User:The june frost/sandbox

Welcome to the WikiProject page for WriteHers: Women Writers and Philosophers of the Early Modern Period (c. 1600-1800).

This project has been started by a group of four Wikipedians with the aim of adding and improving entries on early modern women writers/philosophers to English Wikipedia (with the possibility of including other language sites if we find interested editors/participants). We're currently applying for a Wikimedia Project Grant (Round 2 2018) to fund a year-long campaign to recruit editors and host an extended edit-a-thon. You can find our proposal here.

The project will begin once we start setting up for our first major edit-a-thon next year. At that stage, we'll update this page with details about project-related offline and online events, as well as info about how to join and resources for editors (including editing templates). In the meantime, we'll be adding information about the kinds of entries the project would be creating and improving. If you have feedback, would like to suggest entries for creation/enhancement, or want to join once our edit-a-thon goes live, please feel free to get in touch via this project's talk page or our user pages.

Goals
Our project will invite experts from around the world to create and update English Wikipedia articles about early modern women writers/philosophers and their works. This will take a step towards addressing the well-known gender imbalance in Wikipedia entries on notable figures, and will get more academic researchers involved in the Wikimedia community, enhancing Wikipedia’s role as a reliable, authoritative source of information.

Scope
This project will focus on women writers/philosophers who lived and worked between 1600 and 1800. We'll be enhancing and creating entries about these women and their key works, and updating lists to ensure that these entries are can be easily located by people interested in relevant topics (early modern philosophy, women philosophers, etc.). We want to improve the quality, quantity and structure of English Wikipedia articles about these figures.

Some of the women philosophers we will focus on include: Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary More, Bathsua Makin, Margaret Fell Fox, Mary Astell, Mary Chudleigh, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Judith Drake, Elizabeth Burnet, Elizabeth Thomas, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, Sarah Chapone, ‘Eugenia’, ‘Sophia’, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Emilie du Chatelet, Marie le Jars de Gournay, Marguerite Buffet, Gabrielle Suchon, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Sophie Electress of Hanover, Sophie-Charlotte of Prussia, Christina of Sweden, Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Arcangela Tarabotti, Anna Maria van Schurman, Elizabeth Carter, Louise Keralio-Robert, Elise Reimarus, Sophie de Grouchy, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, Laura Bassi, Mary Hays, Mary Shepherd, Cornelie Wouters, and others.

There are Wikipedia articles for the majority of these figures, and some are quite good and comprehensive (see, for example, those on Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Macaulay, Suchon, and Wollstonecraft). But many are poor quality according to both academic standards and WikiProject assessment standards (see, for example, those on Buffet, Eugenia, Cockburn, and Reimarus). In many cases, the scholarly references are ten years old or even older, and many figures are not explicitly recognised in the articles for their contributions to philosophy. There are also varying standards in terms of the clarity and relevance of intellectual content and the simplicity and structural organisation of articles. Some articles also require further work to be developed into proper encyclopedia entries that are written in a simple and accessible style, that cover the main dimensions of the figure’s works/ideas, and that describe the figure in a non-biased way. There are no Wikipedia articles for Chapone, More, and Sophia, three figures who made significant contributions to feminist philosophy in their time.

More info on women writers to come shortly!

Editing advice
Once the edit-a-thon goes live, we'll be providing training resources for new editors, as well as editing advice and templates (based on current templates for writers/philosophers and key works).

Participants
The core project facilitators/initiators are:


 * A/Prof Jacqueline Broad -
 * Dr Patrick Spedding -
 * Mia Goodwin -
 * Dr Marilyn Stendera -

Interested Wikipedians and others have expressed interest and support for our grant application - you can find details here. Once the project gets started, we'll be asking those people and the editors we recruit to add their names here.

If you would like to join the project, please free to add yourself here, and to indicate any areas of particular interest.

Tasks
Note: These lists are dynamic and will continue to grow.

