Status Active Years active 3 | Frequency Annually | |
 | ||
Location(s) 70 venues in 17 countries (2015) Inaugurated February 1, 2014 (2014-02-01) Most recent March 4, 2016 (2016-03-04) | ||
Art and Feminism (stylized as Art+Feminism) is an annual worldwide edit-a-thon to add content to Wikipedia about female artists. The project, founded by Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, Michael Mandiberg, and Laurel Ptak, has been described as "a massive multinational effort to correct a persistent bias in Wikipedia, which is disproportionally written by and about men".
Contents
In 2014, Art+Feminism's inaugural campaign attracted 600 volunteers at 30 separate events. The following year, 1,300 volunteers attended 70 events in 17 countries, on four continents.
Establishment
Art+Feminism started when Artstor librarian Siân Evans was designing a project for women and art at for the Art Libraries Society of North America. Evans talked with fellow curator Jacqueline Mabey, who had been impressed by Wikipedia contributors' organization of edit-a-thon events to commemorate Ada Lovelace. Mabey spoke with Michael Mandiberg, a professor at the City University of New York who had been incorporating Wikipedia into classroom learning. Mandiberg in turn talked with Laurel Ptak, a fellow at the art and technology non-profit Eyebeam, who agreed to help plan the event. The team then recruited local Wikipedians Dorothy Howard, then Wikipedian in residence at Metropolitan New York Library Council; and Richard Knipel, then representing the local chapter of Wikipedia contributors through Wikimedia New York City.
One reason for establishing the Art+Feminism project included responding to negative media coverage about Wikipedia's cataloging system. The project continues to fill content gaps in Wikipedia and increase the number of female contributors.
Events
Outside the United States, the 2015 event received media coverage at locations including Australia, Canada, Cambodia, India, New Zealand, and Scotland. Inside the United States the event received media coverage at the flagship location in New York, and also in California, Kansas, Pennsylvania, Texas, and West Viriginia.
Reception
Content contributed by participants in the editing events is tracked in a coordinating forum on Wikipedia.
In November 2014 Foreign Policy magazine named Evans, Mabey, Michael, Richard Knipel, Dorothy Howard, and Ptak as "global thinkers" for addressing gender bias on Wikipedia.