User:Sslwelland/Global Feminist Art

Course name

Global Feminist Art

Institution

University of Washington

Instructor

Sasha Welland

Subject

Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and Anthropology

Course dates

2015-03-30 – 2015-06-12

Approximate number of student editors

120

This course "introduces feminism as a way of thinking about visual art practice in terms of social hierarchy, aesthetic form, and ideology. Explores how feminist artists working in diverse locations and cultural traditions challenge, at the local and global level, artistic conventions and representations of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality."

For our Wikipedia project, students will be identifying Wikipedia gaps and providing documentation to help fill them. Students will think critically about how Wikipedia in its current formation structurally limits knowledge about feminism and art, and then to contribute to changing this situation.

Each student will identify a gap in Wikipedia coverage for a course-related topic — such an artist, topic, concept, or movement. The student will then post an entry to the course project page to describe the gap, propose text to fill the gap, and list sources that could be used to fill it.

Wikipedia Gap Analysis

Assignment (due May 14, 2015)

1. Create a user account on Wikipedia and enroll in this course page.
2. Complete the first two modules (Welcome and The Core) of the Wikipedia Training for Students. Also review in more detail Wikipedia's guidelines on identifying reliable sources and on notability (which describes the requirements for a topic to have its own article).
3. Identify a course-related artist, topic, concept, or movement. You can begin with material discussed in class but are also encouraged to move beyond it, following your own interests. Check out, for example:

   • additional books of interest on reserve for the course (see syllabus for titles)
   • links provided on the course website
   • Art + Feminism’s Additional Resources: http://art.plusfeminism.org/resources/more
   • the journal n.paradox: international feminist art journal (a subscription for the UW Library has been ordered)
   • Wikipedia’s Category for "Feminism and the arts": Category:Feminism and the arts

4. Search Wikipedia for coverage of your selected topic. What do you find? Can you identify any gaps? (If not, you may want to think about another topic. Give yourself some time to explore a variety of ideas.) Examples of Wikipedia article gaps:

   • Artists: There is no page for the artist you are interested in; the information on the page is sparse or limited; there aren’t links in the article to movements or forms of art they contributed to; there is a link to male artists they were in conversation with, but not vice versa.
   • Media and Movements: The media (e.g. performance art) or the movement (e.g. British Black Arts Movement) does not include significant or relevant feminist artists, events, works, or concepts; there are missing links between artist and movement articles.
   • Ideological gaps: As recently as 2013, Male novelists were are categorized as “American novelists,” whereas female novelists are listed under the subcategory of “American women Novelists” with no equivalent subcategory of “American Men Novelists.” See: this New York Times story and the ensuing discussions on Wikipedia about how to categorize novelists here and here.

5. Once you have identified a gap, write a paragraph (approx. 250 words) that documents this gap, describes how you found it, and analyzes how this gap limits knowledge or structures it in a particular way along axes of power such as gender, sexuality, race, class, nationality, etc.
6. Think about how you would fill this gap and research at least five reliable sources as defined by the Wikipedia community. Working from these resources, write at least one paragraph (approx. 250 words) that provides new content to fill the gap. This paragraph can take different forms. It can be the beginning of a new article for an artist or movement not currently represented in Wikipedia. It can be an addition to a pre-existing article. Or it can be a proposed rewrite of a pre-existing article section, in which case you will want to post the current version along with your rewritten version.
7. Document your sources according to Wikipedia conventions on citing sources. If they are online sources, please hyperlink them.
8. Type in the topic of the gap you identified, click "Submit Gap Analysis", add your answers, then click "Save page" to submit your response.

9. Go to your Contributions page and find your Global Feminist Art gap analysis edit in the list of contributions. Click the "diff" link for that edit, which should show what you added as your gap analysis. Copy that "diff" URL to submit to Canvas.