Wikipedia:Indian Women in Science Edit-a-thon

In spite of policy advances and rising awareness, gender issues continue to plague Indian science - women scientists are fewer in number, occupy fewer positions of power, are more likely to drop out of academic career tracks, and face distinct issues by virtue of their gender, hostile work environments and societal pressures.

Women scientists in India also tend to be less visible than their male counterparts, and public awareness of Indian Women Scientists and their scientific contributions is low.

IndiaBioscience, which is funded mainly by the Department of Biotechnology, has been organising a series of public events to raise the profile of women scientists on one of the most-popular online encyclopaedias - Wikipedia. At these events, participants will be encouraged to create and complete profiles of Indian Women in Science while also introducing participants to Wikipedia. We hope that more women scientists will also take the opportunity to contribute to science communication not just in English but also in the Indian language versions of Wikipedia.

The first editathon was conducted in 2014 followed by sessions in 2015 and 2016 with another being planned in 2019. Note that there are significant changes on the English Wikipedia - articles may no longer be created by new users. Note also the role of Wikidata, a semantic catalogue that also requires maintenance.

Main Wikidata list 2014 2015 2016 2019

Upcoming

The last editathon was held on 31 August 2019 at JNCASR, Jakkur.

At the venue, the events will begin with a short, hands-on introduction to Wiki editing. Participants can then go on to pick the scientist they would like to work on. There will be a discussion on issues commonly faced by women in science. In the afternoon session, participants can continue working on the Wiki pages, with a break for tea. We have desktops available at Saturday's venue, participants are also required to bring their laptops for backup. Online participants can find us on this page.

Contact the IndiaBioscience Team for more details: www.indiabioscience.org & hello@indiabioscience.org

Participants

Please set up a Wikipedia account before the event if possible. Very few details are needed to do this: a username, password, and your email (optional-but this will help to recover forgotten passwords). The short Wikipedia:Tutorial/Registration has more details.

Entries on Wikipedia

A Wikipedia page can be as brief as the ones for Rajeshwari Chatterjee, Pascale Cossart or Margaret Pittman, or as detailed as the ones for Janaki Ammal, Asima Chatterjee, Elaine Fuchs or Marie Curie.

If you are new to Wikipedia, this page is an excellent resource which provides guidelines on how to create an article, what to include and what to avoid. In particular, editing or creating biographies of living persons requires extra care. This page addresses important issues and questions to think about when writing biographies.

Notability is a critical criterion for an article to be deemed suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia. Make sure you are aware of what is required for an article to be accepted. To establish notability, research the scientist whose page you want to work on thoroughly and gather your references ahead of time. It helps if you understand the field of research in which case it is useful to include a summary of the subject's key research contributions to the article on the subject citing their major publication using the citation templates and including the parameter |authorlink=[[ author name ]] .

Wikipedia has style guides - see WP:STYLE and WP:MOS but do not be daunted by it. Other users will (eventually) fix stylistic issues. Read Wikipedia entries that have been marked as a Good (a green plus in a circle on the top right) or Featured Article (a golden star on the top right) to learn by example. Writing in the style of a newspaper or a CV is especially frowned upon.

Many articles have been created but remain sparse with insufficient information and lacking clear links to their areas of research. The entries that already exist need to be improved.

Here are a few websites that list names of notable Indian women scientists:

Target list of women scientists

The following list is temporary and will be removed - for existing and new biographical entries see the Wikidata list.

Entries that need Wikidata entry - all others will also need to be examined carefully and improved / corrected

Useful links