The College of Southern Nevada is celebrating Women’s History Month by dishing up some extra schoolwork.
Students, staff, and faculty were invited to participate in a two-day Wikipedia edit-a-thon to bolster the information about Nevada women in the online encyclopedia.
“Building public knowledge via the Wikipedia platform is a critical component of centering the often marginalized women, as Wikipedia is the world’s seventh most-read website,” the college said in announcing the project.
The event is sponsored by the CSN Libraries, CSN Women’s Alliance and the college’s office of community relations, diversity and multicultural affairs.
The edit-a-thon started last week at the college’s Henderson campus and continues on Friday at the West Charleston Boulevard campus.
CSN Libraries Director Beth Schuck and history Professor Sondra Cosgrove, who helped organize the effort, plan for it to be an annual event.
While Wikipedia is looked down upon as a good source of information by most academics, Schuck and Cosgrove admit it is the first stop for information by many people.
Which is why they saw it as a great way to fill in blanks in Nevada's history, especially around women who helped and continue to help build the state.
“While there maybe more rich articles about men politicians in Nevada, the ones on women politicians in Nevada either don’t exist or are just very short,” Schuck said.
Cosgrove said the project allows students to find Nevada women who are not found in many official state records, but they can be found in other records like those belonging to churches, ministries, women's clubs and orphanages
“There’s all kinds of ways you can bring women in, doing what we would consider to be ‘women’s work’ but it’s important so that you don’t think that the only women in Nevada in the early days were prostitutes,” she said.
Schuck hopes the event will get students excited about becoming experts on a person or an historic event and maintain that Wikipedia article.
Find more information here.
Beth Schuck, director of CSN Libraries; Sondra Cosgrove, CSN history professor