THIS WEEKEND: An Epic Feminist Edit-a-Thon Takes Aim at Wikipedia’s Gender Gap“UPDATE: T

THIS WEEKEND: An Epic Feminist Edit-a-Thon Takes Aim at Wikipedia’s Gender Gap“UPDATE: The 2015 Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thon is coming up the weekend of March 7. Check out this list of editing events all over the country to see if there’s one near you.It’s well known that female artists are underrepresented in art museums, but what about in our more modern and malleable institutions?  Next week, groups of artists and tech-savvy folks around the country are taking aim at gender imbalance in representation of female artists on Wikipedia. The "Art + Feminism Edit-a-Thon” being held in New York on February 1st has inspired simultaneous editing marathons in 17 other cities, all focused on adding more female artists to the public encyclopedia and fleshing out the meager entries of existing women artists.“How the site is written has a political impact, I think,” says multimedia artist and digital designer Krystal South, who is helping run an edit-a-thon on February 1st in Portland, Oregon.  "Doing searches for contemporary female artists on Wikipedia, you find there are giant gaps.“ While there are hundreds of female artists with entries in the encyclopedia, there should be many more. As a recent New York Times story on Wikipedia’s gender gap succinctly pointed out, "Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in The Simpsons?” Since over half of internet users say they have used Wikipedia to find information, the absence of women artists from the site is the equivalent of leaving them out of the history books. Luckily, unlike a history book, Wikipedia is easy to change. The edit-a-thon has posted a list of female artists that it hopes to add to Wikipedia by the end of the big day. But Krystal South is making her own list of favorite artists who are poorly represented on the site.  At the top of her to-do list is improving the entry on video artist Joan Jonas. When you Google Joan Jonas’s name, her Wikipedia entry is the first result to pop up—even above her biography at the Museum of Modern Art. But unlike the museum’s biography, Jonas’s Wiki entry has zero photos of her work.“It’s not like my life passion to make Wikipedia feminist, but it’s been really surprising, there’s this whole underground world that I wasn’t aware of of people who are dedicated to editing Wikipedia,” says South. “The beauty of Wikipedia is it’s a public institution, people have the ability to go change it.Read the full piece herePhoto: A photo from multidisciplinary artist Krystal South’s internet-exploration project Identify Yourself. -- source link

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