As a clear up, the data being collected for many countries right now is
very limited and is about benchmarking.  Does it make sense that there are
no women from Chad or Bangladesh or Chile contributing to and being
involved with leadership on English or German Wikiversity?  Absolutely.  It
is still worth noting to have these benchmarks.  You don't understand the
bigger picture until you have all the data.  You can get a good idea of the
forest you're describing by documenting all the trees and wildlife and
other parts of it. Again, please contribute to
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:WikiWomenCamp_-_women_perspective_by_countryand
improve these. :) If you know in your pocket of Wikimedia that no
women
from a particular area contribute or the content is now great, then say so.
 There is nothing wrong with it.  This gives us areas we can improve and
better understand where we are successful.

That said, Australia. ;)  As this is long and the text with all the
formatting would kick it to moderation, posting link free.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomenCamp/FAQ/Perspectives/Australia


Australian women have been editing Wikimedia projects since Wikipedia was
founded in 2001. Among the first were Claudine Chionh and Karen Johnson on
the English Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia has had five female
administrators from Australia, and one Australian woman on its Arbitration
Committee: Rebecca. Australian traffic accounts for 1.8% of all global
traffic to Wikipedia, on par with the amount of traffic India provides.[1]

Wikimedia Australia currently has two women on the board, Vice President
Laura Hale and Secretary Anne Frazer. The chapter's first president,
Brianna Laugher, is female and women have always had at least one place on
the board.[2] Sarah Ewart was the board's longest serving member. When the
chapter was first founded in 2008, there were five female members, 13.8% of
the total membership. This increased to eleven female members in 2009,
23.4% of the total membership. In 2010, this number dropped to four total
female members, 12% of total members.[3]

Women have frequently been participants in meetups around the country,
though their participation, like that of their male counterparts, is
dwindling. For example, in 2007, a Canberra meetup had roughly forty people
attend, of which half were women. In 2011, a Canberra meetup was held with
around nine people attending of which two were women. RecentChangesCamp has
become Australia's national wiki conference. In 2011, there were five
female participants out of twenty total with the conference primarily being
organised by one man and one woman. The 2012 conference is predicted to
have a similar gender composition. Women attended only two of Australia's
Wikipedia 10 year birthday celebrations: Canberra and Perth, although the
three Perth female attendees were not Wikipedia editors.

In 2011 Wikimedia Australia sponsored Ada Camp Melbourne which will take
place in January 2012. This women-only conference is dedicated to helping
and promoting women involved in the open-technology movement. One of
Wikimedia Australia's board members and a chapter member will
participate.[4]

There were grassroots efforts by some Australian women to increase female
participation on Wikipedia. This was done by non-members of Wikimedia
Australia, which included two presentations before groups of women at a
meeting, a mini-workshop at a female owned coffee shop in Canberra and at
least one radio appearance. There were efforts to integrate the Australian
female led efforts into the Wikimedia framework by having them join the
gender gap list. Shortly after they joined, in response to a situation on
the list, these women ended their outreach efforts and efforts to re-engage
them have been unsuccessful. In December 2011, there were 40,580 women of
all ages from Australia who were interested in Wikipedia on Facebook.[5] In
December 2011, according to Alexa, Wikipedia was ranked the 7the most
popular site in the country.[6]
Australian content for women on English Wikipedia is strong in terms of
covering women's sport and female politicians though the men's content
often is much better and there is more of it. Content related to
Australia's feminist movement needs a lot of improvement. Netball is one of
Australia's most popular participation sports for women. There are a
relatively large number of articles about this sport in Australia. Over the
past year, the Australian netball articles are mostly maintained by a very
active female New Zealand editor with Australian IP addresses providing
some support. On English Wikipedia, there are 11 articles about roller
derby leagues from this country. Australia has a female Prime Minister,
Julia Gillard. The article about her is the 71st most popular in the
English Wikipedia's Wikiproject Women's History most popular article list,
having received 100,226 views in November 2011. However her article is only
assessed as a C class article. Australia's female Governor General, Quentin
Bryce had only 13,155 visits during that period and most of the edits to
the article were made by men. On English Wikipedia, there are 209 articles
women in politics, with more articles spread across four subcategories.
There are 116 articles about models from this country on English Wikipedia.
Australian women have been involved with some Australian specific project's
like Australian literature. The high point for this project was three women
involved, but female participation has since dropped and efforts by project
participants to recruit additional Australian women have been unsuccessful.
Female Australian leadership on English Wikipedia exists, but it is not
very visible; none of the recently elected administrators have been
Australian women. In December 2011, elections were held for English
Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee and no women from Australia ran for a
position. Overall, Australians have been represented but mostly by men.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Australian_female_actor_articles_by_gender.png

