Help shine a light on women in the arts

If the go-to source for quick online knowledge is not inclusive, society risks erasure of figures from underrepresented groups.

This is the reality that the Art + Feminism project seeks to change. Every March since 2014, the movement has gathered in around 500 events in the world, volunteers to create and expand thousands of Wikipedia pages on cis and transgender women, feminism and the arts.

This Saturday, from 1–7 p.m., GitHub instructional designer Vanessa Gennarelli and former Bitch Media editor Sarah Mirk are organizing one such event, where they’re hoping to open the door for a broader group of people to pitch in on the global repository of facts and figures.

https://twitter.com/mozzadrella/status/968495616522366976

“Wikipedia has great potential because it’s an open source platform that we can use to correct the ways we’ve done things through history,” said Mirk. “It’s a much more grassroots way to enter information.”

Mirk, also a cartoonist at The Nib, said there are hurdles preventing the site from reaching its full potential. “A lot of people don’t feel like they have what they need to make changes,” she said.

Gennarelli’s interests will focus more on expanding the pages of women in technology. But her bottom-line goal is opening the door for others to join the edit process.

“Fewer than 10 percent of editors are women,” the designer said. “We’re changing the equation of who gets to make the sum total of human knowledge.”