WikiGap/How to organize WikiGap

W I K I G A P

Purpose

The campaign's intention is to, primarily, reduce the gendergap at Wikipedia and hopefully make more women interested in editing encyclopedic articles. By highlighting prominent women in Wikipedia, the possibilities for an increased gender aware society in general are also improved.

Structure and division of labour

The purpose of the campaign has been fulfilled when dedicated persons have participated in events where you edit biographies about women at Wikipedia in as many language versions as possible.

Local actors (e.g embassies, institutions in the educational system, museums, libraries or social organizations) and volunteers connected to local Wikimedia organizations will jointly organize events/edit-a-thons with the aim of editing, translating or writing new biographies about women at Wikipedia.

Wikimedia Sverige manages the dialogue with international Wikimedia organizations. The local organizers on site engages local actors and markets and manages the dialogue against those who show interest in the event.

Tools

The Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs has developed a material that contains both instructions for how to prepare an edit-a-thon and marketing material. This toolkit provide organizers (embassies, local actors and organizers from the Wikimedia-movement) with instructions how to best organize a Wikigap event. However, they do not have to follow the recommendations but they are intended to reduce the time needed to prepare for an event and avoid some common mistakes.

Wikimedia Sverige has provided the organizers with two campaign on the dashboard, the WikiGap 2018 and WikiGap 2019 campaigns, to follow up the statistics from each event. Wikimedia Sverige has also produced a lot of written information about WikiGap on Meta and directly supported the organizers from the Wikimedia movement with introductions to the campaign and how to be a part of it.

Contacts

Wikimedia Sverige has created a participant list of the people from the Wikimedia movement who organized WikiGap previously.

Organizers

Local actors (e.g embassies, institutions within the educational system, museums, libraries or social organizations), volunteers/organizers from the Wikimedia movement in each country, and Wikimedia Sverige.

Main tasks for the responsible organizations

Wikimedia Sverige

• Create or refresh the pages on Meta about WikiGap. This includes moving last year's pages to subpages and to create updated texts for the year for all pages.
• Inform volunteers and organizers from the Wikimedia movement about WikiGap and what the campaign is all about.
• Create a campaign on the Programs and Events dashboard. The Dashboard can be used to measure the outcome of the campaign.
• Ongoingly give support to, and engage in a dialogue, with volunteers and organizers from the Wikimedia movement all through the campaign.
• Work with Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs and other local actors about what to do to succeed in reaching as many people as possible during the campaign.
• Make connections, with some help from the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, between people who would benefit from working together during the campaign.

Local actors, such as embassies, institutions in the educational system, museums, libraries or social organizations.

• Examine the interest and opportunities for conducting an event.
• Identify and make an outreach to local non-Wikimedia partners to take part in an event.
• Host an event together with other local partner and volunteers/organizers from the Wikimedia movement and create the right conditions for a successful event. Assist with things such as premises, digital connection, refreshments, lecturers and equipment.
• Promote the event/edit-a-thon in different social media channels and invite to participation.
• Summarize the results from the event and market it in their social media channels.

Organizers from the Wikimedia movement

• Create a program and register it on the Program and Event Dashboard as soon as the date for the event is finalized.
• Are responsible for ensuring that the purpose of the event is to be achieved as far as possible. It is of great importance that the organizers have prepared instructions, have made suggestions for appropriate reference literature and have proposals of convenient articles to edit.
• Will engage volunteers that can answer questions that may appear during the edit-a-thon. It is very important that there are enough volunteers that know how to edit on-site in order to have a good and creative atmosphere.
• Must have a dialogue with the embassy and the local actor around the event.
• Are to collect numbers and statistics over the work that has been done during the edit-a-thon and then communicate it.