Wikipedia Edit-a-thon for Underrepresented Philosophers & Philosophy, in Honor of Kevin Gorman (Oct 8th)

On October 8th 2016, from 1:30PM PST onward, in the San Diego Central Public Library, Wikipedia will host an edit-a-thon in honor of Kevin Gorman, whose passionate work on behalf of women in philosophy we highlighted in an earlier post (see also here).  The editathon will be part of this year’s WikiConference North America.  I will be coordinating the editathon with seasoned editor, Julie Farman.

This is a call for crowd-sourcing in advance of the editathon.  What the Wikipedians most need from us: guidance about which pages are still missing, and content and references to fill those missing pages.  Kevin began compiling a list of missing notable women philosophers, and a current list-in-progress is here.  This is part of the “Women in Red” project (so-called because links to nowhere in Wikipedia are in red font.  You can also see a list of the many pages on women philosophers that Kevin had already created toward the bottom of this link.)

For starters, you can post suggestions for pages to add on Wikipedia, about underrepresented philosophers and philosophy in the comments below.  Also please feel free to email me (alexmadva@gmail.com) with comments, questions, suggestions, etc.  We will also eventually need help with content and references.  In particular, to pass Wikipedia’s “notability” guidelines, we will need reliable, verifiable references to back up what we post.

The gaps on Wikipedia remain vast, and they will not be hard to find, but here are my preliminary thoughts about concrete strategies to identify gaps:

1. Compile a list of existing or planned pages on, e.g., the SEP and the IEP, related to, e.g., feminist philosophy, and then check to see if corresponding pages exist on Wikipedia.
2. For every page that is already up on notable woman philosophers, see if the Wikipedia page on the subject she works on has a link to her and/or reference to her work.  There’s surely a lot of room for better cross-referencing within Wikipedia.  (The established Wikipedia editors will be especially well-poised to contribute here.)
3. Check the existing pages on underrepresented topics and people to see if they are accurate, substantive, etc.
4. More generally, people should just look up the topics they themselves work on (or are currently interested in or are simply curious to learn more about!) and see what’s missing, where there’s room for improvement, etc.

For those who can attend the editathon in person, you can join us for lunch at 12PM PST if you register for $10 that day, or you can come at 1:30pm with free registration.