much of the solution lies in knowledge and awareness. But a solution is needed because a user-contributed encyclopedia primarily built by the contributions of twenty-something, single, white males inherently leaves gaping holes in shared knowledge. Or even worse, inherent biases.
Teaming up with DC Web Women‘s Girls Rock On the Web, JESS3 (who will be hosting the event at their office in DC) and Andrea Baker and Kirby Plessas who will be our Guest Gurus, we have a sold-out event.
The invitation with full details is here: http://growwiki.eventbrite.com/
We also created a page for the workshop in Wikipedia itself and added the event to the scheduled future Wikipedia:Meetups list.
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