Abstract
June is LGBTQIA+ Pride Month! Join the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee of LGBTQIA+ Issues in Linguistics (COZIL) for a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon (what we in the biz call a LingWiki) to celebrate queerness and transness in linguistics and make information in these areas more widely available to the world. Wikipedia articles are the top search results for most topics, and yet many of these articles are incomplete, out of date, have few or no citations, or don’t mention active research efforts. Academics can use their access to university libraries and training with scholarly sources to improve public knowledge of important concepts related to gender and sexuality. Queer and trans folks interested in linguistics can bring a queer and trans perspective to linguistics and a linguistic perspective to queerness and transness, and we hope to make the presence of work that highlights that prominent. We encourage all kinds of edits, in any domain or subfield.
During this event, we’ll go over how to edit Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia sister projects such as Wiktionary, WikiData, etc. should there be interest) from the basics. There are some ideas that are important to understand, like the need for attestation of information in some form, but we hope to show very clearly that Wikipedia and its offshoots are not only easy to improve but also worth contributing to.
The past two years’ events involved editing over 120 articles, adding over 100 references, and even creating 15 articles. We’re so excited to see what will come of this year!
NB: This event is meant to highlight queer and trans topics and people on Wikipedia, but participation is not by any means limited to queer and trans people. Everyone is welcome to contribute!
(Session 1: Wednesday, June 21, 3:00-5:00pm)
Location: ILC S240
Organizer: Sunkulp Ananthanarayan
Sunkulp (“Sunny”) Ananthanarayan is currently a post-baccalaureate researcher at Yale University working with Claire Bowern and the Historical Linguistics lab/Chirila archive. Sunny is working on building digital tools for language work, oriented toward language users as well as those who work with them (both as members and outsiders). Sunny’s BA was from the University of Texas at Austin, where he focussed largely on language documentation. Since 2015, he’s been involved with linguistics-oriented Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons as a part of an effort to encourage the dissemination of knowledge past academic circles. This coming fall, he’ll be beginning in the linguistics PhD program at the University of Washington.