Monthly Archives: February 2011

Women’s History Carnival 2011

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via History Carnival.

It’s that time of year, the one that makes those of us in the field of women’s history slightly batty super busy getting everything ready for our women’s history month events, with the help of the National Women’s History Project (image above).  If that weren’t enough, some of us in the women’s history blog/twittersphere are so masochistic enthusiastic that we’re participating in a Women’s History Carnival too.  Here’s more information from the History Carnival site:

In honor of International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month the History Carnival is inaugurating a special Women’s History Carnival for March 2011, for all blogs and blogging about the history of women, gender and feminism. We don’t know exactly what’s going to happen yet, but hopefully it’ll be a bit different from the usual History Carnivals:

There should be at least one Carnival post, but we’d like to do much more than that! We’ll publicise any great blogging or themed events we come across (or you tell us about) and generally do our best to encourage discussion and bang the drum for women’s history.

There’ll be further updates on Twitter throughout the month at @historycarnival and on this website. If you’d like to get involved, if you’re doing something for Women’s History Month that you’d like to publicise, or you have ideas for different events, you can leave a comment below, use the contact form, or just send a tweet @historycarnival.

Plus, you can follow the RSS feed for WHC announcements

The Carnival

Depending on nominations, it’s likely that there will be a Carnival posting (venue tbc) shortly after International Women’s Day, with a follow-up towards the end of March to round up the month’s activities. You can nominate blog posts for the Carnival using this special nominations form. (Don’t use the normal HC nomination form.) Although recent material may be given priority, anything written since March 2010 will be considered!

Blog conversations

Join in blogging for Women’s History Month! A few people we hope to hear from are listed below (more to follow)…

Jen Newby, Writing Women’s History (twitter)
Judith Weingarten, Zenobia: Empress of the East (twitter)
Penny Richards (twitter)
Knitting Clio (twitter)
Katrina Gulliver, Notes from the Field (twitter)
Another Damned Medievalist, Blogenspiel
Sharon Howard (twitter)

Other places

Twitter
Follow @historycarnival for news: hashtags #whc11 or #twitterstoriennes

Women’s History and Wikipedia Part II: Wikiproject Women’s History

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Ask and ye shall receive — Cliotropic has just set up a formal  Wikiproject: Women’s History.  This is also accessible by the shortcut WP:WMNHIST.

Cliotropic says that anyone can participate, but would “particularly love to see more professional scholars get involved. I know that there’s significant opposition to Wikipedia in some academic quarters, but I think that the information there isn’t going to get better unless people who actually know this stuff start pitching in. I’d really like WikiProject Women’s History to deploy a good quality scalethat helps our students evaluate whether the material in any given entry is trustworthy for their own research. And, as I’ve already said, I think that competent undergrads can be involved in this work very fruitfully as a learning project.”

Here’s more information on how to help:

  • Create a Wikipedia account. If you want to boost the contribution percentages credited to women, fill out your demographic information appropriately (even though it’s not required.)
  • Read a bit about how to contribute to Wikipedia. Start with their page onyour first article. For the social conventions of “talk pages,” which are where discussion about individual articles and projects happens, see the talk page guidelines.
  • Edit the WikiProject Women’s History proposal to add your username (in section 2, “Support”) and add any comments in section 3, “Discussion”.)
  • Go to the main page for the WikiProject and help expand our list of articles that should exist. If you’re an experienced Wikipedia editor, you might help reorganize the list if it’s getting unwieldy. If you’re unsure of what to do, ask on the talk page.
  • Once you’ve added anything, no matter how small, to the WikiProject page or to one of the articles mentioned, add your name to the WikiProject Women’s History Members page.
  • Wikipedia’s organized by a kind of benevolent anarchy. If you’re interested in taking a leadership role (formal definition of goals and scope; implementing a quality scale; starting a task force for entries on a particular national context, subfield, or time period) please go ahead. Write a note on the members page about what you’re interested in working on, and start doing it.

So, please help spread the word about this project to other women’s historians.  Like Historians of Science, we cannot allow a Wikipedia gap!

How Women’s Historians can help close the Wikipedia Gender Gap

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via Cliotropic, who comments on the recent report that only about 15% of Wikipedia contributors are women. Cliotropic notes that ” Wikipedia’s user-demographics data is entirely voluntary and that many women, offered a chance not to identify themselves by sex, avoid doing so. Sometimes it’s an effort to avoid harassment, and sometimes it’s to avoid the women-targeted ads. So their data may well be off.”

Related to this gender gap in who writes for Wikipedia is the woefully inadequate coverage of women’s history in Wikipedia — not surprising since women’s history, after decades of research and teaching, is underrepresented in both higher education and K-12 history teaching.  Cliotropic says, “if you teach history courses on women, gender, or sexuality, or on the history of any racial or ethnic minority in the United States, it’s worth considering adding a Wikipedia assignment to your syllabus.”

One of the commenters suggests using Jeremy Boggs’  “stub-expanding” course assignment for his U.S. survey course  here -but there isn’t a stub section for women’s history!

It’s too late for me to assign this for my women’s history class this semester but I think I will take Cliotropic’s suggestions in the Fall.

Meanwhile, I think it’s a good idea for those of us who are professional women’s historians to think about investing our time in improving the representation of women’s history on Wikipedia.  Shelby Knox’s comments to my post about her Radical Women’s history project reminded me that digital sources like Wikipedia and “this date in history” sites are the point of entry for many young women, and young people in general.  Of course, we would like them to use more authoritative sources like Notable American Women and Notable Black American Women, but that still means schlepping to a bricks and mortar library (assuming there is one close by that’s open regular hours and actually owns the books).  And, we academics are all familiar with Gerda Lerner’s 1975 essay in Feminist Studies that pointed out the limitations of “compensatory history” that simply looks at the “women worthies.”  Still, if “great women” is where our students and feminist activists like Knox are starting, then we have to meet them there.

What do others think?