The Ottawa Art Gallery hosted Ottawa’s first Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon on Tuesday, March 8. The event took place at two locations in the city, the Ottawa Art Gallery and the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG).
“This is the third year that Art + Feminism generally is doing it, but this is the first time it’s ever come to Ottawa,”event organizer Danuta Sierhus said. Sierhuis, a former Carleton art history student, said the event originated in New York at the Museum of Modern Art.
The purpose of the edit-a-thon is to update Wikipedia entries on subjects related to art and feminism, and address the gender imbalances within Wikipedia’s editing community.
“Roughly eight to 15 per cent of Wikipedia editors identify as female,” Sierhuis said. “The Art + Feminism movement is really trying to address that and also the content on Wikipedia itself.”
Sarah Eastman, also a Carleton graduate, said she came across Art + Feminism in the summer and was interested in their cause.
“I was really interested in their mission to increase representation of women artists online and also teach people how to use Wikipedia,” Eastman said.
Eastman said the focus of this event is to add to articles that already exist.
“In Wikipedia, making changes to existing articles is a good place to start working because creating a whole new article is a longer process,” Eastman said. “So we’ve been focusing on what Wikipedia calls ‘stubs,’ which are articles that only have a couple paragraphs about people.”
Sierhuis agrees many of the articles simply need more information.
“There are artists like Jocelyne Alloucherie who either have articles that need improvement—like they’re short little articles without much information—or there’s just absolutely no article, so it’s just that sort of thing that we’re trying to address,” Sierhuis said. “So from here in the CUAG context, we’re looking at artists who [have] some sort of connection to Ottawa or are in the gallery’s collection.”
Eastman said, “I’m working on an article right now about Francoise Sullivan. She’s a Canadian artist and she’s really well known for her performance art and choreographing dance, and she’s still living, she’s a prof at Concordia right now.”
Eastman said that with smaller articles, often all of the information is put into one category, such as “Biography.” Much of the work that she does is to separate articles into multiple categories and then expand them. Eastman also said that giving people a broader network of information is essential.
“With Art + Feminism, one of the things they focus on is not only adding more content about women artists but also adding more references to articles so that when people come across them they can explore and do their own research outside of Wikipedia,” Eastman said.
