The Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery has hosted Wikipedia edit-a-thons — events where participants contribute edits and writing to expand Wikipedia’s coverage — for nearly a decade. Each event works toward promoting the visibility of female artists on Wikipedia, where less than 20 per cent of biographies are about women. This year’s edit-a-thon took place at the gallery on March 5.
The Belkin’s edit-a-thon events are part of a worldwide initiative called Art+Feminism, which was founded in New York in 2014. One of the four founders, Jacqueline Mabey, is a UBC alum and former Public Programs & Exhibitions Assistant at the Belkin.
Naomi Sawada, Manager of Public Programs at the Belkin, said the Art+Feminism project came about when the four founders — Siân Evans, Michael Mandiberg, Laurel Ptak and Mabey — noticed a dearth of coverage on Wikipedia when it came to women. With the Art+Feminism project, their goal was to “create articles about dismissed, underacknowledged artists who are women. Since then, the movement … has expanded — it's not just about women,” but now includes other marginalized gender and racial groups, said Sawada.
Wikipedia has long been the first place many look to answer a question, the beginning of every research project, where students go when a lecturer is not making any sense. Now for a lot of people, that place has shifted to generative AI models. Though Wikipedia is much more verifiable than ChatGPT, it, like every human project, is subject to bias.
91 per cent of Wikipedia editors are male, a staggering statistic that makes it no surprise that numerous global initiatives have sprung up to increase the representation of women and other minority groups among editors of the digital encyclopedia. This is why a small group of participants gathers at the gallery every year, huddling around tables with their laptops open to dedicate the day to writing. Many more join in online and contribute edits remotely.
Like the founders of Art+Feminism, Sawada sees a lot of exclusion on platforms like Wikipedia, either as a result of unconscious bias or active malice. She has been working to change this since the first Wikipedia edit-a-thon held at the Belkin in 2017.
At the Belkin, the focus is on female artists that have been featured in the gallery itself, many of whom might not have Wikipedia pages if not for edit-a-thon participants. The Belkin keeps a list of these affiliated artists that they recommend participants edit or create biographies for. That isn’t to say that the organisers of the event strive to limit the artists that can be written about — “if somebody wants to write about another artist that isn’t on our list, they just have to let us know,” said Sawada.
She hopes that participants will continue to edit Wikipedia with the skills that the edit-a-thon teaches them long after the event is over. Yerang Park, Public Programs and Exhibitions Assistant at the Belkin, described how, in the editing workshop that the Belkin held a month before the edit-a-thon, participants learned what is considered a reliable source of information. These skills, she said, are “not only useful for the Wikipedia editing process, but it is a great opportunity for students to learn how to write an article and how to cite valid resources.”
Over time, the edit-a-thon has changed in minor ways, moving partly online so that participants don’t have to be present at the gallery, but can instead work on articles “slowly or intermittently” throughout March and April. Since 2017, 260 editors have written 118 new articles, made 428 edits to existing articles, added 238.3 thousand words and generated 9.02 million views. This year, some of the artist pages updated include Vuntut Gwitchin interdisciplinary artist Jeneen Frei Njootli, Canadian-American photographer and painter Judith Lodge and Inuk artist and filmmaker asinnajaq. Njootli and asinnajaq’s work in particular is on display as a part of the Belkin’s current exhibition, The Structure of Smoke.
Sawada said that the Belkin has been working “slow and steady” year after year to raise awareness and representation and combat the diminishment of women artists online. Should readers want to help the gallery in that goal, the Art+Feminism edit-a-thon is ongoing throughout March and April — you can find the Belkin’s list of suggested subjects for edits here.
