FARMINGTON – A workshop on Saturday educated participants on the process of editing Wikipedia articles to provide accurate and up-to-date information, specifically focused on women in the arts. The online encyclopedia offers free information in over 250 languages worldwide. Articles are a collaborative effort of the general public, allowing anyone to contribute or edit the information.
Organizer, Abby Flannigan, brought the idea for the “edit-a-thon” back to her hometown of Farmington after learning the skills at a similar gathering in her college town of Bozeman, Montana. The workshop was scheduled to align with others happening around the globe, an event in its fifth year of taking place.
The Wikipedia Edit-a-thon is one piece of a larger movement to bring more female participation to the site. The movement began after a 2010 survey revealed that less than 13 percent of Wikipedia contributors were women, leading to a lack of representation on the site. Last year’s edit-a-thon brought an estimated 2,500 global participants who edited a total of 3,000 articles related to notable women artists. 
“A lot of my students are getting biased information from Wikipedia and using it for papers, which is solidifying it as real history,” University of Maine at Farmington Associate Professor of Art History, Sarah Maline said.
Maline helped to organize the event after hearing about the idea from Flannigan. The team, along with UMF freshman Hope Williams, gathered at the UMF Art Gallery to provide free food, childcare and skills to interested participants. Despite the university’s spring break, a small crowd brought laptops and camped out for the day’s edit-a-thon. The team plans to schedule next year’s event when classes are in session in order to encourage more participants.
“As a teacher, it’s not about the mechanics of technology, but about the forward thinking use of technology. We are a global society. We need to be looking at the bigger picture and how can we use technology to make a difference in the world,” UMF Associate Professor of Secondary Education Theresa Overall said.
Abby Flanagan = artist who’s not afraid to be awesome!
Thanks. Excellent project. Once the skills are learned, you might also make a class project of sending students out into the wider Maine arts community to work with individual contemporary female artists to get them on to wiki.