Come learn how to write a Wikipedia entry about women in architecture at the AWA+D #wikiD Writing Workshop on Saturday, October 22, 2016 at 1pm at Woodbury University’s Burbank Library. Wikipedia training begins the workshop on how to write and edit Wikipedia entries, followed by entry writing. Bring your laptop, power cord, and published information (bios, books, articles, etc.) on women about whom you would like to write. You will also have access to resources and collections at the Woodbury Library. RSVP by Friday, October 14, 2016 to [email protected]
This workshop is hosted by the Association for Women in Architecture and Design and is part of a global campaign for improving and increasing Wikipedia articles pertaining to the lives and works of women in architecture and the built environment.
Since architecture and allied disciplines became professions in 1857, women’s widespread contributions to practice and design have largely been misattributed, overlooked, or undocumented all together. Reliable statistics on women’s place in architecture traditionally has been difficult to find.
“Forgetting women architects has also been imbedded in the very models we use for writing architectural history.”—Despina Stratigakos
Women have designed, created, innovated, developed, founded, constructed, maintained, and influenced all aspects of architecture practice, pedagogy, and preservation throughout history. The traditional invisibility of women in architectural history does not reflect their essential roles in the A & D professions, nor their contributions to pivotal movements.
Correcting our suppressed histories enables women to emerge as important players in our analysis of the past; it reshapes our understanding and collective memory; it adds lost voices to the record. By writing women into Wikipedia, our focus is broadened, enlightened, comprehensive, more nuanced, and accurate.
Who better than today’s students of architecture and design to reconstruct the female dimensions of architectural achievement, and recover our record of authority and legitimacy? Writing women into Wikipedia is a call to action, an archival documentation project vital to preserving our legacies, and building a more accurate perception of women’s participation in architecture and the built environment disciplines. As the Association for Women in Architecture and Design’s mission is “to advance and support women in the allied fields of architecture and design”, we are uniquely poised and obliged to participate in this global mission.