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Campbell Library

2023 Women's History Month Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

2023 Women's History Month Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

Hybrid kick-off: March 8, 9:30-11:30am

Organizers: Tim Dewysockie and Andrea Baer

Location: Campbell Library, Room 138 OR virtually via Zoom

Registration required

This coming March, Rowan University Libraries is partnering with Women’s and Gender Studies to host a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon for Women’s History Month. Our mission is to fill gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of Women's History.

We’ll have a 2-hour kick-off meeting in early March. In the first hour, the facilitators will introduce the basics of Wikipedia editing. The live presentation will be recorded and will followed by an hour of hands-on editing. During that time the facilitators will also be available to help. Participants can also continue editing online throughout the month of March, and the facilitators will continue be available throughout the month to help.

After learning the basics during the first hour of the live kick-off meeting, you will have the tools you need to help combat Wikipedia's gender imbalance. There are numerous ways to contribute to Wikipedia, including adding citations to a select article, making small or substantial edits to an article, or even creating a new article on an overlooked topic, issue, event, or person.

No experience is necessary. Stay as long as you like during the live session, or participate virtually during or after the live event!

Wikipedia can be edited in guest mode or using an account you create. If you plan on creating a Wikipedia account (which is required for advanced features like creating new Wikipedia pages), create it in advance. You may wish to use a pseudonym for your account, rather than your real name.

Kick-Off Event Slides + Recording

Creating a Wikipedia Account

Wikipedia recommends using a pseudonym when choosing a username for your account, rather than your real name, to protect your privacy or remain anonymous.

Advantages of having a Wikipedia account:

  • Join the Event Dashboard to have your contributions to the event recognized
  • Use advanced editing tools
  • Create new Wikipedia articles
  • Edit protected pages

For more information, see Wikipedia's page on advantages of creating an account.

Event Dashboard

If you would like to have your contributions to the event recognized, you can join the Event Dashboard using your Wikipedia account, which will show the impact of participant's work through the number of words added, references added, etc. to Wikipedia.

Follow the instructions on this page to join.

Possible Articles to Edit

The Event Dashboard lists articles related to women that can be edited as part of the event here. They are categorized by their "class", a measure of the quality of the article:

  • Start-class = A preliminary article with plenty of room for improvement
  • Stub-class = A short beginning of an article that needs more content
  • C-class = An intermediate article with room for improvement
  • Unrated = An article that hasn't yet been rated on Wikipedia's quality scale

The "How you can help" section of the Women's History WikiProject also provides articles you can edit as part of this event.

If you would like to create a new article and are looking for ideas, see this Wikiproject: Women in Red Index, which lists women and works created by women that may qualify as new Wikipedia articles.

Ways To Contribute To Wikipedia

  • Add citations for new information you add to articles

  • Fact check articles (add citations for uncited information)

  • Copy editing (fix spelling, grammatical errors, etc.)

  • Fix dead links

  • Add links to other Wikipedia articles

  • Add infobox

More Wikipedia Editing Resources