GLAM/Newsletter/September 2016/Contents/Mexico report
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Towards reducing gender gap in Wikipedia: "Editatona" Female writers
Like many technology projects, Wikipedia suffers a wide gender gap among its collaborators, as one in ten Wikipedians is female. But the problem does not stop there, because this gap is also reflected in Wikipedia's content: in Spanish, most of the biographies are of men. As a way to try to reduce this problem, Wikimedia Mexico created the "Editatona" initiative, editing marathons created by women for women with the express purpose of having more female editors and more published biographies about women.
In this edition of the Editatona, held last September 24 at the Biblioteca Vasconcelos (Vasconcelos Library) in Mexico City, we sought to create more articles about Mexican women writers and improve existing articles. The objective is not only existing content dedicated to the best-known women writers, in change create a greater number of biographies of women writers with extensive experience and awards of various kinds. The event was attended by experimented editors, organizations for reducing gender gap, new women editors, and women writers and women publishers.
The event began with a welcome to the participants and the presentation of each. Later, Carmen Alcázar (User:Wotancito), Secretary of Wikimedia Mexico, gave a brief workshop edition to new editors.
It went on to content editing, creating new articles on the central theme of this editatona.
Finally, as an unusual event in this initiative, a round table was held. This was chaired by the collective "Ropa sucia" ("Dirty clothes"). The topic of discussion was the experiences of harassment and sexism that women have suffered in the field of literature. Many of the comments were focused on the fact that sexism in the field of literature has to do with society and the system that predisposes both men and women adopt that behavior, so that many women feel guilty for triumph in a field dominated by men.
Also, a proposal for the creation of a network in which participants can help each other was discussed.