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Australian_feminists_articles_by_language.png

When compared to some other countries, Australian content is particularly
good on Simple Wikipedia, with a large number of these articles being Good
Articles and Very Good Articles. Unfortunately, most of this content does
not relate to Australian women. Only three of the twenty-one articles in
Australian people are about Australian women. It was largely the work of
one Australian male. Simple Wikipedia also lacks a female Australian
administrator and check user. Australian content exists on other language
Wikipedias. Much of this appears to involve Australian actors, models
politicians and athletes. The article about Julia Gillard exists in a
number of languages including Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, Belorussian,
Catalan, Czech, Cypriot, Danish, German, Estonian, Greek, Spanish, Farsi,
French, Korean, Croatian, Indonesian, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, Norwegian,
Polish, Russian, Serbian, Thai, Vietnamese, Yiddish, Chinese. The article
about Katy Gallagher is on two other Wikipedia. Former New South Wales
Premiere Kristina Keneally has articles written about her in five other
languages. The Priya Cooper article appears in German and Estonian. The
article about Samantha Stosur is written in over 20 different languages.
The article about the Australian actress Nicole Kidman appears in over
thirty languages. Australian model and businesswoman Elle Macpherson
appears in twenty other languages. On Spanish Wikipedia, there are 18
articles about models from this country. On Turkish Wikipedia, there are 2
articles about women from this country.[7] Australian women are covered in
other languages. There are 3 articles about female actors from this country
on Belorussian Wikipedia.[8] On Aragonese Wikipedia, there are 5 articles
about female actors from this country.[9] On Slovak Wikipedia, there are 5
articles and 1 category about female actors from this country.[10]

Norfolk Island language Wikipedia was created and largely originally
supported by an Australian woman. Australian women and other women have
been part of Australia's efforts to improve Wikipedia content in
Australasian languages. Wikimedia Australia is sponsoring a language
conference to support this goal, though the female leadership for the
conference largely is coming out of Indonesia.
There are no female Australian administrators on wikinews, nor are there
any Australian women who are wikinews accredited reporters. A December 2011
search on English Wikinews for Women Australia found 130 articles that
mentioned both words.[11] A male university journalism professor at the
University of Wollongong had a class project on wikinews. Class membership
was split evenly along gender lines. These students, both male and female,
published several articles. Sadly, the retention levels were low and few
students have continued to contribute after the class ended. One of the
best contributors to Wikinews as a result of this classwork was female. A
December 2011 search on Spanish Wikinews for Australia mujeres found 21
articles that mentioned both words.[12] In December 2011, according to
Alexa, Wikinews was ranked the 48,408th most popular site in the
country.[13] On Portuguese Wikinews, there are no women active from this
country. This may be a result of several factors, including the language
and because Portuguese Wikinews only has an active editing community of
five people, one of whom is a woman.

Wikiversity was ranked the 4,229th most popular site in the Australia.[14]
Wikiversity plays an important role in Australia's educational involvement
with Wikimedia Foundation projects, although its use is primarily limited
to one of Australia's 38 universities, and has not been subjected to
significant use by other secondary or tertiary education providers. The
University of Canberra has one of the largest Wikiversity communities of
all universities on the project, with the University of Canberra National
Institute of Sport Studies being one of the most active departments on the
project. Twenty-one staff members have been involved with the project. Six
of them are women. Inside UCNISS, there have been five staff members and
faculty who have used Wikiversity. Of these, one was female. Four
instructors, from sport studies and psychology, have used Wikiversity as
part of their student coursework. None of these were women. 54.3% of
University of Canberra students are female and this ratio was generally
true for the classes using Wikiversity. When the classes finished using
Wikiversity for school work, there was very little retention of these
contributors on Wikiversity. The consistent Australian editing on
Wikiversity is male.

