Learning patterns/Ensuring your wiki project is inclusive

A learning pattern fororganizational

Learning Pattern Library

Ensuring your wiki project is inclusive

problemIssues of race, gender, and sexuality representation among Wikipedia editors

solutionPartner with community leaders and organizers to review your materials and practices, incorporate their suggestions into your work.

creator• Siankevans

created on15:19, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

status:DRAFT

What problem does this solve?

Making Wikipedia more inclusive isn't just a question of updating content, it's also a question of making the community a space that is welcoming to everyone. This means making sure all of your outreach is sensitive to gendered pronouns, it means making sure the examples you use in tutorials are diverse, it means making sure you reach out to partner organizations within and outside the Wikipedia community to ensure you are building a truly intersectional editing practice.

What is the solution?

1. Listen. Reach out to organizations who work on social justice issues and ask for their feedback on your content. Work with them to partner and build your editing community to include non-white cis hetero men.

2. Incorporate their feedback.

Examples:

a.) If you're running an edit--a-thon, add groups as partner organizations and ask them to do outreach with you. For example, AfroCROWD held an edit-a-thon within the Art+Feminism edit-a-thon for people who wanted to focus on editing specifically around the African diaspora.

b.) Review your training materials: in using examples, are you editing articles on women, people of color, queer people, trans people? Make sure you're inclusive in your training materials.

c.) Review your pronouns. Make sure you're not implying a gender binary.

d.) Be specific in your mission. If you have multiple people participating in your project, write a mission statement that makes clear your expectations for inclusivity in your code of conduct.

Things to consider

• Make sure you work with experienced community organizers.
• Make sure you are inclusive in your selection of collaborators.
• Have clear goals and guidelines for your collaborators to review. Specific tasks will yield specific results.
  • If you plan to have a report produced, make sure to give your collaborators a template so they aren't working from scratch.
• But also give them a place to respond to your work freely.
• Have a plan for how to implement their strategies in your own work, where applicable or possible.
• See our Diversity Audit for an example of how feedback can be gathered [See below under External Links.]

When to use

This pattern could be applied to any project that engages with an AFK or online community. Although we specifically created a document that speaks to organizing edit-a-thons, many of the principles outlined in the document could be used for other projects that engage with the Wikipedia community or encourage Wikipedia editing.

See also

External links

• See the Diversity Review completed as part of the Art+Feminism project.