Brown To Host Wikipedia 'Edit-a-Thon' for STEM Equity

Brown University will host an "edit-a-thon" October 15 to help students and other interested individuals create or expand Wikipedia pages for women scientists.

Taking place on Ada Lovelace Day, the edit-a-thon is designed to improve the visibility of women in science.

The event's wiki page includes a list of dozens of entries in need of work or creation, as well as resources about women in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) and Wikipedia editing. Participants are encouraged to use the site to do a little advance research before the edit-a-thon.

"Organizing Wikipedia editing sessions as a means of social change has become a movement on college campuses, including at Brown," according to a school news release. "Wikipedia editing is part of the curriculum of the Modern Culture and Media class 'Dialogues on Feminism and Technology,' taught by visiting lecturer Megan Fernandes."

The medical school at the University of California, San Francisco also offers course credit for students who improve medical content on the online encyclopedia.

"It has a kind of guerilla warfare aspect to it that appeals to me," said Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Biology Anne Fausto-Sterling, who is also one of the event's organizers, in a prepared statement. "I go back to the '60s in terms of my activism. Anybody can do it, but in addition to having metaphoric value it has a real corrective value."

"What we lose by not having a full panoply of information about women scientists is that we continue to perpetuate this idea that this historian had that women haven't done science at the same level as men or are somehow deficient in this area," Added Fausto-Sterling, who was told by a history professor, shortly after she came to Brown in 1971, that hers was the first generation of women scientists.

More information is available at en.wikipedia.org.

About the Author

Joshua Bolkan is contributing editor for Campus Technology, THE Journal and STEAM Universe. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • glowing digital brain interacts with an open book, with stacks of books beside it

    Federal Court Rules AI Training with Copyrighted Books Fair Use

    A federal judge ruled this week that artificial intelligence company Anthropic did not violate copyright law when it used copyrighted books to train its Claude chatbot without author consent, but ordered the company to face trial on allegations it used pirated versions of the books.

  • server racks, a human head with a microchip, data pipes, cloud storage, and analytical symbols

    OpenAI, Oracle Expand AI Infrastructure Partnership

    OpenAI and Oracle have announced they will develop an additional 4.5 gigawatts of data center capacity, expanding their artificial intelligence infrastructure partnership as part of the Stargate Project, a joint venture among OpenAI, Oracle, and Japan's SoftBank Group that aims to deploy 10 gigawatts of computing capacity over four years.

  • laptop displaying a phishing email icon inside a browser window on the screen

    Phishing Campaign Targets ED Grant Portal

    Threat researchers at cybersecurity company BforeAI have identified a phishing campaign spoofing the U.S. Department of Education's G5 grant management portal.

  • stylized illustration of a desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone all displaying an orange AI icon

    Report: AI Shifting from Cloud to PCs

    AI is shifting from the cloud to PCs, offering enhanced productivity, security, and ROI. Key players like Intel, Microsoft (Copilot+ PCs), and Google (Gemini Nano) are driving this on-device AI trend, shaping a crucial hybrid future for IT.