‘Storming Wikipedia’: Colleges offer credit to students who enter ‘feminist thinking’ into Wikipedia

Fifteen universities worldwide — including Yale University, Brown University, and Pennsylvania State University — will offer college credit to students who “write feminist thinking” into Wikipedia.

The program, “Storming Wikipedia,” will be part of the Dialogues on Feminism and Technology online course developed by FemTechNet, an organization of feminist educators and scholars.

Students will be given course credit if they contribute the "feminist thinking" article on Wikipedia.

Approximately 300 students are currently registered for the course, Alexandra Juhasz, professor of media studies at California's Pitzer College and one of the course facilitators, told Campus Reform Thursday.

“A woman's point of view or feminist point of view is not yet expressed in relationship to women in technology in Wikipedia,” she said. “We hope that people engage in this project in respect to other themes as well.”

FemTechNet alleges that many Wikipedia pages are "skewed now toward male participation," citing a 2011 study which found that fewer than 15 percent of Wikipedia contributors were females, according to an article in the Huffington Post. 

It appears that "feminist thinking" is not currently an entry in Wikipedia at all, however there are entries for both "feminism" and "black feminism." 

A goal of the course is “to advance feminist principles of social justice in creating educational models and pedagogies for the future,” according to a FemTechNet news release.

Other participating colleges include Bowling Green State University, California Polytechnic State University, Colby-Sawyer College, The City University of New York Graduate Center, Macaulay Honors College and Lehman College (CUNY), The New School, Ohio State University, Ontario College of Art and Design University, Pitzer College, Rutgers University and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, according to the news release.

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