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All Slides for the SPLOTpoint presentation "Women in red editathon guide" https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/wir-editathon
Formatted to print with pagebreaks
begin slide 1
Why Women in Red?
Women in Red is a WikiProject (more details on those later) which has been running since 2015 and aims to turn Wikipedia “redlinks” blue. We need a community of editors and collaborators such as you to bring these women to the forefront.
It’s estimated that fewer than 20% of regular contributors to Wikipedia are women and, as of 2020, just over 18% of the biographies on English Wikipedia are about notable women. Highlighting these voices is hugely important not only within the University community but also to society as a whole. If Wikipedia aims to be the “sum of human knowledge” then why is it that the content on the site is not representative of the diversity of the population as a whole?
Anyone with a computer and access to the internet is able to edit Wikipedia. We have the power to tip the balance of this entrenched bias through the creation and control of information. We have the power to create role models for a future generation of female innovators by highlighting the fantastic achievements of women throughout history. We have the power to share knowledge and do good.
This site is a walkthrough guide to help train a community of potential editors like you to help redress the balance of biographies on Wikipedia. We will cover how to research, create, and publish articles and then, once you’ve cut your teeth on improving representation, talk about running your own Women in Red edit-a-thon.
If you’re new to Women in Red and want to take a look at the events the University of Edinburgh is running, take a look here.
If you’ve already signed up to an event, or want to learn to edit in your own time, click through to find out what you need to do ahead of editing.
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).
Click Create Account in the top right corner of the screen.
Type your chosen account name into Username.
Type your Password and enter it again in Confirm Password. Don’t use your online banking password!
Add your Email address if you want to be notified about pages you create.
Complete the Captcha Security check.
Click Create your account to finish.
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.
Wikipedia’s Visual Editor interface is simple and intuitive to use – it works a lot like a word processor such as MS Word or Pages. This site we’ve created to help get you started will guide you through using the Visual Editor. You should enable it in Preferences before going any further.
Click Preferences in the menu at the top right of the screen.
Select the Editing tab.
In the Editor section, uncheck Temporarily disable the visual editor while it is in beta if it is checked.
In Editing Mode, choose Show me both editor tabs.
Click Save in the bottom right corner of the screen.
You’re now ready to follow through the rest of this guide!
end slide 3
begin slide 4
Create your user page – say hello!
Say hello to a wonderful new world of editors!
Once your user account is all set up, you should create a user page which other people will use to find out more information about you.
We’ll also cover adding a wee template which lets other users know that you’re a new editor and just learning the ropes so they can help welcome you to the world of Wikipedia editing.
How-to:
Click on the red link to your username at the top of the page. You will see that this tells you that you do not have a user page yet.
Click on the top option from the dropdown list, which says Create [username] user page, to create your page.
Type a sentence introducing yourself to the Wikipedia community. You may find it useful to add a short sentence to explain that you are new to Wikipedia and still learning to edit. Think of it as some voluntary ‘L’ plates while you get to grips with editing.
Go to ‘Insert’ and select ‘Template’ from the dropdown list.
Search for “This is a new user” in the box.
Select the “This is a new user” link, and then click ‘Add template’.
Finally, click ‘Insert’ and you should see a banner appear which identifies you as a new user.
To identify you as a Women in Red activist and contributor, repeat steps 4-7 but add the template “User WikiProject Women in Red” and insert.
Click Publish Page in the top right of the screen.
A box will appear prompting you to provide an edit summary. These exist on all pages on Wikipedia to help other users identify which changes have been made, and to prevent page vandalism. Type a short summary, for example ‘created user page’
Click Publish Page
You will see that your the user name link at the top of the page has changed in colour from red to blue.
You’ve now got a Wikipedia user page!
