Gather, a a collaborative project led by the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism & Communication, hosted Women Do News and The 19th for a lightning chat about women in media. Agora’s Regina Lawrence moderated a conversation with Alexandra Smith of The 19th and Women Do News board members Angilee Shah and Jareen Imam about bridging the gender gap in the journalism industry and reporting inclusively on gender, politics, and policy.
Board member Jareen Imam and board chair Angilee Shah led a workshop at the AEJMC 2022 Midwinter Conference. What’s AEJMC, you ask? It’s the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, the organization for educators, students and media professionals who are training the next generation of journalists. If you are signed up for Women Do News emails, you’ll get the recorded session in your inbox. The 90-minuted session focused on ways to increase the representation of women journalists on Wikipedia by collaborating with Women Do News. It started a brief overview of gender bias on Wikipedia, with Wiki Edu, […]
The Wikimedia Foundation just released survey results on “awareness, trust, and feelings of representation that people have in our work and projects, including Wikipedia.” Here are some topline findings about women on Wikipedia: Women, across communities, are far more skeptical of Wikipedia’s support of social/equity movements. Black women and Hispanic women have the lowest engagement rates with Wikipedia, and have negative views of Wikipedia when it comes to inclusivity and support for racial and gender equality. Asian women have high awareness and are heavy users of Wikipedia, but feel unrepresented on the platform. White women have high awareness but relatively […]
Meg Heckman at Northeastern University writes about how her class worked with Women Do News: “Helping to create these entries was a bright spot in an otherwise difficult semester, but my students’ struggle to find source material was also a reminder that, as Eckert and Steiner (2013) put it, ‘The internet is not free of ‘real’ world hierarchies.’” Read the full essay in Media Report to Women.
Art + Feminism is a big inspiration for Women Do News, but they have also created amazing resources to make it easy to learn to edit in Wikipedia. AND they put it in the public domain, which helped us get started in creating our program.
Women in Red is a project that has been a huge inspiration and support for Women Do News. If you want to get involved in broader issues of gender parity on Wikipedia, start here.
Who Makes the News is a knowledge, information and resource portal on media, gender and other axes of discrimination. It hosts the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), the world’s largest and longest running research and advocacy initiative that seeks to advance gender equality in and through the news media.
For the most up-to-date information and ideas about gender bias, see this Wikipedia article on the subject: “Gender bias on Wikipedia, also known as the Wikipedia gender gap, refers to the fact that Wikipedia contributors are mostly male, that relatively few biographies on Wikipedia are about women, and that topics of interest to women are less well-covered.”
Biographies of female and non-binary journalists are underrepresented on Wikipedia, which can lead to issues related to safety, credibility, and recognition. Women Do News, an organization dedicated to elevating the voices and profiles of female journalists online, wants change. In this event, we showed Jaws and Women Do News conference-goers how to join the movement. We gave a 20-minute presentation on how tovolunteer and add articles into Wikipedia, followed by a 40-minute edit-a-thon. Here’s more.
Board member Jareen Imam joined Hacks/Hackers London to talk about our work and how Wikipedia can affect the safety and credibility of women journalists. Journalism.co.uk reported on the event.
In September, 2021 we won our first grant of $2,000. It’s a rapid grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, given in part because of your endorsements! So we’re ready to get planning. Want to get involved in our 2022 schedule? Sign up for our emails to find our how to host and edit-a-thon or add us to your conference or event.
Biographies of female and non-binary journalists are underrepresented on Wikipedia, which can lead to issues related to safety, credibility, and recognition. Women Do News, an organization dedicated to elevating the voices and profiles of female journalists online, wants to change that issue. Board member Jareen Imam presented.
Need help finding published articles and citations about amazing women journalists who deserve a Wikipedia page? Finding those links to published works about the journalists is one of the toughest parts of creating a Wikipedia entry that stands up to scrutiny. Mary Nahorniak, Google News Lab Teaching Fellow, presented to give us super tips for search and citation building. Watch the presentation here.
Our board chair Angilee Shah joined Take The Lead to talk about different forms of leadership and the genesis of Women Do News on July 28, 2021. Watch the talk on YouTube.
A study led by Francesca Tripodi in the journal New Media & Society finds that 19% of Wikipedia’s 1.5 million biographies are about women. Edit-a-thons help address the problem but there are issues to explore about who should be considered notable for Wikipedia. For the shorter version, hear Tripodi on NPR.
Historical exclusion and systemic bias in media has erased and omitted female and nonbinary journalists from the digital record, particularly those who are also racial and ethnic minorities. This essential conversation for journalists, Wikipedia contributors, and allies to historically excluded journalists offered an opportunity to learn how to begin the work of attenuating “symbolic annihilation” by reintroducing the work of notable, formerly excluded journalists to Wikipedia.
From the Wikimedia Foundation on May 5, 2021: The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and the Wikimedia Foundation co-hosted the virtual event, “Taking back the narrative: Changing how Asian Americans are represented in the news, on Wikipedia, and beyond”. This past year we saw a rise in acts of violence and xenophobia perpetrated against people of Asian descent, further exasperating biases and a lack of representation of AAPI voices in the media and across the web. Speakers discussed how Wikipedia and journalists can act as partners to increase the representation of AAPI voices in the news media and online landscape, […]
Board member Andrew Lih created a quick visualization of the women in Wikidata that are flagged as being part of WikiProject Women Do News, showing their occupation, schooling and employer to see if there were some patterns. Check it out!
We can do more to make sure women get their due. Angilee Shah and Jareen Imam, two of the founders of Women Do News, talked with host Michael O’Connell on the “It’s All Journalism” podcast.
Gather, a a collaborative project led by the Agora Journalism Center at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism & Communication, hosted Women Do News and The 19th for a lightning chat about women in media. Agora’s Regina Lawrence moderated a conversation with Alexandra Smith of The 19th and Women Do News board members Angilee Shah and Jareen Imam about bridging the gender gap in the journalism industry and reporting inclusively on gender, politics, and policy.
From the Wikimedia Foundation on May 5, 2021: The Asian American Journalists Association (AAJA) and the Wikimedia Foundation co-hosted the virtual event, “Taking back the narrative: Changing how Asian Americans are represented in the news, on Wikipedia, and beyond”. This past year we saw a rise in acts of violence and xenophobia perpetrated against people of Asian descent, further exasperating biases and a lack of representation of AAPI voices in the media and across the web. Speakers discussed how Wikipedia and journalists can act as partners to increase the representation of AAPI voices in the news media and online landscape, […]
Board member Andrew Lih created a quick visualization of the women in Wikidata that are flagged as being part of WikiProject Women Do News, showing their occupation, schooling and employer to see if there were some patterns. Check it out!
We can do more to make sure women get their due. Angilee Shah and Jareen Imam, two of the founders of Women Do News, talked with host Michael O’Connell on the “It’s All Journalism” podcast.
