UNC students work to close information gaps on Wikipedia at Art + Feminism Edit-a-thon event

Members of the campus community came together on Monday to close information gaps on one of the most highly consulted reference sources in the world — Wikipedia. 

The Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon was held at UNC’s Sloane Art Library for the seventh time since 2015. The event, which focused on editing pages with the themes of art, feminism and gender, aimed to increase representation of women and nonbinary people on Wikipedia. 

Over 30 Wikipedia pages were edited during the three-hour session. Edits made by attendees ranged from adding a page number to an existing citation to thousands of characters of new information. 

Most of the entries worked on at the event were artist biographies, but entries on topics such as the National Black Feminist Organization and rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s song “Body” were edited, too.

“It’s one of the 10 most used websites in the world, so edit-a-thons like this enhance the quality of Wikipedia articles to benefit everyone,” Veronica McGurrin, librarian for art and art history at Sloane Art Library said. 

A survey from 2011 found that less than 10 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors were women, leading non-profit organization Art + Feminism to launch an international project of edit-a-thons dedicated to addressing this disparity in 2014.

Co-sponsored by University Libraries and the Art Student Graduate Organization, the goal of the project was to connect people with accurate sources of information and encourage people of all gender identities to learn to edit on Wikipedia. 

The University Libraries provided access to scholarly resources necessary for editors at the event and created a guide for attendees to use to identify articles on Wikipedia that needed citations and edits. McGurrin said some of the information used by participants in the edit-a-thon is normally behind paywalls.

This year was the first time since 2020 that the Art + Feminism edit-a-thon was held at UNC. McGurrin said she was interested in bringing it back with the help of graduate students from the ASGO. 

Mimi DeLuca, a graduate assistant at the Sloane Art Library, helped organize the event and answered participants’ questions throughout the editing process. 

“What we really want for people is to come to the library and have this community experience where they are empowered as researchers to go in and make these Wikipedia edits on their own,” DeLuca said.

She said the edit-a-thon, which took place during the first week of Women’s History Month, was a great way to engage in feminist dialogue.  

Chelsea Lancaster, a second-year graduate student in the UNC School of Information and Library Science, said she was interested by the themes of inclusivity surrounding the event. Lancaster said she had never edited on Wikipedia before and found herself looking through empty pages, thinking about what she could contribute. 

She referenced an incident from 2007 in which an incorrect Wikipedia entry reported the death of actor and comedian Sinbad — who hadn’t actually died. 

“You want to make sure things are true so that you aren’t adding to misinformation,” Lancaster said. “There’s enough misinformation.”

Open-access sources like Wikipedia allow anybody to sign up to edit their pages, but McGurrin said it is important that credible sources are used when adding information. She added that the event provides a different way for students to think about research and how to approach it.

“It’s really empowering for students to know that anybody can improve the accuracy of Wikipedia, and they can be part of the scholarly production and open access source,” McGurrin said.

@dailytarheel | university@dailytarheel.com