You are now ready to begin editing Wikipedia and join a growing community of fellow contributors. Click through to the next slides to learn more about formatting pages for publication – you’ll be adding minorities to Wikipedia in no time!
end slide 4
begin slide 5
Essentials; Manual of Style and Reliable Sourcing
Before we get started creating articles, there are a few need-to-know Wikipedia essentials to go over. We need to understand what makes a good Wikipedia article, and how to check
Notability – the individuals you add to Wikipedia must be considered to be
Reliable sources – Wikipedia is a tertiary source of information
Be bold
If you’ve signed up to one of our Women in Red sessions then suggestions for pages to create/improve will be given to you during the event but you should be bold and edit any page on Wikipedia you wish to… as long as you are responsible and backing up any statements with a citation from high-quality reliable published source.
Part of the philosophy behind Women in Red is to combat systemic bias by having a diverse team of editors, so if you have any notable minority individuals
Every page is licensed as free content that anyone can use, edit and distribute. Therefore use only Creative Commons open-licensed images and write in your own words as close paraphrasing is still copyright violation.
Be respectful and civil when discussing an article on Wikipedia’s Talk pages.
There are no firm rules. Lots of norms, conventions and guidelines but exceptions to the rule can also be argued.
What is a reliable source?
Wikipedia is a tertiary resource based on reliable, published secondary sources with a reputation for fact-checking & accuracy. It is these sources backing up every statement that should be cited not Wikipedia itself. Hence:
Academic and peer-reviewed scholarly material is often used (barring the no original research distinction)
High quality mainstream publications inc. books from respected publishing houses, university level textbooks.
Internet blogs are not considered reliable as they tend to be more opinion-based and less fact-checked.
News sites tend to be thought of as reliable; broadsheet news sites rather than tabloid news sites (avoid).
Secondary sources tend to be used more than primary sources as they offer greater objectivity.
No original research– while knowledge is created everyday, until it is published by a reliable secondary source, it should not be on Wikipedia. We are after verifiability not truth. Therefore, however well-researched, someone’s personal interpretation is not to be included.
If no reliable sources can be found on a topic then Wikipedia should not have an article on it….yet.
Many people are not aware that Wikipedia has a strictConflict of Interest policy. To help protect the project’s integrity editors are asked to take the trust test: would others trust you to be impartial in your editing if they knew how close you were to the subject you were writing about? Therefore, you should avoid editing Wikipedia page where your impartiality could be called into question e.g. pages about yourself, your friends, close work colleagues, family members, employers etc. Paid editing is particularly frowned upon and institutions have been banned from editing their own Wikipedia pages until 2020 when it has been discovered their staff have edited the page without disclosing their conflict of interest (COI). If in doubt, always disclose on your userpage any potential COI and leave a message on a Talk page to discuss COI issues.
Transparency is key
Transparency is key on Wikipedia. Every edit is recorded on the View History tab of a page with a short edit summary describing recent changes. Every entry on the View History tab is a permanent link so every edit can be checked, challenged and corrected. If need be a page can reverted to its last good state. Bots do this automatically for predicable vandalism of pages. Ultimately, Wikipedia is still a human-curated encyclopedia so more eyes on a page tends to help improve the quality and coverage of that subject. After all, Wikipedia is only ever as good as the editors who engage with it. That’s why we need you.
Talk pages are important
Wikipedia is an academic encyclopaedia first and foremost… but there is an element of social media to it as every article has a Talk page behind it. This is where each article’s creation can be discussed with other Wikipedia editors. Writing an article accurately and neutrally often takes some negotiation to arrive at a common consensus after all. That’s why engaging in Talk page discussions is important and also why Wikipedia has, as one of its central tenets, that users should be respectful and civil to one another as some articles will need more debate than others.
Talk pages also detail which WikiProjects are ‘looking after’ each article. There are some 2000+ Wikiprojects on Wikipedia and these are behind-the-scenes places where editors with certain areas of interest/expertise come together to focus on improving Wikipedia’s coverage of a particular subject area e.g. WikiProject Military History, WikiProject Medicine, WikiProject Women In Red, WikiProject Novels etc etc.
Talk pages are also where you can ask for help and guidance; both on the article’s own Talk page and/or a WikiProject’s Talk page. There is also the Helpdesk and theTeahouse for new editors to ask questions.
