Students and staff organize Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

SUNY New Paltz was one of more than 50 international host locations for the second annual Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon this March. Less than 10 percent of Wikipedia editors identify as female, and this event aimed to address that imbalance and the related gaps in coverage of women artists and art movements on the Internet’s largest and most popular source of general reference articles.

Attendees learned the basics of editing and creating Wikipedia content. They improved a number of extant pages, including those of authors Grace Aguilar, Clarissa Sligh and May Kendall, and began the lengthier process of adding new, accurate, well-sourced entries for local artists including Sheila Goloborotko, assistant professor of art.

Apart from the importance of expanding women’s role in curating and maintaining Wikipedia, the event also meets the goals of the Sojourner Truth Library (STL) to educate the campus community in research and source citation best practices.

“We’re trying to situate the Library as not just a place you come to get materials, but as a place you come to be a knowledge-creator and a producer of information,” said Madeline Veitch, metadata cataloger and reference librarian. “We want New Paltz as a community to see itself participating in the creation of knowledge, which then feeds back into the scholarship we do here.”

New Paltz’s participation is largely thanks to the efforts of Crystal Zoodsma ’15 (Visual Arts), who was inspired to bring the event to campus after learning of the series of videos on Art+Feminism’s website offering tutorials and guidance to first-time Wikipedia editors.

“I hope this will encourage people to get together and share ideas about contemporary artists they think are important or exciting, and come away with the basics and the drive to further edit Wikipedia on their own,” Zoodsma said.

SUNY New Paltz joined other 2015 Edit-a-thon satellite locations including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

More information about the College’s participation, including Wikipedia training materials used at the event, can be found in a new library guide on the STL website.

More information about Art+Feminism is available at their website and their Wikipedia page.