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Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Women's History month lead by Odia Wikimedians

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Title ideas

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  • Odia Wikipedia organised the second edition of Women's History month edit-a-thon.
  • Participation of new members of the Odia Wikipedia community made the edit-a-thon successful.

Summary

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Improving Women achiever articles on Odia Wikipedia through Edit-a-thons and experience of the first time edit-a-thon participants.

Body

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Women's History Month Edit-a-thon logo. logo by Sailesh Patnaik and Subhashish Panigrahi, CC-BY-SA 4.0
Wikimedian Rajalaxmi Mishra during 3rd Bhubaneswar WikiTungi meetup. Image by Gyan Sahu shared under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Wikimedian Bapuji during 3rd Bhubaneswar WikiTungi meet-up. Image by Gyan Sahu shared under CC-BY-SA 4.0
Gender diversity in Odia Wikimedia community during 2014-16. For this statistics Odia Wikipedia and Odia Wikisource have been considered.

On 8 March 2016, Odia Wikimedians initiated the second edition of Women's History Month Edit-a-thon. Like the last year's Women's History Month 2015 Edit-a-thon this year's Edit-a-thon is also considered as one of the successful Edit-a-thons on Odia Wikipedia in terms of the number of participants and number of articles created or improved. All total twenty new articles were created and more than ten articles were improved during the Edit-a-thon month. The objective of the Edit-a-thon was focused on creating and editing articles on women achievers and the theme was based on Women I am inspired from. A Dozen of participants participated in this and of them seven were female editors. The increase in a number of female participants also encouraged in forming an informal group for female editors on Odia Wikipedia.

Throughout the month of December 2015 Odia Wikimedia projects saw an increase in the number of female editors, so this thematic Edit-a-thon was an approach to connect female editors on Odia Wikimedia projects. In Women's History month edit-a-thon there were eight participants those participated in any edit-a-thon for the first time. We reached out to Wikimedians Rajalaxmi Mishra(RM) and Bapuji Behera after the Edit-a-thon. Rajalaxmi and Bapuji shares their experiences:


Rajalaxmi Mishra(RM) is an MCA student and she's associated with Odia Wikipedia after an Utkal University workshop. After the mentioned workshop, she has been one of the active editors on Odia Wikipedia and has recently placed her article Annie Besant on top 10 longest articles on Odia Wikipedia. She started the Annie Besant article during the Edit-a-thon and has also created one more article in this Edit-a-thon. According to her she got to know about the Edit-a-thon from her fellow Wikimedian Sailesh Patnaik(SP) and as it was her first Edit-a-thon, She was excited to participate in it. She has written both the article using content translation tool.

  • SP: Why did you chose articles on Annie Besant and Sudha Chandran?
  • RM: I wrote an article on Annie Besant because she has always inspired me from her personality and writing an article on her has also helped me in learning more from her life story. Sudha Chandran's achievements in her life have always inspired me, she had never let her problem as a barrier and She is one of the famous dancers in India.
  • SP: How was your experience in this Edit-a-thon?
  • RM: This was the first time I have participated in any Edit-a-thon and as the Edit-a-thon allowed me to write about the Women I am inspired from, so I got to know more about them and their successes or failures, which will help me in every part of my life. I would also like to thank Odia community for encouraging me and helping me.

Bapuji Behera is also an MCA student and was involved with Wikimedia projects after Utkal University workshop. He has written two articles during this Edit-a-thon. Bapuji shares that as many of his friends started editing on Wikipedia, He was attracted to Wikimedia projects. He got to know about the Edit-a-thon from one of his fellow Wikimedian friends. During the workshop he was trained on how to use the content translation tool, so he created both the articles using the tool.

Thematic Edit-a-thons assists in increasing the participation of community members on Wikipedia and further helps in involving and supporting new Wikimedians. From the last two edit-a-thon based on Women's History month theme, the Odia Wikimedia community has actively participated in it and helped to record the women achievers of our society.

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Sailesh Patnaik, Access To Knowledge, Centre for Internet and Society

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