If you’re attending one of our Women in Red events, we’ll cover the basics of editing during the session with about 60 minutes of training. We’ll then hopefully allow a couple of hours for you to research and compile an article on your chosen individual.We’ll specify exact timings on the day, but we usually aim to publish before the end of the working day.
Take a look at our List of Suggested Women and select an article to work on.
Go to the Event Dashboard and assign the article to you (it’s important we know who is working on these articles so two editors do not create an edit conflict when they go to the save the page at the same time).
If you’re having trouble assigning an individual, speak to one of our facilitators who will help you find someone to write about.
Create your sandbox
Now that we’ve covered setting up your User Page, I’m going to talk you through page formatting a little bit more but using your Sandbox. Your Sandbox is a kind of draft space where you can format articles before moving them into Wikipedia’s live space. You can play around here and format any pages you are writing before publishing them for the world to see!
Click on the red ‘Sandbox’ link at the top of the screen.
Click Create at the top of the page to use the Visual Editor.
Place your cursor below the grey box* and type ‘This is my new sandbox’ in the space indicated in the pic above. Once you have typed at least one character of text onto the sandbox you can save it.
Click the blue ‘Publish Page’ button in the top right.
Type a short but descriptive Edit Summary e.g. ‘created sandbox’.
Click ‘Save changes’. Your sandbox is now created!
When editing in your sandbox, remember to save regularly to prevent any progress being lost, just the same as you would in a standard word processor. You do this by following the same two step ‘Publish Page’ method as we have when creating pages. Don’t worry, it may look scary but hitting ‘Publish’ wont publish to Wikipedia’s live space, it’ll just save changes to the location you’re editing in.
*If what you’re seeing doesn’t look quite right, remember you can use the magic pen to switch to visual editor.
end slide 6
begin slide 7
Citations, Links & Images
Adding a citation
Citations are the most important part of any Wikipedia page. Every bit of information on Wikipedia should be backed up by a reliable, high-quality, published secondary source… anyone can edit but we can’t just say anything. We should aim to have a citation at the end of every sentence, or at least every paragraph. We can use multiple sources to back up one piece of information.
More details on adding references with Visual Editor can be found here.
In your sandbox, click Edit to access the Visual Editor interface.
Add your statement to the Wikipedia page.
Place your cursor at the end of the relevant statement (after the full stop or punctuation mark of the sentence you are writing) and click Cite on the editing toolbar at the top of the page.
Paste the url web address, DOI code, PMID or ISBN number into the Automatic citation box and click Generate. This will create the citation automatically.
Click Insert to place the citation into the article.
Click Publish changes to save the page with a short edit summary like added citation.
Click Publish changes to save your citation and auto-generate a reference at the bottom of the page.
More details on adding references with Visual Editor can be found here.
Adding links to and from other Wikipedia pages
Wikipedia is based on wiki links leading from one article to another. I’m sure we’ve all been up researching a topic and fallen down the rabbit hole of finding interesting articles relating to that topic. You might even have played the Wiki Game where you navigate between pages in the fewest number of clicks…
Well, links are another one of the most important aspects of Wikipedia. You should go through your article as you are editing and add links to any potential pages you think may need a link. If a concept or topic is mentioned more than once in an article then it should be only be linked the first time it is mentioned.
How-to:
Assuming you are already in the Visual Editor for your page:
Highlight the text you wish to wiki link.
Click the chain link dropdown menu on the editing toolbar at the top of the page. This will search Wikipedia pages for the text you have highlighted.
Select the correct Wikipedia page.
The text will now turn blue if a page exists with the title of the text you have highlighted or red if it can’t find a page.
Click Publish changes to save the page with a short edit summary like added link(s).
Click Publish changes again to save your edit.
Links are also one of the key ways readers will find your page. The problem comes when pages that should have a link… don’t. Links can be the difference between articles that are easy to find and those that aren’t. And therefore receive more pageviews as a result, particularly if the high traffic pages link to your page.
