Stumbling toward the doors of Art+Feminism 

By Anthony B. Diaz – A+F Network Organizer

I have always been an advocate for promoting women’s rights and equal gender representation. From being a fan of essays, novels, and art that focus on feminism, to writing my own literary pieces and novels with women as the protagonist, Having found Wikipedia inspired me to be an editor and made me feel that being part of the Wikimedia Movement will serve my calling as a writer and an advocate of feminism. 

When I was looking for initiatives to run as a first-time community organizer in the Philippines, I stumbled across the Art+Feminism Campaign by chance. Though I had previously participated in gender-related campaigns and was well aware of the gap of gender representation within Wikimedia projects, my understanding of the word feminism was never the same as what I would learn after three years of running the campaign. 

In 2020, I had to start things from scratch…

Back then, I didn’t have any communication with the A+F community. What I only have is the passion and purpose to conduct a series of edit-a-thons to help bridge the gender gap in Wikipedia.  

Our project ran smoothly at first. We were a week ahead of our planned date of running our scheduled events. On March 12, 2020, I received an email about “COVID-19 Wikimedia Foundation Grants for public events,” and as a result, scheduled events were canceled. Because there were still articles that needed to be improved, I encouraged the editors to conduct the editing from their own places. 

CoVid Pandemic and the challenges of being a volunteer…

Aside from the pandemic, there were also other factors that affected the actual expectations I had for the event. The majority of the activities took place in a computer shop. We were on the seaside, and the Internet connection was mostly down or slow. Also, new participants require a lot of coaching and follow-up in order to complete their edits. The majority of them are hesitant to use Wikipedia, and this has been a long-standing problem in the Philippines. Due to the cancellation of the offline events, we transitioned to one online activity (that we were not yet familiar with). There were technological challenges that we had to deal with.

Learning opportunities from the A+F Community

With the Art+Feminism Community now assisting me all throughout the campaign, we were able to create other alternatives as to how interested participants can join in. This created open opportunities for us to conduct interviews with feminists in the region, and also host an online exhibit of artwork by visual artists in the Philippines. The Community hours conducted by the A+F community were a huge help in the overall brainstorming of our 2nd-year event, together with the WMF Community Resources team. It has been a learning experience to learn how to create your proposal on Meta-Wiki and how to incorporate activities beyond Wikipedia editing. 

Why would a man lead the Art+Feminism Campaign?

One significant comment I had with the local feminists was the question, Why would a man lead a certain event such as this instead of a woman? I took that as a legitimate question and have seen that we still need to work on the many faces of feminism, including its aspects of diversity and inclusion. That is what leads us to create a more open space for every year’s Art+Feminism campaign. 

From one, to many…

With me in the role of a Network Organizer at Art+Feminism, I decided to increase the reach and participation of our local volunteers. If we want to sustain the advocacy and involve a lot of people in this movement, the work should not be solely done by me.  I was grateful that a group of eight new volunteers and three experienced Wikimedians were eager to work on different aspects of the projects, including edit-a-thons, interviews, and other forms of Wiki outreach activities. Some recent activities we had were the development of Wikiquote incubator projects in our local languages (Central Bikol and Tagalog), wherein we visited libraries in search of references. The team also participated in the Earth Day Celebration through a Coffee painting workshop attended by 21 female participants and 12 volunteers. And we are happy to highlight the outreach activity we had on Catanduanes Island, donating a Kiwix device to a public school and sharing the wiki projects with teachers there. 

Little did we know that our first participation in the A+F campaign would grow into this over the years. And we are all grateful for the support the A+F community has given us along the way.