Art+Feminism is an intersectional feminist non-profit organization that directly addresses the information gap about gender, feminism, and the arts on the internet. Our work is centered on building an equitable global community striving to close the gaps in content and editorial representation on Wikipedia, ensuring that the histories of our lives and work are accessible and accurate.
About
Wikipedia’s gender trouble is well documented. In a 2011 survey, the Wikimedia Foundation found that less than 10% of its contributors identify as female; more recent research puts that number at 16% globally and 23% in the United States. Further, data analysis tools and computational linguistics studies have concluded that Wikipedia has fewer and less extensive articles on women; those same tools have shown gender biases in biographical articles.
This is a problem.
When cis and trans women, non-binary people, people of color, and Indigenous communities are not represented in the writing and editing on the tenth-most-visited site in the world, information about people like us gets skewed and misrepresented. The stories get mistold. We lose out on real history. That’s why we’re here: to change it.
From coffee shops and community centers to the largest museums and universities in the world, Art+Feminism leads a do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others campaign that teaches people of all gender identities and expressions to edit Wikipedia. Informed by critical pedagogy and intersectional feminist organizing principles, Art+Feminism mobilizes, trains and supports a growing global community that collectively creates and updates articles on Wikipedia, adds images to Wikimedia Commons, expands WikiData entries, and more.
Since 2014, over 14,000 people at more than 1,100 events around the world have participated in our edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 58,000 articles on Wikipedia. To date, Art+Feminism supported events at institutions like African Women Development Fund, Accra; Spelman College, Atlanta; Mairangi Arts Centre, Auckland; Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity; Kunstmuseum Basel; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; MAMCO, Geneva; The Menil Collection, Houston; M+, West Kowloon Cultural District and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Kathmandu Living Labs; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz; Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Yale University, New Haven; Interference Archive, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Archives Nationales, Paris; Rome MAXXI; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; University of St. Andrews; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Blitz, Valletta; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Afroleadership, Yaoundé.
Participants created pages for artists like Unity Bainbridge; Tina Charlie; Otelia Cromwell; Zackary Drucker; Akwaeke Emezi; Aurora Reyes Flores; LaToya Ruby Frazier; Che Gossett; Camille Henrot; Heresies Collective; Juliana Huxtable; Liz Magic Laser; Park McArthur; Divya Mehra; Anne Pasternak; and Tuesday Smillie.
Foreign Policy Magazine named the founders Leading Global Thinkers, and publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, Canadian Art covered the project.
Events
All Art+Feminism in-person Edit-a-thons have been canceled, postponed or moved to virtual events until further notice. We’re trying to collectively adapt as we all learn together. We welcome any questions, concerns, or comments. Please email us at info@artandfeminism.org or message us on Slack.
People learn to edit, update, and add articles to Wikipedia at our edit-a-thons. Anyone and everyone interested in learning more about editing Wikipedia, regardless of experience, gender, or background, is welcome to attend. These events are held year-round at museums, coffee shops, colleges, community centers, and elsewhere, though the majority of Art+Feminism edit-a-thons take place in March.
As of March 12, the Wikimedia Foundation sent out a notification that all WMF funded projects (which includes Art+Feminism) must be canceled, postponed or moved to virtual events effective immediately.
Click here to view events taking place virtually.
Click here to share you event details.
Remote Learning
Art+Feminism has tools for teaching with Wikipedia that can be easily adapted for remote learning and remixed to any subject matter. These tools are made for the virtual space, creating a rich opportunity for students to contribute directly to the act of knowledge sharing and information advocacy while honing research and writing skills. Learn how to to incorporate Wikipedia into your lesson plan with our Remote Learning Guide.
Materials
A full re-design of our training and organizing materials is forthcoming. Until then, please visit our meet-up page on Wikipedia to review our current materials.
Safety on Wikimedia Projects
We take safety very seriously in the events we promote, which is why we have a Safe/Brave Space Policy that we demand to be honored by all those who organize an editathon under the flag of Art+Feminism. We have initiated a line of work to develop strategies and tools that help our community deal with and prevent online harassment that may occur as a result of their involvement with Art+Feminism projects. This initiative is a response to the experiences of harassment lived by members of our leadership collective, as well as to the reports that we have received from members of our community over the course of our organization’s history. We know from experience that Wikimedia’s online community is far from being a safe space for everyone, which is why we decided to create a group specifically charged with developing tools to prevent and document incidents of harassment or misbehavior, in order to guide users through the tools already in place via the Wikimedia Foundation. This work has been done in consultation with the Trust and Safety team, as well as the Legal team at the Wikimedia Foundation.
To report incidents of harassment or for any questions please contact: safety@artandfeminism.org.
