We Got Your Wiki Back - Sikivu Hutchinson!

Regular readers of this blog might remember a few months ago I wrote a blog for She Thought explaining the We Got Your Wiki Back! project.  Along with the reasons why it is important, I followed up with my normal plea for editors.

Well guess what, not a single person signed on.

No one.

I wrote to several people that will be speaking at the Women in Secularism conference this May.  Debbie Goddard responded, but her Wikipedia page had already been targeted for deletion and I was unable to save it.  Jennifer McCreight's page has just had an over hall which happened because she asked for help. One of the other speakers was very rude with comments about Wikipedia editors.  All the others that I had contact info for, ignored me. Only Sikivu Hutchinson responded.  Sikivu supplied me with links and pictures and over the last 3 weeks the page has really developed.  Tonight I'm proud to be able to launch a total re-write of the page.  See the bottom of this page for Before/After lnks.

Thanks to everyone on the team for your feedback on the page.  Brian Engler quickly responded to my call for pictures, he even managed to edit her face out of a group shot for the main photo on her page.  Adam Isaak donated an image from the last Humanist conference (but alas, we didn't end up using it).  Wendy Hughes sent me links and told me that she has a famous father who is also on Wikipedia, thus I was able to add her name to his page also. 

I wanted to point out that some of these women speakers pages are being improved behind the scenes.  Lei Pinter is working on cleaning up Greta Christina and Ophelia Benson's pages with new images supplied by Brian, and some general housekeeping. 


We are making a difference, it is slow, but it is getting done.  

Sikivu Hutchinson was such an interesting topic, I had not known of her before the re-write.  She has done (and continues to do) some amazing things.  I listened to all of her lectures and read a lot about her.  Fascinating woman.  The billboard idea was a very clever idea, linking modern Black non-believers to Back non-believers from the past.

Speaking of the billboard project.  I would like to see more street-view images like the one on this page.  Its a formal way to link the two Wikipedia pages together.  I put the same billboard image up on Zora Neale Hurston's page with a link back to Sikivu's page.  Zora Hurston gets over 35K hits each month which means the Sikivu Hutchinson page has been exposed to an additional 35K readers.  There is nothing stopping other pages to be linked by their common billboard.  We just need others to become involved. 

Write to me at susangerbic@yahoo.com

Sikivu Hutchinson Before

Sikivu Hutchinson After

Smithsonian Article on Women Wikipedia Editors

Just a quick note to catch you up on how busy we have been.  Several really exciting pages are going up or just went up.  Rick Duffy launched the brand new page for SkeptiCamp.  Looks wonderful and seems to be stalled while awaiting consideration for Did You Know? recognition. 

Lei Pinter has been working on Reason Rally as well as several other projects including Greta Christina. 

Dustin Phillips is about done with a complete re-write for Alison Gopnik.  It is going to be an amazing makeover just wait and see. 

Photographer Brian Engler has been uploading pictures like a mad man. And we are adding them to pages as fast as he uploads them.  I have a couple more photographers who are in the process of uploading images from Reason Rally, TAM and the Florida Humanist Convention. 

I've got multiple pages going at once, creating a page for Actress and skeptic Rachel Bloom and total re-writes for Secular Humanist Tom Flynn, Magician Paul Zenon and  Professor Sikivu Hutchinson.

I have more waiting in the wings to start, so if you want to help or have something to add I'm all ears. susangerbic@yahoo.com

The main reason for this blog post was to introduce you to this terrific article my friend Jarret from  The Odds Must Be Crazy website sent me.  Great title, "How Many Women Does it Take to Change Wikipedia".  Regular readers know I don't focus on one area, my blogs are all over the place with topic choices.  This author is correct there is a small percentage of female Wikipedia editors.  I don't know this for sure but would suppose this to be true, that female scientists pages are in bad need of attention.  Science = Skepticism so we need to keep an eye on this area as well.  You all know I don't want to assign people to specific pages, I want people to edit pages they enjoy.  Editing is fun, and I want it to stay that way.  But check out Sarah Stierch's article and comment.  We bloggers thrive on getting comments.

 

Black Non-Believers on Wikipedia

While working on the Sikivu Hutchinson page I found this article "Blacks Say Atheists Were Unseen Civil Rights Activists".  Very interesting article.  I wondered what do their Wikipedia pages look like?  How is their non-belief presented to readers?  February was Black History Month, so school children all over America were accessing Wikipedia to learn more about people, events and places, what did they see?

All numbers are from Feb 2012

Richard Wright - 28,653 hits
Carter Woodson - 59,994 hits 
A. Phillip Randolph - 29,920 hits
Hubert Harrison - 2,610 hits
Lorraine Hansberry - 19,324 hits
W.E.B. Du Bois - 215,498 hits (in one day he received 48K hits alone)
James Baldwin - 40,160

The Black History Month page alone received 182,271 hits February 2012.

Check out these pages for yourself.  Do you think their non-belief is well represented?  Do you think these pages need improvement with content and are visually appealing?  The goal is to get students (and others) to stick around and read the whole page, click on the links and continue reading the references.  Can we say that this has been done in these cases?  If yes, then we need to keep an eye on these pages and work to improve the links that are fed from these pages.  If no, then please help by working on the page, or at least writing on the talk page with your observations so other editors can proceed.

As usual if you would like to help with this project but don't know where to start or how to edit, please contact me susangerbic@yahoo.com


 
 note: I know, I know.  Students aren't allowed to use Wikipedia as a source for schoolwork.  But guess what, they are.  They might not be able to cite a Wikipedia page, but they are going there to get an overview of that person and then following links to other Wikipedia pages and to the citations that are used.

Wikipedia and Skeptic Women

My first She Thought blog mentions Rebecca Watson, Debbie Goddard, Greta Christina, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Annie Gaylor, Sikivu Hutchinson, Susan Jacoby, Wafa Sultan and Ophelia Benson.