OccupediA – Women Contributing to Wikipedia (the first of many such events)

Last Thursday night about 8 women arrived at Noisebridge to learn how to contribute to Wikipedia. Several things led to this gathering:

An article in the New York Times back in October drew attention to the lack of women contributors to the Wikipedia knowledge base and that got me thinking.
Having organized other spontaneous “women get together and learn stuff” events I figured I could take the same approach to Wikipedia contributing, get some women together to create accounts, generate content, learn how to stop vandalism and see what would stick.
Recent participation in activism around the Occupy Wall Street movement also inspired me to try and reach out to communities I am in who are not as technical, to encourage people to come first with knowledge and interest in topics Wikipedia could benefit from and let the tech come second.
A month ago Elsa and I were talking casually about all the the above mentioned things and we decided to just go for it and pick a date, throw it up on the Noisebridge (local SF hackerspace) calendar, and see what we could make happen.

We took over a small makeshift classroom space at the back of Noisebridge. It had one lamp as the primary source of light because the fluorescent holders above were missing their tubes. A man was near the back working on a dress for fashion school, several other hackers were up front working on their various projects. Noisebridge was a wonderful place to have this event. It feels like anything is possible in a space like that.

I was happy with the turn out – we had a mix of artists, educators, and tech workers. Also as a bonus one of the attendees, my coworker Boriss, was a seasoned Wikipedia contributor who was able to really detail the ins and outs of the different levels of participation. I can’t stress enough how amazing it was to have her and her knowledge there because there are lots of misconceptions about Wikipedia (I definitely had some) and her first-hand knowledge was inspiring to me.

So the beginning of the meetup went well enough, and as you might expect. We introduced ourselves, talked about why we had come to the event and what we were hoping to get out of it. We started in on learning how to set up an account if one didn’t already exist and we looked at discussion/history/edit and other basic navigations of Wikipedia space. There were a lot of questions about what belongs in Wikipedia, neutral tone, citations. The conversations were lively and I found them quite enjoyable.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: Getting folks interested and excited about Wikipedia becomes REALLY HARD in practice. Unlike learning Python where the participants can hammer out some code on their own computers in minutes and feel accomplished, there is a lot more complexity to Wikipedia. There is a lot of confusion about their UI, their purpose, who can do what and when. Very quickly it seemed that the women who had come to the event feared adding anything new to the knowledge base and they were also incredibly intimidated by the UI of the site. It wasn’t even clear enough how one would create a new article when none existed.

From this event I learned a lot about organizing and about the intentions of future events like this and I did a little braindumping while we were meeting so I could remember to list them later in this very post.

Things that would help newcomers:

Having a “new to wikipedia” moniker next to their nickname for the first N activities on the site (we have this on our Mozilla bugzilla) so that hopefully older and wiser participants would be extra nice to them
Find a way to make some of the simpler tasks that help Wikipedia (typos, reverting vandalism, categorizing articles) into a game that a new arrival could play that would start easy and then move more toward the real-life workflow of working on Wikipedia – as a way to warm them to the UI
Encourage newcomer to write a straight-up article and have a place for these things to be dumped for inpection/linkage/categorization and otherwise Wikipedia-fying the knowledge dump. My partner is an English professor and can certainly write good content for Wikipedia but everything about the site is intimidating. There should be a page where she could copy/paste or upload a document of her article and then let people who know wiki syntax and the other requirements an article needs come along and finish it up
Make it way easier to find the “adopt a user” program that I hear exists but no one would know to find that from the Wikipedia home page

I will continue to organize these events, perhaps once a month. More reports as they happen.

Want more women in Open Source? Donate to Ada Initiative today!

Short version: If you love women, or even like them just a bit, go right now and donate to the Ada Initiative to show the women in your life that you value their contributions past, present, and future to the wonderful world of Open Source. I’m going to make a donation in my grandmother’s name this year and I know she’ll be happy to have supported such a valuable project.

Long Version

I love Open Source.

