Wikipedia:Meetup/Hoyt Hall Women's edit-a-thon

Event details

• Date: Saturday, April 5th, 2013
• Time: 3-6 pm (but feel free to show up early!
• Location: Hoyt Hall (2519 Ridge Road, Berkeley, Ca 94709)
• Event: An edit-a-thon focused on introducing BSC members to the ideas behind Wikipedia, with a focus on women's history and Wikipedia's demographic gaps
• Facebook page:Because of our demographics, our main pre-event page is on Facebook, Here. If you'd like to come, please feel free to RSVP on our Facebook page (although if you're unable to RSVP in time, please feel free to come anyway!)

Come learn about Wikipedia and help improve Wikipedia articles related to women's history! Food and drinks will be provided (although if our turnout is as high as it could be, we may be a bit low on both!) If you have never edited Wikipedia before don't worry - friendly experienced editors will be here to help.

Although the event is primarily aimed at BSC members and UC Berkeley students, everyone is welcome to come to edit Wikipedia with us at this event. Experienced Wikipedians are especially encouraged to attend, given that we're likely to have a ton of newbies at the event.

What to bring

• a laptop
• ideas for topics or articles you might want to work on (though suggestions will be provided for those just looking to be put to work)

• Some suggestions related to broader women's history can be found here.
• Requested articles from WikiProject Women's History (a long list of people, organizations, and topics from around the world)

• any relevant reference materials you might have
• a friend - we love to meet new would-be-editors! (you can also bring your spouse, kids, family, etc.)
• or, if you don't have any of the above, just bring yourself :-)
• any digital photos you've taken that might be appropriate for our topic

If you need help

Just find one of us and ask! :) If we end up having a ton of attendees and can't help everyone quickly, you can also stop by this help chat channel or stop by the WP:TEAHOUSE to ask questions of experienced online Wikipedians.

Sign up

Feel free to mention if you'll be bringing a friend, or family member. Children are welcome. New editors are also welcome to signup for the event on our Facebook page, and most likely will.

Attendees

(Simply click the edit button, add your name and hit save page. Or have a friend or Wikipedian sign you up! Copy the format of the person above you :))

1. Kevin Gorman
2. Evelyn Hammid
3. Shreyas Patankar
4. User:FluffyPancake
5. Charlotte Hryse
6. Reilly St. Amand
7. Miriam Newman-Gerhardt
8. User:Ylc2123
9. User:Vyster8
10. (Several others who we didn't catch the users of)

Potential articles to be created or improved

Although you should feel free to work on whatever aspect of Wikipedia you'd like today, we've picked out a number of articles that we think it could be productive for us to work on together. In compiling these lists, we've mostly focused on prominent women and women's organizations in the history of Berkeley or in the history of the Cooperative movement. We've also compiled some sources that you could use to begin to expand (or create) these articles, and will be around to help you with any questions that come up. If you need more resources to flesh out an article, Google Scholar and Google News are always first good steps, and you also can access JSTOR and many of the other specialized databases Berkeley students have access to through the library's VPN service - you can find instructions for how to configure that here.

Wikipedia does have a number of very detailed sourcing policies, the most important of which is WP:RS. For all practical purposes, Wikipedia's sourcing requirements mean that any secondary source that has undergone editorial review is acceptable. This means that sources like biographies, biographical articles, peer-reviewed journal articles, newspaper articles, books, and pretty much most sources you would think are okay will be okay. If you're creating an article from scratch, it's best to include at least three or four different sources in the article before you publish the article outside of your sandbox.

In terms of Wikitext and references and stuff, WP:CHEATSHEET will likely provide you with tons of help. Beyond that, feel free to grab one of the experienced Wikipedians present and ask us, we should be able to figure most stuff out :)

Potential useful sources that could cover a lot of these topics

• We have copies of most books from UCB's library that deal with women in cooperative movements; these will be floating around and should be awesome source material. Much of this material isn't available online in any form.

Potentially useful books that we have on hand, in no particular order

• Modern Organisation and Management of Women Co-Operatives (focused on Africa)
• Social Feminism (by Naomi Black - contains significant biographical info about prominent women co-opers)
• Proceedings of the Seminar on Women's Involvement in Co-operatives in Tanzania, 1987
• Cooperative Movements in Eastern Europe
• A Century of Rochdale Cooperation, 1844-1944
• Gender Integration in Cooperatives (focused on Japan)
• Feminism and the Politics of Working Women (contains significant biographical info about prominent women co-opers)
• Gender Bias in Cooperatives (focused on India)
• The People's Co-op - The Life and Times of a North End Institution
• Gender, Democratic Practice, and Member Control in Agricultural Primary Co-operative Societies in Uganda
• Caring & Sharing, the Centenary History of the Co-operative Women's Guild
• The Matriarchs of England's Cooperative Movement - A Study in Gender Politics and Female Leadership, 1883-1921 (this one is especially awesome)
• The Woman with the Basket - The Story of the Women's Cooperative Guild
• +many more!

