The Creators Project: For it’s third-annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, Art+Feminism supported 2,500 participants in 175 events across 6 continents for a record-breaking year of editing and creating pages for women in the arts. Organized in collaboration with the Professional Organization for Women in the Arts (POWarts) and the Museum of Modern Art, the Edit-a-thon was led by Siân Evans of Art Libraries Society of North America’s Women and Art Special Interest Group, Jacqueline Mabey of failed projects, and artist Michael Mandiberg (read: "Meet the Man Printing Wikipedia as a Book").
2 comments:
This is a really cool event, and I don’t know why I haven’t heard of it before. I think that this event can create more cultural change than a lot of other more viral and well known efforts to create a more gender equal society. A lot of people go on Wikipedia for information, not necessarily the information that they would put in an academic paper, but information that they use as trivia. I use Wikipedia a lot to learn about something that I’m immediately curious about, and when something isn’t on Wikipedia, it is fairly discouraging to look up the topic even further. If there are more articles about women (in any field, art included) then there will be more readily available information about the successes and accomplishments of women. That will inevitably do something to change the cultural perception of women’s ability to do things (again, in any field, art included). I think that our cultural attitude towards women is one of the biggest contributors to the lack of gender equality, and once that changes, it will be a (short) matter of time policies and legislation will follow.
I love when I see projects which obliterate anyone's ability to say that content by women, about women, isn't out there. This type of work takes a tired excuse and makes it impossible. It is so important that as Wikipedia grows as a platform for teaching and informational sharing that it reflect the whole of the world it seeks to teach. Leaving women out of that picture - whether by not providing content written by women or excluding content about them - tells an incomplete story. The fact that this project took not only female content but also the ideals and views of many intersectional feminisms and the work of women from all backgrounds into account is incredible, and proves just how hard those involved are working to be inclusive. Last semester, I took an Interp class in global gender studies, and one of the biggest topics we discussed is how looking at a unique female struggle from the outside as a "savior" actually hinders our ability to help all women. It is only from their position and through the lens of their perspective that a specific feminism's ideals can be protected and achieved. Acting like it is our job - and by "our' I mean us white Western world dwellers - to save them is often more harmful than helpful and can set back generations of work by women of backgrounds we cannot even begin to understand. This is why we need intersectional feminism. I think this project does well to realize that and makes an incredible leap forward on a unique scale in the matter. I wish I'd thought of it myself.
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