Gender gap strategy/Thematic edit-a-thons

Thematic edit-a-thons which focus on topics that pertain to women are an excellent way to increase the participation of women in Wikimedia. The 2013 report by the Program Evaluation and Design team states that edit-a-thons are productive for generating decent amounts of content regardless of size or cost, but the more participants, the more the content produced. Thematic edit-a-thons are easy to plan and execute. Thematic edit-a-thons centering topics pertaining to women are most popular during the Women's History Month and Ada Lovelace Day.

Participants at the ArtAndFeminism edit-a-thon

What are thematic edit-a-thons?

Thematic edit-a-thons are usually conducted for increasing the quality and number of articles on neglected and underrepresented topics. Thematic edit-a-thons also seek to increase the number of editors interested in selected topics. For example, an edit-a-thon on women's health attracts people interested in writing articles about women's health, and consequently they become active editors. Thematic edit-a-thons can be run for variable duration : edit-a-thons which ran for as short as two hours and those which ran for as long as a month are documented.

Thematic edit-a-thons could be run online, offline or both. During online edit-a-thons, participants choose an article of their choice that comes under the theme of the edit-a-thon and improve them. They also create new articles related to the theme of the event. Offline edit-a-thons are often clubbed with Wikipedia workshops, where participants are first taught about the basics of editing Wikipedia. After the Wikipedia workshop, the participants start creating and improving articles of their choice, which fall under the theme of the edit-a-thon.

How do I conduct a thematic edit-a-thon?

It is easy! Edit-a-thons have been organized starting from zero budget! All you need is a project page, internet and a few interested participants. The main article, How to run an edit-a-thon gives a lot of information and plenty of links to useful resources for conducting edit-a-thons. Solutions for some common problems while organizing an event can be found at learning patterns on meta wiki. Learning patterns provides has been documented for sharing an important lesson and it gives advice on how to do something in the smartest way.

Evaluating your edit-a-thon

How many participants of your thematic edit-a-thon made more than 100 edits? How many articles created during the edit-a-thon were good articles? How many new contributors did your edit-a-thon attract? To answer all these questions and more, use the Wikimetrics tool created by the program evaluation and design team of the Wikimedia Foundation. To know about how to use this tool, visit the program evaluation portal.

Useful links for organizing thematic edit-a-thons

1. A sample thematic edit-a-thon that ran for over a month : Women's History Month, India-2014
2. A sample thematic edit-a-thon that ran for a few days : w:en:Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Ada_Lovelace_Edit-a-thon_2014