The equality of conditions between genders is not yet a reality and this bias is also reflected in sectors such as science. To give a voice to female scientists, the General Assembly of the United Nations decided recently, in 2015, to proclaim February 11 as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
Many different activities where organized in Barcelona during the past 11th of February, and the Biomedical Research Park of Barcelona (PRBB) also participated. An edit-a-thon to improve the presence of women in Wikipedia was organized for the third time at the park, with the help of Amical Wikimedia and theViquidones UPF group.
#viquidonesPRBB
The activity started at 3pm and finished at 7pm. During the afternoon Ester Bonet, one of the promoters of the project Viquidones, and Toni Hermoso, bioinformatician at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) and also a wikipedian, explained how the Wikipedia works. All the participants had the opportunity to upload content and to be wikipedians, at least for the afternoon. Moreover, they learned the basis and requirements to edit Wikipedia, and they went home with the motivation to continue making visible the contributions of women to science.
At the end of the day, the participants had translated and added content to biographies of female scientists who were already on the platform, but they also created new entries to explain the amazing work of women who were not yet present in Wikipedia, including some researchers at the PRBB centres. Here you can see the list of entries created.
In this video (in Spanish) you can hear the opinion and experience of Tamara and Selene, two of the participants of the edit-a-thon at the Charles Darwin room at the PRBB.
