Women in Wikimedia

A month ago I headed across the Bay to San Francisco for the second San Francisco WikiWomen's Edit-a-Thon. I met a lot of awesome people there and had some really good conversations about Wikipedia, information, and gender, among other things. I also, over the course of about three hours, transformed approximately a semester's worth of research into a five-paragraph article on Takamure Itsue, the pioneering Japanese feminist historian. (Along the way, I discovered that the earlier article stub had plagiarized a sentence wholesale from the Sonia Ryang article listed in the references.)

I know a lot of academics are highly suspicious of Wikipedia, not always for what I would consider the right reasons. But, especially after hearing Jimmy Wales speak at the Wikimania opening reception last week in Washington, DC, I do think that it's important that academics not shut what we know up in our ivory towers - not just for the sake of the knowledge that we create and love, or even for ourselves, but for everyone else in the world who could benefit from that knowledge, too.