Submissions/WOW and Wikipedia: With Women-Only Workshops Against the Gender Gap

After careful consideration, the Programme Committee has decided not to accept the below submission at this time. Thank you to the author(s) for participating in the Wikimania 2015 programme submission, we hope to still see you at Wikimania this July.

Submission no.: 2021

Title of the submission

WOW and Wikipedia: With Women-Only Workshops Against the Gender Gap

Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)

Presentation

Author of the submission

Sanja Pavlovic

E-mail address

sanjoo911[@]gmail.com

Username

Trans Goat

Country of origin

Serbia

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)

Wikimedia Serbia

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

It is well known that the number of women editors on Wikipedia is comparatively very low and that the global wiki community is investing a lot of efforts to remedy this gender gap. Although those efforts are making difference, the problem itself is so huge that it will stay with us in the long run, and requires various approaches depending on various factors. In this presentation, I would like to open up the question of women-only workshops as the bottom up means to tackle gender gap on Wikipedia.

Being engaged with the FemWiki project in Serbia, I have faced a lot of difficulties and misunderstandings when it comes to women-only events regarding the legal status of those events, e. g. do they discriminate men, aren’t they too radical for organisation such as Wikimedia, is the ‘isolation’ of women a good thing for them or it is self-victimizing practice that keep women even further away. In the presentation, I am going to engage with all those questions and to point out why these kind of workshops could be of crucial importance when it comes to empowering women to participate on Wikipedia.

Then I will go on to present the experiences of women themselves when it comes to women-only events. By organizing women only workshops in Serbia with the idea not only to increase the number of articles about women and women related subjects, but also to create a space for discussion about possible explanation of the existing gender gap, I have received the feedback from the participants. As an extension of those informal feedbacks, I am conducting a survey designed both for women who have had the opportunity to attend WOW and those who have not, and both locally and internationally (the survey will also be conducted during the Wiki Women Camp in Prishtina, which I am organizing together with women Wikipedians from Kosovo and Albania on April this year). The survey is made to collect qualitative statistics about the experiences and thoughts of women about WOW - do they find it motivating and useful, have those events met the expectations they had before attending them, etc.

After presenting data and findings, I would love to open the floor for questions and suggestions on the subject.

Track

WikiCulture & Community

Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)

30 minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

Depends on the scholarship.

Slides or further information (optional)

Special requests

Interested attendees

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Wotancito (talk) 08:06, 1 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
--Atropine (talk) 23:21, 7 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Interested both in general and from an LGBT+ point of view. CT Cooper · talk 00:04, 11 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
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