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ABOUT | EVENTS | RESOURCES | PRESS |
Just For The Record is happy to announce a new duo of events entitled Bots, robots, cyborgs, exploring the writing of non-human agents like the bots on Wikipedia.
If recent studies have shown that women represent a very small minority amongst the contributors of Wikipedia, other studies also show that a majority of its most active and founding contributors were and are non-human actors called bots, who seem to escape the gendered binary that we apply to human bodies.
Since the creation of the internet, some people have seen in the cyberspace a promise to go beyond gender, race and class. A space to construct an “empowering virtual reality”, as Essex Hemphill phrased it in his conference On the Shores of Cyberspace, Black Nations/Queer Nation? in 1995. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Harraway presented the figure of the Cyborg as a post-gender, fragmented identity. She invited feminists to get involved with technology. Yet these same researchers noted already that off-line boundaries also exist in cyberspace. Since then researchers have noted the many ways in which on-line representations are structured around gender, race and class.
In our two upcoming events, we will take as object the Wikipedia bot: what is the gender of this denizen of cyberspace? Can the bot ever be, like Wikipedia wants itself to be, neutral?
During the event, we invite you to contribute to Wikipedia and to the discussions around the gender gap on Wikipedia. You can edit an existing article to improve it, create a new one about a subject that doesn’t exist, but we also highly value the sharing of editing experiences, and ideas about what could make Wikipedia a more welcoming and colorful place!
Here are interrogations we would like to share with you:
Here are lists identifying articles that could benefit from edits and expansion:
The page Writing about women offers great insights. Look for the following problems in existing pages and try to fix them:
Sign here to help us learn more about how users interact with Wikipedia! If you sign up, we can observe how your username uses the Wikimedia projects during and after this event. This will help us to better measure the effectiveness of this event and similar programs. This means that your publicly available activity and the information you share with us during this event may be processed by the Wikimedia Foundation, Art+Feminism, and the organizers of the local event, and may be transferred to or from the US and other countries that may not have the same level of privacy regulation that your country does. However, we will not share your information with third parties or publicly unless it's in aggregated or anonymized form.
Prior to the event:
Bots, Robots and Cyborgs - Part 1 10.06.2016: 17 people present
Bots, Robots and Cyborgs - Part 2 18.06.2016: 26 people present
![]() |
ABOUT | EVENTS | RESOURCES | PRESS |
Just For The Record is happy to announce a new duo of events entitled Bots, robots, cyborgs, exploring the writing of non-human agents like the bots on Wikipedia.
If recent studies have shown that women represent a very small minority amongst the contributors of Wikipedia, other studies also show that a majority of its most active and founding contributors were and are non-human actors called bots, who seem to escape the gendered binary that we apply to human bodies.
Since the creation of the internet, some people have seen in the cyberspace a promise to go beyond gender, race and class. A space to construct an “empowering virtual reality”, as Essex Hemphill phrased it in his conference On the Shores of Cyberspace, Black Nations/Queer Nation? in 1995. In her Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Harraway presented the figure of the Cyborg as a post-gender, fragmented identity. She invited feminists to get involved with technology. Yet these same researchers noted already that off-line boundaries also exist in cyberspace. Since then researchers have noted the many ways in which on-line representations are structured around gender, race and class.
In our two upcoming events, we will take as object the Wikipedia bot: what is the gender of this denizen of cyberspace? Can the bot ever be, like Wikipedia wants itself to be, neutral?
During the event, we invite you to contribute to Wikipedia and to the discussions around the gender gap on Wikipedia. You can edit an existing article to improve it, create a new one about a subject that doesn’t exist, but we also highly value the sharing of editing experiences, and ideas about what could make Wikipedia a more welcoming and colorful place!
Here are interrogations we would like to share with you:
Here are lists identifying articles that could benefit from edits and expansion:
The page Writing about women offers great insights. Look for the following problems in existing pages and try to fix them:
Sign here to help us learn more about how users interact with Wikipedia! If you sign up, we can observe how your username uses the Wikimedia projects during and after this event. This will help us to better measure the effectiveness of this event and similar programs. This means that your publicly available activity and the information you share with us during this event may be processed by the Wikimedia Foundation, Art+Feminism, and the organizers of the local event, and may be transferred to or from the US and other countries that may not have the same level of privacy regulation that your country does. However, we will not share your information with third parties or publicly unless it's in aggregated or anonymized form.
Prior to the event:
Bots, Robots and Cyborgs - Part 1 10.06.2016: 17 people present
Bots, Robots and Cyborgs - Part 2 18.06.2016: 26 people present