Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Essays/Writing women and their works

Women and their works on Wikipedia need to be made more visible and easier to access. Writing about women and their contributions to history is important. There is a well-documented gender gap on Wikipedia which results in less visibility for women in the real world. It's also important to provide users of Wikipedia multiple points of discovery for information. This involves ensuring that women are linked to their works and providing full citations on Wikipedia. Other projects, such as Wikidata, have other avenues for providing information discovery.

Visibility and discovery on Wikipedia
Writing about women on Wikipedia means that you are helping to combat gender bias on the online encyclopedia. For example, among biographies of engineers on Wikipedia, only four percent are women's biographies. Because Wikipedia is a key point of internet discovery, anyone searching for women in engineering, in this example is not getting a full picture of the field due to the gender gap. Whenever there is no article for a topic, person or person's work on Wikipedia, the general public using the site often believes that what they are searching for must be unimportant or non-existent. Adding both women's biographies and women's works makes what women do visible online.

Information that is available online is visible online. This is even more important with Wikipedia since the articles can be written with information that is offline or behind paywalls. Adding this kind of "hidden" information to Wikipedia brings the subject into visibility online. Once women and their works are written into visibility, internet searches are more likely to find them.

Links within Wikipedia provide points of discovery. Having multiple points of discovery mean that articles are easier to find. Different users browse or search differently and providing multiple ways for women to be found is important. This can mean using full attribution on citations, cross-linking, or getting involved in other Wikimedia projects.

Ensuring full attribution
Since we are trying to increase the visibility of women on Wikipedia, it's also important to fully credit the sources that you get the information from. Always check your references, especially if you use an automatic reference creator, like the kind we have on Wikipedia. Not all reference fields are populated correctly when using the automatic interface!

Even if the citation doesn't link to a person with a Wikipedia page, it's important that researchers get credit for the work that they do. in addition, information made available on Wikipedia is more likely to be accessed by users.

Books
When citing a book, make sure that the information you are using matches the information on the copyright or verso title page. Newer books often have a Cataloging in Publication record (CIP data) page that include the ISBN, publishing data and information for libraries to import into MARC records.

If you are using a book which has been compiled by editors, our automated tools typically pull in only the editors for book citations, rather than the author of a specific chapter. To properly give credit for the editor, book name, author, and chapter name, be sure that you verify that the information is in the proper fields. If you are using a translated work, you should also give credit to the translator and indicate the translated name. (see examples below).

If you are having trouble finding the data you need, search for the book on WorldCat, also known as OCLC. Find the title and edition of the book you need and the data will usually be available somewhere on the page. (Link to WorldCat.) Early books and journal articles do not have ISBN numbers, but you should include the OCLC number and/or ISSN to help others find specific works and facilities which may house those works.

Sometimes ISBN numbers are given in a single string, but the format actually has meaning. The ten or thirteen-digit number is divided into five sections. These parts can have varying lengths. In the current structure for ISBN-13, the first 3 digits are a prefix, i.e. "978". The next digit identifies the location, so English ISBNs begin with 978-0 or 978-1. The following group of numbers identify the particular publisher. These can be looked up in the Global Register of Publishers Following the publisher are the numbers which identify the title or edition of a title and the last digit field is always a single number.

DOI
Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) can help researchers using Wikipedia find the corresponding journals and other works. Wikipedia is a large referrers of DOI, so adding them helps increase the visibility of the creator(s) of those works. If your work has a DOI, make sure you add it into the field doi=

Cross linking women's works
Does the author of the work you are citing have their own Wikipedia article? Add a link to their Wikipedia page using the field authorlink to provide a wikilink to their page. Pairing last1= with author-link=; editor-last= with editor-link=; or translator-last with translator-link= will provide accurate citations.

Examples
Author:

Editor:

Translator:

Finding works
Finding materials which are behind a paywall or are dated can be difficult. If you repeatedly need information from the same source, you can attempt to obtain a subscription for that source if it is accessible from the Wikipedia Library. If it is a source that you simply need to access for a single article, you can ask for help at the Resource Exchange. For sources which the Resource Exchange is unable to help, you can often obtain copies by utilizing the "Ask a Librarian" key from WorldCat. Look up the source, press the linked title and on the second page where it asks "Find a copy in a library" type in the city. Scroll through the library holdings and look for the entries with "Ask a Librarian". Pressing that link will open a chat and you can communicate with a facility which has the source. It is doubtful that they can provide you with an entire book, but often libraries will provide journal articles or short book chapters.

Linking other works
If you are working on an article about a creator of some sort, whether they are an author, artist, designer or inventor, it can be useful to have access to images of their works. For an author, it is easy to create a bibliography of their writing in their article. If there is an article about one of the books or journal articles, link that as well. For artists, if there are copyright-free images of their work, add those to the article. Patent drawings can also add to the article you are writing.

You can upload images using the Upload Wizard on Wikimedia Commons. Images and works published before 1925 in the United States are usually in the public domain and can be safely uploaded. Like Wikipedia, Commons is patrolled and images that are still protected by copyright will be deleted.

Wikidata
Adding the subject of your article to Wikidata allows cross-linking across different Wikis, including Commons and other language Wikis. There are several ways to add articles to Wikidata and some useful plug-ins that import information into Wikidata. (See Wikidata Tools)

Scholia
Scholia is a project on Wikidata that is working on creating links and visual representations of how scholarly and academic works and their creators are linked to one other. Scholia links researchers, their works and publications together in a visual way. You can add women and their works to Wikidata so that projects like Scholia can access that information.