Women in the public domain | January 2020

Women in the public domain
Online event 1–31 January 2020

The Berne Convention establishes that authors enter the public domain on the following the next January 1st after a certain amount of years (normally 50 to 70) of their death. Activists supporting free access to knowledge and culture have created the " public domain day" as a way to celebrate the fact that different authors enter the public domain on a single date.

The proposal for this activity is to help create and improve articles of the women that are entering in the public domain this year, and also encourage other activities that can take place now with their works: for example, digitize and upload them to Commons, transcribe them in Wikisource, create new Wikidata items for women creators, create new Wikidata items for their works, among other activities.

When: The actual day in which women enter the public domain is on January 1st, but people can edit throughout January.

How: We have created a set of lists that you can use to know which women are entering in the public domain this year. As a way to avoid complexity, we created the lists based on +70 post-mortem calculation (i.e., deaths in 2019). These dates might differ in your country (for example, if you are in Mexico is +100 post-mortem, or if you are in Uruguay or Canada is +50 post-mortem). If you want to create a specific list for your country, you're more than welcome to!

We have created the lists with the main occupation and all the sub occupations of "creator".

Activities:

• Create, improve or translate articles about the women entering into the public domain this year.
• Create new Wikidata items for their works.
• Create new Wikidata items for women creators.
• Digitize their works and upload them to Commons.
• Help convince your local archive, library or museum to digitize & upload their works into Commons!
• Transcribe their works in Wikisource.

Contributors are of course also welcome to add articles on any other notable women who deserve to be covered, for example under our #1day1woman priority.

The main goals of the event are:

• to encourage inexperienced editors and show them how they can contribute to Wikipedia by creating biographies of some of the world's most prominent women
• to draw the attention of more experienced editors to the need for concerted action on a specific area
• to support Wikipedia in combating the systemic bias against the coverage of women and women's works
• to promote the new/improved articles and images through social media (Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter)

What else?

• Below, you'll see a section where you can list the articles you create this month, and another section where you can add the images you have uploaded to Commons.
• This essay on creating women's biographies and our Ten Simple Rules might be helpful to newer editors.
• If you tweet about any of the articles, or upload any of the images to Pinterest, please indicate you have done so next to the article name.