Wikipedia Edit-a-thon DC: Ada Lovelace Day Edition

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day to celebrate the contributions of self-identifying women to science, technology, engineering, and math. So to celebrate their achievements, 500 Women Scientists and our allies, as well as the DC Science Writer’s Association, are gathering at the West End DC Public Library on Saturday, October 13th to share their work on Wikipedia’s pages.

While Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website in the world, notching up more than 32 million views a day, less than 18% of its English-language biographies are about women. So in honor of Ada Lovelace—and her contributions to mathematics and computing—we’ll work to add more entries to Wikipedia and give you the tools to keep making the Internet less sexist after our Wiki-thon. All you have to do is come armed with a laptop or tablet!

We ask participants to only do a few things before October 13th:

1. Come with your laptop or tablet.
2. Create a Wikipedia account here.
3. Make your edits count! Register on our dashboard to track our collective edits and measure our impact as Wiki-thons take place around the world over the week.
4. (Optional) If you’d like to do some training on how to edit beforehand to familiarize yourself, you can check out a tutorial here. Of course, we’ll go over the ins and outs of editing during the event as well so this is totally optional!

To read more about why editing Wikipedia is such a powerful tool to combat gender inequity in science, you can check out this editorial in Nature.