The security toolkit can be found here. The toolkit contains information on the following topics:
What Art+Feminism can and can’t do
Personal information on Wikimedia projects
Policies around harassment on Wikimedia projects
Useful templates when editing or creating an article
Policies around user interactions
What to do if you are in a dispute with an editor
Instances to make a harassment report to the WMF
People
Board of Directors
Michael Mandiberg
Acting Board President
Artist; Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center
they/them
Sheetal Prajapati
Acting Secretary, Advisory Committee Chair
Faculty, School of Visual Arts; Principal, Lohar Projects
she/her
2020 Advisory Committee
Staff
Lead Co-Organizers
Regional Ambassadors: United States of America
Regional Ambassadors: International
Wiki Regional Ambassador
Founders
Siân Evans
Information Literacy and Instructional Design Librarian, Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA)
she/her
Jacqueline Mabey
Assistant Curator, Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University – Newark; Independent Curator, failed projects
they/them
Michael Mandiberg
Artist; Professor of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island/CUNY and Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center
they/them
Opportunities
Request for Proposals: Website Redesign
Project Overview
Art+Feminism is seeking to contract a web developer to build a new WordPress website and create data integration solutions in order to streamline our organizing tools and workflows. The budget for this project is $25,000.
Proposal Deadline
Thursday, July 9, 2020
Company Overview
Art+Feminism is a non-profit that works to improve coverage of gender, feminism, and the arts on Wikipedia. Art+Feminism creates accessible, Creative Commons licensed training materials and step-by-step organizer kits to foster the organization of edit-a-thons, events where people of all gender identities and expressions collectively create and update articles on Wikipedia, add images to Wikimedia Commons, expand WikiData entries, and more. These events are often accompanied by programming such as talks and workshops that contextualize the concerns and concepts that inform the project. Since its founding in 2014, over 14,000 people at more than 1,100 events around the world have participated in our edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 58,000 articles on Wikipedia.
Website Audience
The audience consists of existing and prospective members of the Art+Feminism community. They visit the site to learn more about Art+Feminism, download training and organizing materials, watch training videos, and add their events to the list of edit-a-thons. Our community is made up of artists, art workers, educators, museum-goers, activists, librarians, university students, and more, hailing from 83 countries around the world.
New Website Objectives
The objective of our website re-design is to create an intuitive interface that empowers visitors to utilize the materials we have created and note their participation in the community.
Current Website
Our current website, http://www.artandfeminism.org/, is a temporary, stopgap measure, as the previous version became unusable.
The previous website, https://dev.artandfeminism.org/ (password: gendergap), was built in 2016, based off of a UX/UI Review (see Further Links). It is a custom WordPress theme that was not built as a child theme, so it lacks some basic infrastructure (e.g. blog section is produced with a plugin). It hosts training materials and allows organizers to submit events, which a member of the Art+Feminism team must review and approve. At present, certain aspects of the code have ceased to function as designed. For example, previously, when users would submit an event listing, a copy of the details would be sent via email to the Art+Feminism general inbox; this function is no longer operational. Additionally, the use scenarios have changed, as our volume of events has grown fivefold to about 300 events per year. Some pain points include the difficulty of updating event posts, dealing with multiple posts, finding images for posts, linking directly to posts, accurate search/filter of posts, and the vulnerability of the system sending an email for the notification (and as the “paper trail” backup). Also, we will need you to transfer our server from one Dreamhost account to another.
New Website Functionality Requirements
The new theme must have the capacity for visitors to the site to publish and update their event listings, without requiring administrative approval
Each event must be an individual page
Better location sorting for the event overview page
Blog capacity
Ecommerce functionality to sell merchandise and receive donations
Easier to use custom fields (e.g. Elementor)
Translation function so that the visitor can read the site in their language
Re-design must be WCAG 2.1 compliant
The theme must conform to Art+Feminism Brand Guidelines
The new theme must migrate or preserve existing content, specifically events and blog posts
Build integrations across a series of platforms (Streak, WordPress, Wiki Education Foundation’s Programs and Events Dashboard, Airtable) so that we can automatically sync data
Site is responsive in mobile devices
Ideal Candidate
You are excited about collaborating on creative, outside-of-the-box data solutions. You’re not afraid to ask questions and challenge the status quo. Expertise you currently hold may relate to WordPress, UX/UI Engineer, UX/UI Designer, Full Stack Engineer/Developer.
Proposal Requirements
Applicants must have a US tax ID.
Interested applicants will need to complete a form that includes: contact information, mission and value alignment responses (questions listed below), references, and upload a PDF attachment.
PDF Attachment (on the form):
One PDF document that includes a proposal (including a line-item budget, and timeline) and portfolio (with no identifying information). In efforts to reduce bias, the form system will remove contact information for first-level screening. Not having identifying information (name, email address, website) on your PDF helps us in this process.
Mission & value alignment questions (on the form):
Please provide a brief statement on your relationship to intersectional feminist and anti-racist work.
Please list any organizations you have worked with on a professional or volunteer level that apply intersectional feminist and/or anti-racist practices. Membership to organizations doing the above work also applies.
Only applications submitted by a form will be considered. For questions or technical issues with the form, please email opportunities@artandfeminism.org.
Art+Feminism values a diverse workforce. We strongly encourage and seek applications from people with disabilities, women, non-binary/trans, people of color, including bilingual and bicultural individuals, veterans, and LGBTQI individuals.
Further Links
Website
http://www.artandfeminism.org/
https://dev.artandfeminism.org
2016 UX/UI Review
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/ArtAndFeminism_UX_and_UI_Review.pdf
Brand Guidelines
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ArtandFeminism_BrandGuide_2015_FINAL.pdf
Promotional Images
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ArtAndFeminism_Promotional_Images
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ArtAndFeminism_Call_to_Action_Art_Commission
