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Wikiesfera/Reports/2020

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Last editathon held in the Serrería Belga building where Medialab Prado was located (Madrid).

Wikiesfera Grupo de Usuarixs (ESP-WE) was officially recognized by the Affiliations Committee on May 9, 2018. However, it was founded in 2015 as a stable working group at the Medialab Prado cultural center in Madrid (Spain), where it has become one of its most representative projects. During 2020 and the first half of 2021, Wikiesfera has continued to settle and expand its permanent learning community. It is considered as a reference group in Spain, with weekly meetings and other events of greater affluence, which have had presence in local and national media. Both in regular activities and editatonas, new editors have been incorporated and dozens of new articles have been published in Wikipedia. Due to the measures of confinement and social distance, as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have continued having virtual meetings by videoconference and the participation of attendees has been higher than in previous years as we have been able to incorporate people who do not live in Madrid or who could not usually attend the face-to-face meetings. The following report shows the most relevant achievements of Wikiesfera during the last year, although a detailed list of activities can also be consulted in this link.

Workgroup

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Last editathon held in the Serrería Belga building where Medialab Prado was located (Madrid).

Since its start in 2015, Wikiesfera has had a permanent working space at the Medialab Prado culture center in Madrid (Spain). Since last year, and due to the pandemic, the group meetings have been held virtually, which has forced us to have an extraordinary expense in a professional videoconferencing application. Already in June, coinciding with the end of the course and that many participants were vaccinated, the last sessions we have met in person although we have maintained the virtual connection with those who could not come. Although this 2021 was the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia and the 6th anniversary of Wikiesfera, because of the healthy restrictions we were not able to celebrate the anniversaries as in other years, with a party and cake.

Furthermore, we have continued to count the progress made by the group since its foundation and up to now, of which we highlight some significant data:

  • training more than 500 women editors: including participants in editatonas and regular attendees to the working group.
  • more than 3,000 new articles have been created: mostly biographies of women, with no record of the deletion of any of them.
  • more than 40,000 edits: improvements and updates to articles.
  • more than 300 million views of the articles created and edited: high impact of the group's contributions.

Apart from those who already know the group, people interested in learning how to edit in Wikipedia are joining regularly. These meetings, about 50 since last year and with an average attendance of 14 people, do not have previously established objectives, but are designed for each attendee to work on those aspects they wish, from getting started in editing articles, resolving doubts, sharing progress and problems, etc. Those who have come to these weekly meetings have joined the mailing list, which already has 250 people, and in which doubts are solved, new articles are shared for others to verify and improve, and information on activities related to Wikiesfera is offered.

Wikiesfera nodes

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One of the goals of Wikiesfera from the beginning was to be a small and dynamic group that would facilitate the approach to Wikipedia to new editors. As the number of wikipedians and participants in the activities and the mailing list increased, smaller autonomous groups were encouraged to be created, so that they could get together by interests or locations and develop their own dynamics. However, it has not been until this year when four of these nodes have been formalized: two of them have been established in two different areas of Madrid, led by two experienced Wikiesfera editors who have created their own groups; another has emerged in the Canary Islands, where we have made very successful editatonas in these past months; and one more in Aragon, as a result of the activities of the Aspasia project that we will tell about later. In the coming months, we will publish on the Wikiesfera website contact information of these nodes to facilitate new memberships in a distributed way.

Activities

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Editatonas

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Since 2015, Wikiesfera has been fighting the gender gap in Wikipedia by holding editatonas on different topics to raise awareness about this problem and getting more female editors to join the project. The meetings, of which we have celebrated the 50th in 2021, have a playful nature and the participants are accompanied at all times to enjoy the experience, as it is not intended to be a training activity but an experiential one: publishing an article successfully as a stimulus to learn how to edit and publish more. In addition, teamwork is encouraged for data research and the collaborative development of the text. A high percentage of the people who attend the editatonas later join the working group to become wikipedians.

During 2020 and the first half of 2021, 14 editatonas of creation and translation were held on STEM women, female poets, sportswomen, female environmentalists, female archaeologists, female designers, LGBTI+ people y female architects, among others, as well as 4 editathons, one on Madrid's heritage, one on the circus world, one on technopolitics and another on projects and people linked to Medialab Prado, with an average attendance of 15 people (due to the limitations of the pandemic, both in virtual and face-to-face meetings) and the creation of nearly 200 articles.

