One of the professors from the Women and Gender Studies department reached out to me a month ago and asked if I’d be interested in doing a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon under the aegis of Art+Feminism. I’d never edited anything on Wikipedia, and had certainly never taught others how to do so, but I knew it would be a great way to promote women while also teaching students about technical skills and information literacy.
Once we agreed to focus on Texas women artists, I researched our own holdings of such artists and used those to determine which listings of those artists could use more information on Wikipedia. Those artists led to related artists and my reaching out to Hamon Arts Library, where I found more resources and more listings to update, as well as working with the archivist at Bywaters Special Collections to find additional resources.
Meanwhile, I was reading through the guidelines posted by Wikipedia on Edit-a-Thons, completing the training modules offered by Art+Feminism on editing pages, and building a research guide for the event that linked to necessary resources and the pages we suggested editing. I also reached out to our marketing department to promote the event, and the professor was promoting it to the women’s and gender studies and art history departments.
The event was small, with four students participating, but we did update six entries about Texas women artists, and the professor began writing an entry on one of the artist organizations that did not even have a page on Wikipedia. We felt it was a good start and could easily grow with more promotion and work in the future.