WikiD shortlisted for international Beazley Designs of the Year Awards

A campaign to increase the representation of women in the built environment on Wikipedia has been shortlisted for the international Beazley Designs of the Year awards. WikiD: women, Wikipedia, design brings together architectural researchers from Monash University in partnership with research-based advocacy organisation Parlour: women, equity, architecture.

The group has made 12 000 revisions to Wikipedia to-date, ranging from changing women’s biographies from ‘wife’ to ‘designer’ and adding more than 200 new articles. Posts about women in the sector have increased ten-fold in Australia alone.

“Our aim is to have more profiles of women as architects and designers published on Wikipedia, including those who have contributed to our built environment or are undervalued in existing articles,” said Dr Alysia Bennett.

WikiD is shortlisted in the ‘Digital’ category and is a contender for the Design of the Year Award and People’s Choice Award. A winner will be selected in each category and one overall winner will be announced on 21 November.

Nomination in the Beazley Designs of the Year awards signals a remarkable achievement for Monash University researchers Dr Alysia Bennett, Charity Edwards and Virginia Mannering, as well as their collaborator Justine Clark.

“We’re building momentum on a global scale and seeing groups convene all over the world to participate in workshops that write women architects into Wikipedia,” said Ms Edwards.

The project is an ongoing international collaboration between Parlour (Australia), Lori Brown of ArchiteXX (New York) and n-ails (Berlin) and was established through seed funding from the international Wikimedia Foundation.