Nearly 90 percent of the site’s volunteer editors are male, and editors also tend to be mostly white and college educated. As a result, users are likely to find more information about men and male-related topics than they are about women and minority topics.
As part of her introductory to photojournalism course, the College of Media’s Ogden Newspapers Visiting Professor in Media Innovation Nancy Andrews challenged her students to select a notable female or minority photographer to research and either create a Wikipedia page or improve on an existing one. The group discussed the site’s content gaps and related gender and discrimination issues before starting their work.
“It is important that students actively look for diversity in our work,” said Andrews. “It’s good journalism to look for many different perspectives, and we could also do a public service by publishing these reports in a public manner and thus addressing specific needs of Wikipedia.”
In this first classroom effort, students created or improved more than a dozen Wikipedia pages, adding pages for Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers such as Barbara Davidson and Preston Gannaway. The work includes the addition of nearly 32,000 characters to the site and has generated more than 17,000 page views according to the WikiEdu class dashboard.
Andrews says the project was more complex than she originally anticipated.
“First, we found that that the absence of these women and people of color on Wikipedia was in part a reflection of the paucity of credible, non-autobiographical material on these same people on the Internet in general. Second, the exacting nature of Wiki code and procedures made it much harder than your average report.”
In the end, though, the students were proud of their work and can point to their reports published on a website referenced by some 450-million Internet users per month.
“Once you get a handle on the coding it’s easy,” said journalism junior Alec Gearty who improved the page of former White House Photo Director Eric Draper.
Journalism junior Jake McGowan, who completed the Davidson page, described the project as “cool,” noting that he “showed it to [his] parents.” Other students in the class echoed his sentiments.
Design studies junior Cheyenne Albright says the work is “validating.”
“For it to go live, it wasn’t a stub (a page with a need of more work), so something must have been right.”
The project stemmed from a spring 2015 panel event co-sponsored by the College of Media and WVU Libraries. “Where Are All the Women? Wikipedia’s Gender Gap” brought to campus Wikipedia experts to address the lack of female editors at Wikipedia, the barriers to entry for women and how executives associated with Wikipedia are working to close the gender gap. It also led to WVU’s first Wikipedian in Residence.
Kelly Doyle, WVU’s Wikipedian in Residence for Gender Equity, joined the Libraries team this fall. Funded by a partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation and the WVU Libraries, Doyle’s position focuses on the creation and improvement of Wikipedia articles related to that institution’s mission. Andrews enlisted her help this fall to train students to write and edit for the online encyclopedia. The class was part of the Wiki Education Foundation program.
In spring 2016, College of Media students will continue efforts to address the gender and minority gaps on Wikipedia in Teaching Assistant Professor Mary Kay McFarland’s photojournalism class.
Read the official release on WVU Today.