When it first came to my attention, in the first year of my degree in software development at Seneca College, I knew we’d be a good fit. There’s something about the spirit of Open Source that instantly clicked with my existing guerilla activist sensibilities. The way that you just take what you want and make it happen. That you create and give away. That you work with other passionate people to make cracks in the surfaces of monopolies that only want you to be able to do things through their (usually financially) gated communities. It reminded me of how I had approached being a filmmaker – taking $50 of Super 8 film and developing it myself in 16L bucket in a dark bathroom then submitting the results to a prestigious film festival and being accepted. Having my work shown alongside films with budgets bigger than the cost of a house was an amazing experience and taught me that not everything has to be polished to be valued.

Open Source is like that to me, the diamond in the rough.

While I was working on my degree I of course noticed (and was not surprised by) the lack of women in my classes. I was surprised when I started to get involved in Open Source to discover that there were less women in FOSS than in proprietary software companies. That seriously BLEW MY MIND. I mean, if Unlocking the Clubhouse is to believed (and it is very thorough research) then technical women want to do work that is meaningful and helps people. Why that sounds a lot like Open Source doesn’t it? So why aren’t there more women in Open Source? I’ll let you Google that question to your hearts content, there’s a lot written on the subject and so much more could be. The point though is that the Ada Initiative is a new project that is here to take on that very question through ACTION. They will DO things to get more women in Open Source. Women don’t have to be dragged into FOSS kicking and screaming. Trust me, after seeing the overflowing wait list for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing’s FOSS day, there are a ton of talented and smart women interested and able to do work in Open Source. We (all of us who have already drank the Kool-Aid) need to help them get integrated and feel comfortable staying in FOSS.

When I first met my future team at Mozilla in April of 2008 there was a woman on my team (!) and she self-identified herself to me as a feminist within the first 5 minutes we were together. As someone who was coming in as a student with zero experience in professional tech workplaces I was so thrilled to have an immediate feeling of relief, trusting that if she was respected there I would be too. She also introduced me to wonderful internet properties such as GeekFeminism and Sociological Images both of which helped me start connecting with other feminists in tech fields. Almost three years later I am starting to feel like I’ve been successful in building the community in FOSS around me that I want to be a part of. It’s a wonderful mix of the talented people I work with at Mozilla, the folks I’m working on planning the next Dare 2B Digital with, the programmers I organize PyStar workshops with, the Women Who Code, the Women 2.0, and of course – The Ada Initiative.

I’ll leave you with their own words about why you should go straight to the donation page:

We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished already.  Since our founding in
early 2011, we helped over 30 conferences and organizations adopt an
anti-harassment policy, organized the first AdaCamp unconference,
provided free consulting on high-profile sexist incidents, wrote and
taught two workshops on supporting women in open tech/culture, and ran
two surveys, among other things.

http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/

We need your help to achieve our upcoming goals.  The Ada Initiative
is funded entirely by donations.  Without your financial support, the
Ada Initiative will have to shut down in early 2012.

http://supportada.org/donate

Your donations will fund upcoming projects like: Ada’s Advice, a
comprehensive guide to resources for helping women in open
tech/culture, Ada’s Careers, a career development community, and First
Patch Week, where we help women create and submit their first open
source patch.  You can learn more about how the Ada Initiative is
organized and operated on our web site and blog:

http://adainitiative.org

Whether or not you can donate yourself, you can help us by spreading
the word about our fundraising drive.  Please tell your friends about
our important work.  Email, blog, add our donation button to your web
site, and tweet.  Here’s how:

http://adainitiative.org/support-us/spread-the-word/

You don’t have to stand on the sidelines any longer.  You can help
women in open technology and culture, starting today.

New to IRC? Never tried it?

Do you shy away from IRC because it seems daunting, complicated, or completely foreign to you? A pretty large chunk of the Mozilla online community lives and breathes in IRC so I encourage you to come give it a(nother) try. I recently updated https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC#Getting_Started to help get you started. Hit me up with any questions here or find me as lsblakk in IRC 🙂

I’ll re-visit the instructions soon to write about screen & irssi to keep a perpetual connection going in an attempt to make that option more accessible to folks who might feel it’s too technical.