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Australian Women in Religion Archive

The Australian Women in Religion (AWR) WikiProject was initiated in late 2019 by Mannix Library Manager Kerrie Burn. The goal of this collaborative project, based at the University of Divinity, is to create new Wikipedia articles for women who have made significant contributions to Australian religious and spiritual traditions, and to improve existing articles. Currently only about 18% of biographical articles on Wikipedia are about women and about 90% of editors are men, so the project also helps address this gender imbalance on the platform. So far the project has created over 170 new Wikipedia articles.

The University of Divinity project group initially compiled an Excel spreadsheet that includes the names and biographical details of approximately 670 Women in Religion from both Australia and New Zealand. A Wikipedia Article Guide and a Bibliography of Authoritative Sources have also been created and these documents will be updated as the project progresses, and available at the bottom of this page.

The AWR WikiProject Wikipedia page includes a Wikidata-generated list of Australian or New Zealander women, of interest to both the Australian and international Women in Religion projects. Names of women with existing Wikipedia articles are blue and those with Wikipedia articles still to-be-created are red. As the project progresses these links will change from red to blue.

The AWR Project Dashboard Page provides information about future edit-a-thons and collates data related to the project. 

How you can contribute:

  • Register your interest in creating a new Wikipedia entry for a woman on our list.
  • Research and write your article. You don’t need to be a Wikipedia editor. Someone else can create the Wikipedia article from your Word document.
  • Suggest new names to add to the list
  • Join one of our regular editing sessions

Editing Wikipedia

A successful in-person event was held at Mannix Library on 13th March 2021 and an online edit-a-thon via Zoom was held on 9th June 2021. A trial Wiki-Wednesday Zoom session was held each week from 30 June-8 December in 2021. These sessions provided opportunities to consolidate and develop editing skills as well as provide a regular space for those wishing to focus on individual editing projects. Several edit-a-thons were held to coincide with International Women’s Day on 8 March 2022, followed by regular editing sessions that all were welcome to attend. Resources have also been created to assist new editors.

Please email kerrie.burn@ctc.edu.au if you are interested in participating or would like to find out more about the project.

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