Slide 1 - I’d like to welcome everyone to our Women of the Antarctic Wikibomb Events. Thanks so much for coming to our celebration.
My name is Jan Strugnell and I am based at La Trobe University.
Slide 2 - Before we go on any further I would like to thank our incredibly generous sponsors for their support in making this event tonight possible.
I would like to thank the Tinker foundation, La Trobe University, SCAR and the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators for their financial support.
I would also like to thank the Korean Polar Science Institute for their financial support and their strong engagement with this initiative.
I would also like to think the Wikimedia foundation and to all of you who supported this event through our Go fund me Crowd sourcing campaign.
Many people and organisations have given time and support and we thank them also. These organisations include the women in red, Women in Polar Science, APECS, Equal Opportunity Australia and our fantastic volunteers. I thank them all.
The objectives of the Antarctic Women Wikibomb were to:
• - Celebrate the careers and achievements of Antarctic Women
• - Raise the profile of Antarctic Women and by doing this,
• - Provide more visible role models for our Early Career Researchers.
Slide 3 - An initiative like this doesn’t just happen and I have been fortunate in being a member of a strong and passionate committee that has made this Wikibomb happen.
The committee has been fabulous in driving this initiative forward and I want to thank them all for generously giving up their time and for all their work on this project..
In particular Thomas Shafee deserves a special mention. Thomas is a Wikipedian which means that editing and creating content for Wikipedia is his hobby. Fortuitously I met Thomas after this project just begun and asked him if he wanted to be involved. Thomas asked how much wikipedia editing experience myself and the team had. The answer was none! Thomas, whilst trying hard to hide concern at this answer, graciously accepted the challenge and has really guided us through the process of making wikipedia pages. This project would not have not been anywhere near as successful without his guidance, patience, skill and dedication. Thanks so much Thomas for all his efforts and to all the committee for driving this forward.
Slide 4 - This initiative has been driven forward by the SCAR community and I want to thank the SCAR community for nominating women.
We sent the call for nominations went far and wide. We sent several emails to the SCAR community calling for nominations, we had a social media campaign, we called for nominations on the SCAR website, as you registered for this conference you could nominate women. I also personally wrote to all SCAR national committess and to all SCAR delegates asking for nominations from their countries.
We asked for a lot of information in our nominations essential for writing Wikipedia pages. Many of you including super busy directors of institutes, leaders of large groups took the time to find references and nominate influential women. We are grateful for all of you.
We send a big thanks to all the SCAR community for getting behind the wikibomb.
Slide 5 - A huge thank you needs to go to our team of international volunteers made up mostly (but not entirely) of early career researchers.
No one was paid in this initiative and these volunteers gave up their time to make this work. 1000 hours? (how many hours Thomas?)
They spent time searching for references, creating draft pages, reviewing other volunteers pages, uploading pages, translating international references.
I will speak more about their efforts later but I sincerely want to thank them all for their efforts.
Slide 6 - So before we go on I’d like to share a few anecdotes from the early days of this initiative.
Given none of us had any Wikipedia experience – Thomas told us that an easy place to start would be to update an existing page and so one of our keen pages picked one of the few existing pages – that of Diana Wall. Diana has won loads of awards and prizes and much is written about her amazing career on the internet. So our volunteer cut and pasted some great text from the internet uploaded some photos of Diana and we were super please with our result! We were off and running! We had an updated page and were pretty proud of ourselves, until the next day…...
Slide 7 - Diana’s page was completely removed from Wikipedia!
We were devastated! What had happened? This was a low point and I was thinking ‘Nice work Strugnell’, we now have one less page of an Antarctic Woman on wiki.
and Thomas explained that we had effectively plagiarised! And that you can’t cut and paste to make wikipedia articles.
Quickly I set up a subject at La Trobe University to run our drafts through plagiarism detection software – just like we do with undergrads assignments.
And much like an undergrad from this point on we all got very good at paraphrasing!
Slide 8 - And after some fast work, Diana was back up on Wikipedia – phew!
So then it was time to make some biographies from scratch!
In the early days of June I set aside a weekend and uploaded 12 or so biographies prepared by our volunteers and submitted them to Wikipedia and was pretty proud of how we were going.
