GLAM/Newsletter/October 2017/Contents/Australia and New Zealand report
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Adding Australian women in research to Wikipedia
ResearcHERs edit-a-thon University of Melbourne
On Friday August 25th 2017, the University of Melbourne community came together as part of Research@library Week to improve the representation of women researchers on Wikipedia.
The day started with a well-researched keynote address from Provost Margaret Shiel, AO. The program was well-organised by a team made up of library staff with support from the National Foundation for Australian Women, the School of Historical Studies and the University's eScholarship Research Centre. Two streams of workshops catered for both new and experienced Wikipedians, and participants had access to cheat sheets, suggested subjects to edit and related reference sources, as well as all-day refreshments. The event booked out.
Outcomes
As well as the new editor signups, articles and categories created and content edited, the organising team are to be congratulated on the following achievements:
- motivating 40 people over two locations to spend their day learning about, and editing Wikipedia
- winning an interview spot about the edit-a-thon on Melbourne radio 3CR
- generating activity on the two event hashtags #UoMwiki and #HERsUoM
- establishing an ongoing University of Melbourne wiki community of practice which has met again since the edit-a-thon
Australian Women's Register on Wikidata
The University of Melbourne is a partner in the Australian Women's Archive Project established in 2000. Their Australian Women’s Register was one of the online sources used at the University of Melbourne edit-a-thon. This was an obvious dataset for Wikidata, and thanks to Toby Hudson the Australia Women's Register is now available for matching at https://tools.wmflabs.org/mix-n-match/#/catalog/534
