How much do you know about the work of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe? She’s an author and photographer, known best for documenting womanhood and the African-American experience through her art.
How about Anita Steckel? The New York activist and painter rattled the arts scene with a series of provocative artworks depicting sexual imagery.
And there’s Ambreen Butt, a Pakistani American painter whose self-portraits portrayed feminist and political ideas through traditional Persian art.
Each of these artists represent dozens of women missing on Wikipedia, or whose online profiles were left unfinished. On Saturday, the Betty Boyd Dettre Library and Research Center inside the District’s National Museum of Women in the Arts will host its sixth annual edit-a-thon to help fix that problem.
“People would start these pages, only to be told the women they selected to highlight weren’t worthy,” said Lynora Williams, the library’s director, who co-organized the edit-a-thon.
First-time and experienced editors will work to improve the Wikipedia representation of notable women and global figures who have used their art as a tool for social change. Participants need only a laptop, motivation to combat gender bias and a belief in equal access to quality information.
The event, in honor of Women’s History Month, kicks off at 10 a.m. with a training and skill-building workshop led by Ariel Cetrone of Wikimedia District of Columbia. Williams said that’s when editors will sift through a comprehensive guide and learn the basics of improving the articles. They’ll also focus on accuracy so that the newly created pages aren’t later removed by Wikipedia staff. She said participants will then work through a list of nearly 50 underrepresented women and can continue editing after the edit-a-thon is over.
“I think women have been victims of some thinking in the culture about what makes great art, and that’s defined in such a way that it can be very exclusionary to women artists,” said Williams. “We’ve seen a lot of change over the last five to 10 years but given the scale of change that’s needed — we have a long way to go.”
Williams said the edit-a-thon also continues the mission of a social media campaign the museum started three years ago, dubbed #5WomenArtists. The premise, she said, was based on whether people could name at least five women artists.
“Our research showed that lots and lots of people had trouble even getting to five women artists,” Williams said. “And that’s no good.”
The edit-a-thon is part of a global initiative to help improve Wikipedia’s gender imbalance. In 2018, more than 4,000 participants worldwide created or improved 22,000 Wikipedia pages.
And, Williams said, the editing sessions will continue because the gender gap was extremely wide to begin with; research reveals that Wikipedia editorship remains 90 percent male.
This story first appeared on WAMU.