Philosophers

 * Sarah Chapone
 * Mary More (author of The Woman’s Right, c.1674 - not to be confused with Mother Mary More)
 * Sophia, A Person of Quality (anonymous author of Woman Not Inferior to Man, 1739, and Womens Superior Excellence to Man, 1740)
 * Cornélie Wouters (currently only has article on French Wikipedia)

Writers
An initial survey of the existing Wikipedia pages for fifty-one of the best-known, most-studied and cited women writers of the long-18th century:


 * 19 of 51 (37%) have no separate list of Works [the obvious place to links to pages on those individual works], and a number that use eccentric arrangements (or, at least, these are inconsistent with each other), especially for indicating a linked online text.
 * 34 of 51 (66%) have no pages for individual works; many of the individual pages that exist are stubs; there are also numerous internal links to non-existent pages (in expectation, presumably, that these pages will appear one day). The total number of pages for individual works is 51, or an av. of 1.5 per author (who have such pages at all) or 1 (across all authors).
 * 12 of 51 (24%) have no links to online texts of individual titles; another 25 of 51 (50%) only have indirect links (usually a link to the author on the Internet Archive); only 5 of 51 (10%) a link to an individual works; many have eccentric location arrangements for the linked online texts (under Works, References, Further Reading, or Links). In addition, a number of links are dead, or are linked to the wrong page (for instance, to the The Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive splash-page, instead of author pages).
 * 25 of 51 (50%) have poor period/sex/genre categorization; another 14 of 51 (total of 75%) need work; only six (12%) are generally satisfactory

All pages would benefit from a more consistent format, and having all links checked and updated.

Candidates for new Wikipedia entries among notable women writers from the long-18th century have been identified by the WikiProject Women Writers on their Missing articles list page.

Both existing Wikipedia entries and candidates for new entries will be examined closely to establish which authors and works meet Wikipedia's notability criteria in relation to historical significance, using such reliable sources as primary, secondary and tertiary sources, especially review articles, and Google Scholar citations, to establish academic consensus.

* weird formatting

Requests for new articles
Please list any articles that you think should be added to the project's 'Articles to be created' section here. If you are uncertain about the article - e.g., whether the figure meets the notability criterion - or would like to discuss it before requesting, please add a section on the Talk page; feel free to ping other project participants, especially the core team. Please do the same if you want to discuss/challenge another participant's request or one of the articles already added to the 'Articles to be created' section above. If the project community agrees with the request, it will be added to our official tasklist.

Requests for new improvements
Please list any articles that you think need to be added to our task list of articles to update/enhance, providing some general details about the nature of the changes you would like to see. (Check our list of 'Articles to be updated/enhanced' for suggestions of types of improvement that you might like to include.) If you would like to discuss the improvements further, or would like to discuss someone else's request, please use the Talk page. If the project community agrees to the request, it will be added to our official tasklist.

General discussion, issues, concerns
If you would like to discuss any entry related to the project, please feel free to start a section on the Talk page at any point. If a page you have created has been flagged for deletion or has raised concerns within the rest of the Wikipedia community, please ping one of the core project team and also list the page here.



List of new articles created
Once the project goes live, please feel free to list your new WriteHers-related articles here (newer articles at the top, please). We'll provide instructions for making sure that they're associated with the project.

Any new articles that have an interesting or unusual fact in them, are at least over 1,500 characters, don't have any dispute templates on them, and cite their sources, should be suggested for the Did you know? box on the Wikipedia Main Page.

List of articles updated/enhanced
Once the edit-a-thon begins, please feel free to list any articles you have updated or enhanced here (newer entries at the top).

Featured content
If any WriteHers-related articles are featured, they'll appear here - keep an eye out!





Review, assessment and statistics of WriteHers articles
You can find out more about Wikipedia assessment and peer review processes here.

Assessment
We'll be tracking the quality of articles created and edited by WriteHers - and listing rolling targets for quality ratings - here.



Peer review
If you would like other project participants to review your article, please list it here.

You can also nominate an article for peer review from editors across the whole Wikipedia community, which is a great way to get feedback and find out how to improve an article; instructions for this are here. Please list any articles that you nominate here so that we can keep track of the discussions and help you make the most of the feedback you receive.



Related WikiProjects
Projects related to ours include Women in Red, WikiD and Philosophy. We acknowledge the great work that they've done and continue to do, and encourage you to consider joining them as well.