Tag Archives: Wikipedia

Celebrate women in science on Oct. 15, 2013 and participate in a Wikipedia: Ada Lovelace Day 2013 edit-a-thon

Founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson, Ada Lovelace Day (Oct. 15) is on its way to realizing its goal of bringing more recognition to and celebrating women in science. From Charman-Anderson’s Oct. 15, 2013 posting for the Guardian Science blogs (Note: Links have been removed),

When I started the day five years ago, my goal was to collect these stories not only to inspire girls to study the STEM subjects, but also to provide support to women pursuing careers in these usually male-dominated fields.

Ada Lovelace is the ideal figurehead for this project: She was the world’s first computer programmer, and the first person to realise that a general purpose computing machine such as Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine could do more than just calculate large tables of numbers. It could, she said, create music and art, given the right inputs. The Analytical Engine, she wrote, “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”.

This daughter of “mad, bad and dangerous to know” Lord Byron achieved this distinction despite the fierce prejudices of the 19th Century. Her tutor Augustus De Morgan echoed the accepted view of the time when he said that maths problems presented “a very great tension of mind beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power”.

But Ada persevered in her studies, and De Morgan recognised her brilliance when he said that had she been a man, she would have had the potential to become “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence”.

Sydney Brownstone has written an Oct. 15, 2013 article about an Ada Lovelace Day Wikipedia event (on the Fast Company website; Note: Links have been removed),

Take Wikipedia, for example. Despite the fact that our communal encyclopedia provides a wealth of accessible information, women make up fewer than 15% of the project’s editors. (For further information, see the Wikipedia article “Wikipedia: Systemic bias.”) Oftentimes, the lack of gender parity results in a dearth of articles about, or including, important female figures in society. That’s what science journalist and BrainPOP news director Maia Weinstock found when she started editing Wikipedia articles back in 2007: Women who should be included in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) achievement canon were simply missing from the archives. Or, when they were included, their stories were often stubs that left out the magnitude of their contributions.

In attempt to rectify some of these wrongs, Weinstock organized a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon held on last year’s Ada Lovelace day, a holiday dedicated to celebrating achievements of women in STEM fields, named for the pioneering 19th-century scientist (who, thankfully, has an extensive Wikipedia entry). Today [Oct. 15, 2013], Weinstock is organizing another round of editing at Brown University, in which some 40 contributors will help write articles from scratch or expand stubs on women pioneers. [emphasis mine]

In addition to the meetup at Brown University (Rhode Island, US), remote participation is also being encouraged in the Edit-a-thon from 3 pm to 8:30 pm EDT today (Oct. 15, 2013). You can find out more about the event (in person or remote) on this page: Wikipedia:Meetup/Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon 2013 – Brown.

Brava to all women involved in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) everywhere!

Single source info and corporate concentration of ownership

A few posts back (Feb.6, 2009) I talked about corporate concentration of ownership of media and the impact that has on information-gathering. My example was the Environment Canada nanotechnology information-gathering exercise that was announced, oddly, by the US-based Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies and written about in an article by John Cotter for Canadian Press. It’s a little more complicated than just ‘corporate concentration’ but I’ll start there.

Media conglomerates own newspapers, radio and tv stations, and various internet properties and it’s usually understood that the corporate owners are going to represent their interests in the stories that are published and broadcast. Not all corporate owners have the same perspective, however with fewer owners there are fewer perspectives. When you add the cost incentive to centralize research and news gathering so that one article can be the source for newspapers and radio and tv and the internet (as per John Cotter’s article), it’s obvious that there’s another shrinkage of perspective and source for factual information.

Interestingly, Wikipedia (it’s not a corporate media conglomerate!) provides an object lesson on what happens when everyone is relying on a single source.  An article on Techdirt casts a light on a situation involving Germany’s new minister of economic affairs. He has an extraordinarily long name which was written up in an article on Wikipedia that reporters used as their source. when writing up his name. Unfortunately, someone played a trick and introduced an error into the name and the incorrect version got published in newspapers. It gets funny when Wikipedia corrects the error but someone changes the name back to the wrong version because they saw an article in the paper, which they took to be the authoritative and correct version of the name. Do read the article.

It’s tough to get the facts right but it sure helps if you understand some of the problems you can right into despite your best efforts and these things serve as good reminder to myself because it’s so easy to forget.

Meanwhile for something completely different, there’s a call for papers from Nanoethics Asia 2009 (to be held Aug. 26-28,2009 at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand)

The purpose of the Workshop is to stimulate and gather ground breaking research in all areas related to the ethical, social, cultural, and legal implications of what is broadly construed as “nanotechnology, ” especially as these implications arise from within the contexts of Asia and other non- Western regions.

You can go here for more information.

At some point in the next few weeks I will be updating things on the website. Hopefully, this will be a relatively painless process.