Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Essays/Female biography editathon advice

Disclaimer: There is no official writer's guide to Wikipedia

This page is a cheat sheet for attendees and organizers of editathons with the primary purpose of writing female biographies. See Edit-a-thon for more information about the term itself.

Writing about women vs men

In general, it is harder to write about women rather than men. It is also harder to write about women of colour than white women. This is not Wikipedia's fault - it is due to systemic bias. Wikipedia relies on "reliable sources" to source its articles and often women are not in them. For example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC has over 8,000 paintings, but only 548 of them are by women. It would be nice to create articles about all 548 of these, because they must be very special to have made it into the collection. On the other hand, if you want to write about women artists, then maybe the MET is not such a good place to look for them, since those 548 works were created by only 294 women. The Dictionary of Women Artists has more women artists to choose from, as does the Clara database. All three of these are considered "reliable sources" for Wikipedia. Facebook, blogs, temporary art exhibitions and local art fairs are not. No matter whether the woman is an artist or any other occupation, it is also acceptable to use a respectable encyclopedia as a source, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica or the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The ODNB biographies of people are 10.9% female. Sometimes it may seem as though you are searching for a needle in a haystack to find reliable sources about women. This is where the Women-in-Red project comes in: you can consult the WiR's list of reliable sources for women, or even better, try using one of the pre-filled biographies on Wikidata.

For writers

At an editathon, some people really want to write something, so let them! Others are curious but too shy to write. To entertain them, see the advice for organizers.

Wikidata

Many women have been added to Wikidata and are linked to external databases with information ready to be consulted for use by Wikipedia. As an example, Alice Maud Fanner is a short biographical article that started as a Wikidata item. Using the "[biography]" tool, the basic article was formed like this. Though this article is very short (besides the lead there are only 3 sentences), the article is sourced to several reliable sources and includes an authority control template that links out to even more sources. To make another such article, you can copy and paste the structure of this one, which includes an image, an infobox, and references.

Besides the "prepare biography" tool for existing Wikidata items, we also have the Content Translation tool. See for example this. If the window doesn't open, you must first log in and make sure that Content Translation is selected in your preferences here.

Copy the work of others - don't reinvent the wheel

Imitating the work of others is the quickest way to learn and also check that your article has the required basic parts:

a lead with the most common name, the (birth-death) date or dates, and the claim to fame.
a short description of how the subject became famous and what the subject is best known for. Each sentence needs to be referenced.
a section for the references
authority control template
categories for the occupation, the birth date, the hometown

For organizers

Many people are curious how Wikipedia works. You can show them! Personally I like a "learn-by-doing" approach whereby a so-called edit-a-thon opens with one of our beautiful short films about our movement and then starts right off with a group-created stub or improvement edit that has been spontaneously suggested from an attendee. There is no short way to introduce Wikipedia and my recommendation is that you don't. Just get started. For this to happen, someone who is a new user at the venue must be logged in on the big screen. Any Wikipedian standing at the front of a room trying to edit without all of their trusty gadgets and navigating the new user requirements is a valuable learning experience for anyone watching (including other Wikipedians), while theoretically the task at hand is one that is "notable enough for Wikipedia" or it would not have been chosen for use by the attending Wikipedians. Attending Wikipedians have different knowledge approaches and different tips and tricks and therefore learn from each other while attendees learn about basic structures of a Wikipage and at least one user (the logged-in one) goes home with some preferences, extensions, and gadgets enabled, such as the Content Translation tool, Hot-cat, and pop-ups.