Commons has a large number of pictures of Australian women. There are 2
categories and 5 pictures of women's association football and 1 picture of
the women's national cricket team.

On other Wikimedia Projects, Australians are active but women are either
not highly visible, are not in leadership positions, are not getting grant
funding to support their work or are not using these projects as
instructors in their classrooms. In December 2011, according to Alexa,
Wikibooks was ranked the 4,591th most popular site in the country.[15]
English Wikibooks has been used by a male Australian instructor at the
University of Canberra as part of a course he taught. Students contributed
to a book about neuroscience that has since gone on to be featured.
Approximately half the students in class were female. When the class ended,
few of these contributors stayed on as active contributors to English
Wikibooks. On English Wiktionary, there is an Australian male bureaucrat
but no female bureaucrats from the country.[16] During 2011, there were two
grants distributed by Wikimedia Australia to individual members of the
chapter to improve content on Wikimedia Commons. The two individuals did
excellent work and the chapter was pleased with their results. The grants
went to men. No women had applied for a grant to improve Commons. There are
no Australian women administrators on incubator and no active Australian
women editors. The project has few participants overall, with only 44 users
identified as female and 516 identified as male. There is an Australian
male sysop on Mediawiki.org. There do not appear to be any Australian
females who hold a similar position on the project.[17] On English
Wikisource, there are no female bureaucrats from this country.[18] This is
an area that needs improvement.

Wiki Takes My Town… is an Australian project, with much of the work being
done in Western Australia. Versions were held in Fremantle twice and in
Joondalup once. People went and took pictures of local places where no
pictures for them were found on Commons. Women participated in the events,
and their pictures were uploaded to Commons by event organisers.

One of the major recent projects led by an Australian woman is the History
of the Paralympic Movement in Australia project. Part of this work has
included outreach events, including one in Perth, Western Australia. Three
Paralympians showed up, two of whom were female. One of them has worked on
keeping the article about herself up to date. At another outreach event in
Brisbane, Queensland that included Paralympians, women again were included
among the participants. The first Australian Paralympic article to be
nominated for Good Article status as a result of this project was nominated
by a male but featured one of Australia's most famous female Paralympians,
Priya Cooper. As of December 2011, there were forty-one Did You Knows
associated with this GLAM project. Of them, sixteen featured women. The
third most popular DYK by article views was about a woman, Elizabeth
Edmondson. Other female related DYKs ranked fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth,
tenth, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth. For
November 2011, among the most popular Paralympic related articles, there
were twenty-six articles about Australian women in the top five hundred
most popular articles. There are twelve Spoken Word articles about
Australian Paralympians, four of which feature females. On the blog
dedicated to the project, an interview with Elizabeth (Edmondson) Mills was
shared. She is the project's first Paralympic contributor, and has donated
images from her personal collection to help with the project. These images
were shared using a Creative Commons license.

The National Library of Australia GLAM efforts involved women participating
at high levels. A woman is responsible for having the ability to get
citations in Wikipedia format on Trove. Women have also been involved with
GLAM efforts at state libraries in Australia. Elli Torres wrote a paper
titled "What's black and white and read all over? QR Code initiatives at
SLQ" that looks at their efforts. Michelle Swales, State Library of
Queensland and Chris Bermingham, Western Downs Regional Council published a
paper in September 2011 titled Getting Queensland Out There, Building local
content on Wikipedia in partnership with public libraries that also
examines library practices in regard to Wikipedia.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Australian engagement can be hit or miss. During
the December 2011 fundraising appeal, no Australians, men or women, were
featured as part of the appeal. During the 2011 Summer of Research, the WMF
hired eight research fellows. There were no research fellows, male or
female, from Australia that were formally involved as fellows though at
least one woman from Australia applied for this project. Australians do get
hired by the Wikimedia Foundation, but the most visible people to date have
been Australian men, including one programmer and the first GLAM research
fellow.

-- 
twitter: purplepopple
blog: ozziesport.com
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