The Find Link tool(video demo) does a search for article titles/keywords throughout Wikipedia to highlight those articles that mention the search term and therefore ought to be linked to. You can then use the visual editor to add links to your page from relevant articles and generate interest.
Adding images
Click Edit to access the Visual Editor interface.
Place your cursor where on the page you wish your image to appear.
Click Insert at the top of Visual Editor and select Insert Media from the dropdown menu.
Type a keyword in the Insert Media search bar. This will look in the 46 million openly-licensed media files on Wikimedia Commons. Alternatively you can use the Upload tab to add your own openly-licensed image.
Click Use this image and type a caption.
Click Insert to add the image to the page.
Drag the bottom left corner of the image to resize it.
Click Publish changes to save your image with an edit summary of ‘added an image’. Click Publish changes again.
We often find when adding biographies about niche or obscure individuals that images will not already have been uploaded to Wikipedia’s sister project, Wikimedia Commons. If you want to source an open image for the page then try:
So you’ve had fun, you’ve done your bit in the name of information activism, but you want to do more. You want to go forth and spread your new-found knowledge to the world, in your communities and keep increasing the diversity of editors on Wikipedia.
Fab! So how would you go about running your own event to celebrate minority voices?
Editathons are typically a half-day event. Wikipedia editing training takes approximately 60-90 minutes. We have a lesson plan and video tutorials to help there.
Minimum requirements:
a subject or theme for your event (having some kind of USP will help focus your promotional efforts too)
a strong and stable internet connection and (if running an in-person event) some computers.
a handful of pages to create/edit.
a generous smattering of quality sources to back up your info.
a dash of would-be editors.
Recommended:
Book a room with WiFi & a projector if your event will take place in-person. A remote, digital event will require some kind of video conference hosting platform, such as Blackboard Collaborate, Microsoft Teams or Zoom. There are positives and pitfalls of each but widely choosing the one you feel is most accessible to your audience will see you right.
Start publicising the event about 4-6 weeks in advance to recruit interested volunteers to do the editing; you can also ask for page nominations in case people don’t have the time to commit to the event itself but are interested in your cause.
Refreshments if you’re hosting – Tea, coffee and snacks attract attendees and help people stay for longer!
A trainer or experienced editors to lend support. *This will really help you in an online event where editors might not all be working at the same pace! You can for a breakout room to help guide individuals through technical hitches whilst allowing the rest of your attendees to follow the training and give them more time to edit.
Provide a suggested hit list of articles and materials to support writing those articles (e.g. books from the library, links to obituaries, etc.). It’s up to you how prescriptive you want to be but having examples of reliable sources does help first-time editors get a feel for what should and shouldn’t be used to back up their writing.
Signup sheet – Here is an example of a registration form used by Wikimedia UK used to add people to the Wikimedia community email distribution lists: signup form
Q: How should an editathon be structured?
Introduction including a short/long guest talk from someone else about why we’re here, or a visit to somewhere interesting (ie historical information on your event theme or a specialist in the field)
Basic editing training, including any pertinent policies or guidelines.
Edit! (at least 90 mins for a short stub article, but ideally allow longer for people to really dig into information on the person they’re writing about)
Wrap up and (hopefully!) teach people to publish their page to the live article space (depending on their editing permissions) if ready, or draft space if not.
Follow up – update your event page, send sign in sheets to your region’s Wikimedia office (e.g. for the UK info@wikimedia.org.uk)
Q: How do I publicise an editathon?
Decide on a sign up method for the event e.g. Eventbrite/Attending. Dedicated free ticketing sites seem to allow a more reliable gauge on the number of participants than Facebook events where it is easy to put ‘interested’, but you may also reach a wider audience through such social media platforms.
Share the event page
Advertise to relevant (existing) volunteer or student groups
Decide if your event will be public or non-public
If you have a regional or national Wikimedia organisation, be sure to link in with them, e.g. add event page link to Wikimedia UK events page
