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Global 24-hour Wikipedia "Edit-a-thon" Kicks Off In New Zealand

Ada Lovelace Day 24-Hour Global Edit-a-thon

Aotearoa New Zealand kicks off 24-hour worldwide Wikipedia “Edit-a-thon” to showcase women in the sciences

On October 12th, volunteer Wikipedia editors in Aotearoa start an international 24-hour editing marathon to improve the coverage of women in Wikipedia. The event will begin at midday in Aotearoa with a 10 hour edit-a-thon co-jointly run with Australian wikipedians. As October 12th Australian and New Zealand pass the baton from time zone to time zone, finishing back in New Zealand 24 hours later.

The date chosen, October 12th, is Ada Lovelace Day, named after the 19th century British mathematician regarded as the world's first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

The event is organised by the group Women in Red, a volunteer organisation within Wikipedia whose aim is to reduce the “gender gap”: the disportionate number of biographies in the online encyclopedia devoted to men. It takes its name from “red links” in Wikipedia: ones for which there is no corresponding article yet. Women in Red was started six years ago in Mexico by two volunteers, British and American, and now has thousands of followers and hundreds of active editors but no budget, office, or hierarchy. When the group was formed, 85% of Wikipedia biographies were about men. Since then the community has created over 167,000 new articles about women, at a rate of about 70 a day. Participants work in parallel in over 30 languages.

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In Aotearoa there are several editors active in Women in Red, and between them they have run events to showcase women in the arts, history, science, and politics. This event is the first national Women in Red event in Aotearoa, and will take place simultaneously in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and even Hokitika. Participants will be working from “red lists” of dozens of notable women from Aotearoa in the sciences,mathematics and technology without Wikipedia articles.

The online edit-a-thon event has a series of workshops where experienced editors coach people to learn to edit Wikipedia themselves and contribute to reducing the gender gap.

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia began in 2001 and now has 6 million articles in English and over twenty million more in hundreds of other languages. It is now the eighth-most-visited website and one of the few that is run by a non-profit. The Wikimedia Foundation, based in San Francisco, keeps Wikipedia running but major decisions about its content and future direction are made by the global community. All the content is written and kept up to date by about 250,000 active volunteers around the world.

For more info see the NZ Wikipedia event page

The global event is based at AdaWiki24.org

Women in Red: WomeninRed.org

Wikimedia User Group of Aotearoa New Zealand

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