Slide 9 - But then on Monday morning the rejections starting coming in. The editors said that we hadn’t provided enough references, that we had provided too many references or that we’d used so called ‘peacock’ terms (like distinguished and major) to describe the women we were profiling.
And so quickly we learned that pages aren’t just accepted – like a journal they can be accepted but in many cases ours were rejected with major revisions and we were encouraged to resubmit. So we picked ourselves up and tried again.
But we knew how awesome the women we were profiling were and we went back for searching for the right references and the right number of references to show notability, we learned to not use ‘peacock’ terms and words like ‘recently’. Our volunteers scoured the internet for references in languages other than English, we got really really good at using Google translate, we wrote to the women and the people that nominated them to find the references that we missed. We used these references to prove the notability of the women we wrote pages about and soon the messages started turning green!
Slide 10 - And soon we started getting green messages!
Slide 11 - And our pages started appearing on Wikipedia!
And so tonight we are going to show you what we have accomplished. My initial plan was to profile about 20 notable Antarctic Women, but our efforts have far exceeded our goals and I believe that this has been one of the most successful wikibombs in history.
We are very proud of our efforts and we thank everyone who has been involved in making this so successful.
No before we move on I would like to address the point of whether we have forgotten anyone. Have we forgotten anyone?
Slide 12 - And the fact is of course we have. We know we have missed out on important women.
Our profiles are not an exhaustive list and our initiative is not the end. We certainly aren’t claiming that we have profiled all of the notable Antarctic women and that there never will be anymore.
The door never closes on Wikipedia and this is not the final version. We have far exceeded our goals but it is not ‘finished”
Diana Wall will continue to win awards and her page will need updating, new women are up and coming and are having an important impacts, we have missed some women altogether and our wikibomb has been so successful that there are now way more Antarctic women on Wikipedia than men.
So we want to empower the community to learn how to use wiki and create pages on the World’s largest encyclopedia. Thomas, our wikipedian will be holding sessions throughout the conference to show the community how to get started and for those tht can’t wait we have provided handouts here. So where we have got it wrong, or where you think we’ve missed someone we’ld like to encourage and help you to get involved. Perhaps you would like to profile another women, an influential antarctic man or perhaps just improve the page about ice cores. We are more than happy to help you get started.
Slide 13 - And so enough from me. It’s my great pleasure to Director of AWI, Karin Lochte to say a few words on behalf of SCAR.
I’m pleased to say that we updated Karin’s age which initially looked like this
Slide 14 - To this. Thanks for your attention and I hope you enjoy the evening. Thank you Karin.
Slide 15 -
Slide 16 - Before we go on any further I would like to thank our incredibly generous sponsors for their support in making this event tonight possible.
I would like to thank the Tinker foundation, La Trobe University, SCAR and the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators for their financial support.
I would also like to thank the Korean Polar Science Institute for their financial support and their strong engagement with this initiative.
I would also like to think the Wikimedia foundation and to all of you who supported this event through our Go fund me Crowd sourcing campaign.
Many people and organisations have given time and support and we thank them also. These organisations include the women in red, Women in Polar Science, APECS, Equal Opportunity Australia and our fantastic volunteers. I thank them all.
The objectives of the Antarctic Women Wikibomb were to:
• Celebrate the careers and achievements of Antarctic Women
• Raise the profile of Antarctic Women and by doing this,
• Provide more visible role models for our Early Career Researchers.
Slide 17 - Astonishing that women were entirely absent from a whole continenet for over 100 years.
Even though Klenova was working in Antarctica in the ‘50s, many countries (inc. Britain) only allowed women in the Antarctic in the ‘80s
Slide 18 - Wikipedia has its own gender representation issues
Most editor male
Reflected in biased biogrpahies
Slide 19 - Very few biographies when we started, mostly stubs, with only 3 images total
Slide 20 - Bringing together expertise from disparate communities to achieve what none could do individually.
Slide 21 - Already being translated by us and others into 10 languages
Slide 22 - Between 2-6k reads in 12 hours each
Slide 23 - Contacted subjects themselves to request upload (copyright reasons)
Slide 24 - Tried to avoid too much bias towards English-speaking subjects.
Restricted by nominations but tried to profile as many nations as possible
Slide 25 -
Slide 26 - I know they several volunteers that contributed to this initiative are here in the audience. Can you please stand up if so
Stand up volunteers that are present – round of applause for their efforts.

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