Potentially useful online sources

• Historical Dictionary of the Cooperative Movement - useful towards pointing to secondary sources that deal with women and cooperatives
• 2020 Co-operative Women's Challenge: Inspirational Women - This website has many short biographies on women involved in the cooperative movement
• Barbara Blaszak's "The Gendered Geography of the English Co-operative Movement at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century" covers many relevant subjects.
• JSTOR, google scholar, google books, etc

Biographies of women involved in the cooperative movement that Wikipedia should have, but doesn't

For almost all of these people, we have hard-copy books that provide way more detail about them than can be found on the internet :)

• Emmy Freundlich - Emmy Freundlich was a socialist and social democrat activist who became significantly involved in the cooperative movement. She was the first president of the International Guild of Co-operative Women, and played a number of other important roles in the historical cooperative movement.
  • Potential sources: Emmy already actually has an article in the German Wikipedia. If anyone here speaks German, the sources used in that article would be an excellent place to start. Possible English language sources include this article from the Hull University Archives, a brief mention in this book, and this piece from the UK's national archvies. A huge amount of source material about Emmy exists in German as well as in jstor.
• Alice Acland - Alice Acland (1849-1935) was a British education reformist who wrote for and edited the Co-operative News publication and founded the Co-operative Women's Guild.
  • A biography of Acland is available at the 2020 Co-operative Women's Challenge. The Co-operative Women's Guild is a stub article that needs to be improved (so please consider editing this article as well!), but it has some useful external links. The National Co-operative Archive has some primary sources on this organization. This book might have a bit more about Acland
• Margaret Llewelyn Davies - Margaret Llewelyn Davies (1861-1944) was the General Secretary of the Co-operative Women's Guild and a women's rights activist. She is one of the most significant women to have been involved in a cooperative movement, and there's currently nothing about her on the internet and little on Wikipedia.
  • A biography on Davies is available on the National Co-operative Archive's Awareness Campaign. Looking at documents on the Co-operative Women's Guild should provide some useful information. The Matriarchs book has a useful section on MLD here. This book also has some info. We have a number of hard copy books with significant amounts of info about her.
• Catherine Webb - early cooperative activist, and author of 'The woman with the basket,' one of the most comprehensive sources for the early history of the Co-operative women's guild.
  • The main stacks has a copy of her book, other sources may be hard to find.
• Sarah Reddish - Sarah Reddish (1850-1928) was involve din the women's suffrage movement and was president of the Bolton Women's Co-operative Guild. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has a biography on Reddish.
• Annie Jones - early president of the women's cooperative guild, mentioned in matriarchs, probably findable elsewhere
• Mary Lawrenson - Mary Lawrenson (1850-1943) was a founding member of the Women's Co-operative Guild. She was also active in the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society.

Biographies of women involved in the cooperative movement that Wikipedia has, that could use some serious improvement

• Olga Andersen
• Mary Ellicott Arnold
• Ela Bhatt
• Sarah_Chayes
• Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay

Biographies of BSC alums and people involved in social justice work that could use with some improvement

• Beverly Cleary - Beverly Clearly is a famous author and BSC alum. Her article actually isn't horrible, but it definitely needs a lot of cleanup and copy-editing. There is definitely room to include a lot more material about her as well, but this might be a good place for someone to dive in who felt like copyediting/just becoming more familiar with Wikitext.
• Angela Davis - Angela Davis is a famous bay area social justice activist who was closely associated with the Black Panther Party. Her group today, Critical Resistance, works towards prison abolition. The article about her as it stands currently isn't awful, but could definitely be copyedited and expanded.
  • Potential sources: There's a lot of sources already in the article - I would suggest starting by looking through some of those sources for valuable information from them that wasn't already included, as well as copyediting the article. We also have a copy of Angela Davis' book on-hand that is not currently heavily used in the article that could have a lot of useful information in it.
• Beatrice Morrow Cannady - Beatrice Morrow Cannady was the co-founder and editor of Advocate, Oregon's largest African-American newspaper. She was one of the first African-American women to ever graduate from law school in the US, and our article about her is currently a measly six lines long.
  • Potential sources: A lot of potential sources about Beatrice exist, and many of them are books that can be found in one of our libraries. Useful online-accessible sources about Beatrice would include this article in the Oregon Encyclopedia, This article from the Oregon Historical Society, this article from the Journal of American History (vpn required,) and this snippet from Remarkable Oregon Women (google books displays all the info the book has about her.]
• Lucy Ward Stebbins
• Sue Gardner
  • Sue's gotten tons of media coverage; even a simple Google news search should turn up a lot of info to expand her article with. We will also have a couple books about the history of Wikipedia on hand that will also be valuable potential sources for her article.

Relevant organizations that could use some serious improvement

• Co-operative Women's Guild
  • Potential sources: Records of the Co-operative Women's Guild, with some academic commentary, The mothers' international: The Women's Co-operative Guild and feminist pacifism (needs VPN to access,), The Women's Co-operative Guild. 1883-1904, Cooperative Womens Guild website, which contains a lot of info,

Outcomes

As the event progresses, we'll begin to document our outcomes. We're hoping to bring in a lot of new Wikipedians, and produce a solid chunk of underrepresented content :)

Articles improved

• Light copy-editing, and added a few brushstrokes regarding Beverly Cleary's Cooperative links as a former resident of Stebbins! -KM
• Very minor editing of mensturation article of changing some instances 'females' to 'women'
• Some small improvements to Co-operative Women's Guild
• Expansion of article on Women in the Victorian Era, specifically the section on leisure activities.
• Added a section on the Co-operative Women's Guild to the article on the History of the cooperative movement.
• Minor editing of National Insurance Act 1911.
• Minor editing of Co-operative Women's Guild.
• Minor edits to the Hoyt Hall section of the Berkeley Student Cooperative page.
• Addition of information related to a racist advertisement run by the city of Leicester to the article Leicester.

New articles created

1. Alice Acland
2. Tanzania Federation of Co-operatives
3. Margaret Llewelyn Davies
4. Catherine Webb