On March 8, International Women’s Day, the Belkin Gallery hosted its seventh annual Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, an event dedicated to filling digital information gaps about underrepresented artists.
Art + Feminism Wikipedia editing events have been taking place around the globe since 2014, but the Belkin’s branch began in 2017 by visual arts professor Christine D’Onofrio.
Each year, the Belkin makes the Edit-a-thon accessible to new participants by curating a list of notable artists. This year, they placed particular emphasis on highlighting Vancouver-based Iranian women artists.
Among many other artists featured in the Belkin’s selection were Parastoo Anoushahpour, Aileen Bahmanipour and Ghalazeh Avarzamani, whose Wikipedia pages were created from scratch by Edit-a-thon participants. Several other new articles are still currently in the works, but these three were launched just after this year’s event.
Facilitators like Caitlin Lindsay, the art librarian at UBC’s Music, Art and Architecture Library, found resources about the artists for participants to reference while updating existing articles, or creating entirely new ones.
“[Wikipedia] is a resource that a lot of people use every single day,” said Lindsay, “and I think having more people involved in the creation and editing process helps demystify that.”
She pointed out that there is a “well-known and well-documented gender gap in Wikipedia articles,” supported by a 2011 Wikimedia survey which found that less than 10 per cent of Wikipedia contributors identify as female. One of her concerns with this statistic is that it causes potentially harmful biases in what users often perceive as an objective and factual resource.
“It’s a place where we get a lot of information that can seem neutral, but of course there’s no neutrality there. It’s individuals putting information in, and I think the more individuals we have taking a look at that, and thinking about that information, the better the resources can be.”
For Bahar Mohazabina, who works in public programming at the Belkin and is Iranian herself, putting this initiative together held personal significance.
“With what’s going on in Iran, highlighting the voices of Iranian women is key,” she explained, noting that even though she sees herself as having a “minuscule role” in the movement, she tries to open as much space as she can to underrepresented groups in her projects.
“You’re making space, because people can’t write articles about themselves. It’s on us to put these people out there.”
Mohazabina expressed her hope that all those involved leave the event feeling empowered to continue making these changes — to continue shaping the content that millions of people engage with on Wikipedia, which she described as the “most powerful, most accessible source of information.”