Women in Red editathons: What have you gotten yourself into?

As part of our Women in Red efforts, The University of Edinburgh runs regular Editathons in which we work together to add biographies of women to Wikipedia.

What is an Editathon I hear you ask? An Editathon can be anything you want it to be!

In short, an Editathon is an organized event where people come together at a scheduled time to create or edit Wikipedia entries on a specific topic. Sometimes we might work to improve existing articles or make minor edits. These events are facilitated by Wikimedia nerds or ‘Wikimedians’.

*At the University of Edinburgh we run both in-person training, online webinars, and provide support for editors wishing to participate in their own time. For Women in Red, we usually aim to create new entries for women and non-binary individuals around a chosen specialist topic from scratch, to give new editor a taste for bringing voices to marginalised individuals.

Things to do ahead of a Women in Red event:

  • Create a Wikipedia account
    If you do not have a Wikipedia account already, you should ideally create a Wikipedia account at least 4 days before an editathon event. New users cannot publish a new article into Wikipedia’s live space until their account has been registered for 4 days and they have accrued over 10 edits (the number of your edits can be seen in the Preferences menu).

    1. Go to English Wikipedia
    2. Click Create Account in the top right corner of the screen.
    3. Type your chosen account name into Username.
    4. Type your Password and enter it again in Confirm Password. Don’t use your online banking password!
    5. Add your Email address if you want to be notified about pages you create.
    6. Complete the Captcha Security check.
    7. Click Create your account to finish.
    8. You will return to the Wikipedia homepage, logged in as your new user account.Anyone can create a user account on Wikipedia. You should choose your username carefully as this is the name by which you will be known within Wikipedia and that will appear on all the edits that you make.
  • If you have signed up to an event, we should have sent you a link to a dashboard where we can help keep track your edits and ensure your articles are published. It helps us help you!

Recommended

  • Do some advanced research on women or minority individuals that might interest you. During the session we will have limited time to create pages and (hopefully!) get them published. If you want to prepare a topic in advance to save some time, please do!

We will provide a suggested list of women for the event but we don’t want to be too prescriptive – if you have an individual you think deserves recognition and meets Wikipedia’s notability criteria (more details on that can be found on our Wikipedia Basics page) then please feel free to work on that during the session! To get ideas of what to prepare, look in Wikipedia for a subject on which you have some interest or expertise, and find gaps that you could help fill.

Further (optional) prep work

  1. Video tutorial How to edit Wikipedia (40 minutes)