My name is Amber Berson, and in addition to being a writer, curator, and PhD student, I’m the Canadian ambassador for the Art+Feminism Wikipedia project. I’ve been working with Art+Feminism since 2014 to help train more female-identifying editors, and to generate more and better feminist content on Wikipedia. If you’re an artist or other type of creative professional, you may have wondered what it takes to get your own Wikipedia page. And, if you already have a Wikipedia page, you may have wondered how to change the information on your page to make it more accurate (or more flattering!). The tips in this guide are intended to help you understand Wikipedia’s guidelines and policies, and learn more about how you can approach digital archiving, conflict resolution, adding content to the Commons, etc. Hopefully, with all the information presented here, you’ll be able to have the best Wikipedia page possible.</i>
What is Wikipedia, and who writes it?
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. More than that, it’s the world’s free online encyclopedia, accessed by nearly 500 million unique visitors each month in more than 250 languages. The English version of Wikipedia hosts more than 4.5 million articles, all of them collaboratively authored and edited by volunteers. If there’s an article about you and your work, it’s because someone took the time to make one.
How Wikipedia works
Wikipedia is a publicly generated resource. Anyone, anywhere can edit (almost) any article at any time. This means that once a page goes live, volunteer editors are able to edit and add to a page forever (although, there are also a small number of protected or locked Wikipedia pages that require special permission to edit, mainly for controversial topics or templates).
Anyone can become an editor on Wikipedia in order to modify existing pages or to create new ones. Editors can also contribute by translating articles (Wikipedia even offers a really cool content-translator tool) and by adding material to Wikimedia Commons—a collection of over 45,184,580 (and growing!) freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.
To create a new page, all you need to do is create an account on Wikipedia and then add your new article. While only registered and signed-in users can create pages, anyone can modify a page, and the edits are simply attributed to their IP address. In addition to volunteer editors, Wikipedia employs bots to scan edits for plagiarism and carry out other mundane and repetitive tasks such as checking for typos.
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From The Creative Independent, here.