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    Editatona of female poets at Medialab Prado
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    Editatona of female archaeologists at Medialab Prado
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    Editatona of female designers at Medialab Prado
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    Editathon on technopolitics (Barcelona)
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    Editatona of female environmentalists (Madrid)
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    II Editatona Gran Canaria
 
Lecture at the Casa de Colón (Gran Canaria)

Lectures

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During the last year, Patricia Horrillo has been invited as coordinator of Wikiesfera to give talks or participate in round tables related to the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia as well as to talk about how to combat the gender gap that still exists in the free encyclopedia. Some of the institutions that have contacted our group for these interventions have been the Chair of Digital Gender Gap of the University of Valencia within the II Conference for Digital Gender Equality, the Fundação Friedrich Ebert Portugal in the "Debate on digital inequalities", the Government of Aragon in the presentation of the Aspasia Project (Zaragoza), the Carlos III University of Madrid in the Computer Fair T3chFest, La Teixidora for the EditaDona Alcoi (Valencia), the Government of Castilla-La Mancha in the Toledo Public Library, the Casa de Colón in the I Seminar on Cyberfeminism (Gran Canaria) or Maldita Educación in Maldita Twichería EDUCA on Wikiesfera and the 20 years of Wikipedia.

Aspasia Project

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In September 2020, the Laboratorio de la Dirección General de Gobierno Abierto e Innovación Social (LAAAB) of the Government of Aragón (Spain) contacted Wikiesfera to coordinate a series of editatonas within the Aspasia Project. This initiative, which is developed in collaboration with the Aragonese Institute for Women (IAM), seeks to promote political participation with a gender perspective and the visibility of women in public affairs. The objective of Wikiesfera's involvement in this community is twofold: on the one hand, to make relevant women in different fields (preferably from Aragon) visible in Wikipedia and, on the other hand, to train new editors who could form their own working group.

The presentation of the project took place on November 18, 2020, with the participation of Mariví Broto, Councilor for Citizenship and Social Rights, María Goikoetxea, Director of the Aragonese Institute for Women, Beatriz Palacios-Llorente from LAAAB, the writer Irene Vallejo, with her presentation «Aspasia: the roots of the public voice of women» and Patricia Horrillo, coordinator of Wikiesfera, who explained in her speech the great gender gap that exists in Wikipedia.

Between December 2020 and July 2021, 4 editatonas of creation and 1 of translations have been developed on different topics, and with invited experts in different fields: on relevant Aragonese women (19-12-2020), STEM women (13-02-2021), sportswomen (10-04-2021), various areas (20-05-2021) and female architects (5-06-2021). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these activities have been developed virtually through the Zoom videoconferencing platform.

In total, the 91 female editors who have participated so far have created 59 new articles.

Publications

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Laboratorios ciudadanos. Una aproximación a Medialab Prado (2021)

Since its foundation, the training and educational work developed by Wikiesfera has been part of academic papers or institutional publications, partly due to its innovative dynamics of collaborative work or its achievement in activities to make women visible in Wikipedia. In this period, from mid-2020 to 2021, we have collected mentions in the research Preparing Biographies of STEM Women in the Wikipedia Format, a Teaching Experience published in the IEEE Revista Iberoamericana de Tecnologias del Aprendizaje (Volume: 15, Issue: 3, Aug. 2020); as well as in Los laboratorios ciudadanos en los sistemas de experimentación e innovación by Marcos García, chapter 10 of the publication Hacking Inside Black Book promoted by the Dirección General de Participación Ciudadana, Transparencia, Cooperación y Voluntariado, through the LAAAB (Laboratorio de Aragón Gobierno Abierto).

In addition, Wikiesfera appears as a featured project in the publication that Medialab Prado has published about its history Laboratorios ciudadanos. Una aproximación a Medialab Prado, in the chapter Wikiesfera: Un garaje abierto contra la brecha de género en Wikipedia (p. 36-41) written by Silvia Nanclares. Finally, Unión Profesional magazine offered us to publish our point of view as a project to make women visible in the free encyclopedia in the article entitled Wikipedia cumple veinte años Dos décadas de conocimiento libre, abierto y gratuito (p. 58-59).

Social Media

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Wikiesfera YouTube channel

During this past year, we have carried out communication campaigns on our social networks to promote the activities in which we participate and to get more people interested in volunteer editing work. We have also dedicated time and effort to share the articles created and published in our editatonas: we explain the importance of creating biographies of women referents in a multitude of disciplines with the aim of giving them visibility and reducing the gender gap inside and outside Wikipedia.

On July 31, 2021, Wikiesfera has an official Facebook page with 556 followers and a Twitter account followed by 662 people. In addition, in the YouTube channel, where we upload the talks given about Wikipedia in different forums as well as the lectures given by experts in our editatonas, we have 36 subscribers.

Media

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Many of the activities that have been organized from Wikiesfera have had a great repercussion in the media. Also, in this 2021 and with the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia both in English (in January) and in Spanish (in May), we received many requests to analyze the evolution of the free encyclopedia from its creation to the present. Below is a detailed list of the presence of the user group in the local and national media landscape:

Press

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Radio

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TV

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