Day 1: The Set Up

I started creating my wikipedia account, settling for the username “Marrychapelle”. I then completed Wikipedia Adventure, which was definitely a ride, I will have to review it again later on. To finish off the day, I watched Tutorials for Editing Wikipedia Pages.

Day 2: The Red List

Looking at the Red List, I spent the day looking for a potential candidate that I would be focusing on. After 2-3 hours of just clicking or seeing whether I would be able to gain more information on any of them, I took a short break. I was interested in learning about the family members of Jose de San Martin but with the limited information, I resigned my goal. In the end, I chose Guadalupe Vázquez Luna who is a Mexican activist, artisana, and councilman representing the Tzotzil people in the national Indigenous Congress (CNI).

Day 3: Trials

I took the chance to look around wikipedia to try new settings now displayed that based on having an account. I looked into the Talk feature and View History Page. Surprisingly for wikipedia, a lot of things had no discussion forms at all. I felt tempted to just start a discussion and say “Hi” but thought back on it and just thought that there wasn’t a point. I was glad to see that Wikipedia Talk:WikiProject Women in Red was active. People were discussing resources they have gathered or plans to further research women. At the time I finished writing this, two new comments emerged.

Day 4: The Edit & Comparison

You never realize how hard it is to search something until you actually have to do it rather than stumbling across a new word and searching it up. I really had no idea what to look for in order to take the step to edit a page, so I took to tiktok and let the magic happen. Lucky for me, an edit of the Walking Dead came up and I took the initiative to search up my favorite actor: Andrew Lincoln. Pressing the “Edit Source” button, I definitely felt an intense amount of pressure and anxiety come up. I felt like the Wikipedia policy would suddenly ban my account and say “Don’t edit!”. But after maneuvering around the flash of code (Tip: Use the “Preview” to visualize the edits as you go), I did my first edit! It was just a switch of words but I never felt so proud. I wanted to update the image but it was too complex for my first time, I’ll come back to it! Also, I didn’t know that after editing, your edit would go under “pending review”, I thought it was editing and that’s it. Now I’m worried that it won’t be liked.

Speaking of Andrew Lincoln, I decided to take the chance to compare his page with that of Danai Gurira who starred as “Michonne” in the Walking Dead series. Already, I could tell there was a difference distributed to the two actors. Although Andrew Lincoln was admittedly the main protagosnigt of the hit-show, Danai Gurira played a huge part in the development of the plot, gaining much love by fans. That being so, a paragraph of Lincoln’s work in the Walking Dead makes sense, but Gurira’s one phrase of her role in the show does not do her any justice. Not to mention that the rest of her recognition are vague and short. Looking at their tittles, we can also see the differences in how they are introduced. Lincoln has his section named “Early Life” while Gurira had “Early Life and Education”. Lincoln had his education included in his description as well. When it comes to references, Gurira had 80 while Lincoln had 50. Despite the first hiccup, the article for Gurira did tend to be looked at a bit more with descriptions of her career outside of acting and her role in activism compared to Lincoln’s short piece titled “Politics”. I then conclude that the comparison between Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira, may not explicitly be impacted by gender bias.

• As of 3.28.23, the edit is still under review.

Day 5:  Research

I took this day to learn more about Guadalupe Vázquez Lun. Using her name in the google search, I was surprised to find quite a bit of basic information about her. Due to her name being in Red, I honestly thought she would be a bit hard to look for, but this only reaffirms the gender inequality in wikipedia where despite information being available, these women activists don’t have their own page. After researching around my “Red Woman ”, I started creating my first wikipedia page (I think it is a page or sandbox might be different). This just consisted of working around the code and playing around with the edits.

Day 6: Documentary

Learning that Guadalupe Vázquez Lun was included in documentary telling of her heritage, I took the time to watch it. It was very interesting and something that I have decided to focus on in her page. If anyone wants to watch it:

Lupita. Que retiemble la tierra

Day 7: Beginning The Process

I continued working on my page, using the video guides on Blackboard as reference. It has proved to be very difficult but bit by bit, I think I am starting to get the hang of it. Working on this, I have to give my gratitude to the Wikipedia writers because this is not easy, it honestly discourages you to write things because it seems too easy to write due to my experience with other websites. Which again brings me to question, why is Wikipedia so complex in making a site? But I’m glad we’re doing this, even though it might not come from professional hands, I believe our sincerity will do good in getting these women’s names out there. 

Day 1: I haven’t created an account on Wikipedia yet, but I found my red name, Jenna Baronette. She is a Canadian and an emergence nurse at the North Bay Regional Health Centre. She is a female activist fighting for sexual trafficking. 

Day 2: I did more search on Jenna Baronette. She was an emergency nurse trained to work for sexual assault and domestic violence victims. She was awarded the Outstanding Service in Women’s Wellness Award in 2015. She brought up sexual trafficking as a huge issue within the Ontario community. She brought attention to this issue and wanted people to help to solve this issue in the community because the majority of the victims were women. 

Day 3: I created a Wikipedia account, my username is Aawaan. I did the Wikipedia Adventure, it helped me to get to know how to use Wikipedia such as editing, leaving a comment, inserting links, pictures etc. 

Day 4: I was looking through some Talk pages on Wikipedia. There was a comment made by a person who said that the page was crap. But underneath that comment, other people said that the page was great. I can see what people thought about a page and can find that some people are biased and some people are more neutral. There are also people adding onto the information to help people to understand better. I also checked out the View History Page, it showed every edit that people had done to this page. It’s kind of interesting to see how many times and what they had edited into the page. 

Day 5: I edited a page which I think needs improvement. It’s an interesting experience to edit on my own. Sometimes it’s kind of confusing but I still got it in the end. 

Day 6: I started to work on writing a page for my red name women. It is hard because there is not much information about her. All I could find was one article that talked about her. But I did manage to find her LinkedIn page, it talked about her education. I guess that is some new information about the red name women.

Day 7: Overall, as a reflection, Wikipedia is kind of hard to use because the system was kind of different from what I had used before. And doing research using Wikipedia was also kind of hard because of the uncertainties. It is hard to tell whether or not it is a biased or neutral point of view and whether or not this information is reliable. Also, finding resources for the red name is hard because there is so little information about them. Some of them did not even have pictures. But the exercise of getting less red names is really meaningful because it shows that people are trying to change the prejudice of society.