مشروع:About Gender Wiki

This page has the following permenant URL:

https://genderiyya.xyz/wiki/Project:About_Gender_Wiki

Wiki Gender is Feminist open platform that works in community learning and producing knowledge on gender and feminism in Arabic. Wiki Gender is interested in critically engaging with different fields from gender and feminist lens, including concepts, terminology, expressions, and used jargon; Arts, films, and music, activists and creatives profiles, incidents and experiences, as well as campaigns and the organizations behind them.

The Wiki’s work is cumulative and ever evolving, and it is largely based on the voluntary contributions of individuals who are passionate about research and writing on gender, feminism as well as other issues affecting women.

We are interested in content that covers gender and feminism: from concepts, terminology, expressions, and used jargon; to films, songs and visual arts; to people, incidents and cases, as well as campaigns and the organizations behind them.

Our Story

Wiki Gender was launched in December 2016 with the support of the Goethe-Institut Kairo and in collaboration with the Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF). It provides open content and promotes the production of open knowledge in this field by all those interested. Over time the project grew into a regional one with three content writing and editing groups in Egypt, Lebanon, and Tunisia. ---

In December 2015, Goethe-Institut Kairo requested technical support from the Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF) to build a website serving as a directory for institutions and active groups working on gender and women’s issues in Egypt. With a preposition from ADEF, the project evolved into a knowledge base in fields of gender and women studies, in addition to the original organisations' directory.

The first year of the project's life saw was about laying the foundations of the platform; studying the nature of knowledge to be captured, and bringing together a core community of contributors who began to explore the possibilities of working with the wiki platform.

The Wiki Gender website was officially launched in December 2016, following the the first Wiki retreat in November 2016, during which a core group of interested individuals gathered in ADEF and collaboratively set the preliminary vision, mission, objectives, and logo for Wiki Gender, as well as started seeds of pages in several indexes such as terminologies, organizations, persons, films and others.

Few months after the launch, the group of co-founders saw the necessity to gauge and involve more people in Wiki Gender. Hence, the first Wiki Training took place in August 2017 in Cairo, forming a group of 12 contributors. After the training and throughout 2018, the work on the wiki was focused on developing and creating pages under different and new indexes including: terminologies and concepts, books, public incidents and cases, campaigns, organizations, and persons working in the gender and women rights related fields. In parallel to this expansion in content, the wiki platform was quickly growing on a technical level, developing customized templates for the different indexes, enhancing our categorization strategies as well as the interface of the main pages. During this time period, the team met weekly for editorial meetings, and three more working retreats took place during which the team collaboratively discussed and developed the Wiki's editorial policies, and collectively applied necessary changes to pages and indexes responding to new technological developments on the wiki platform.

Towards the end of 2018, Wiki Gender took its first steps into becoming a regional project, responding to increasing interest in collaboration from different countries in the Arab speaking region. In November 2018, the second Wiki Training took place in Beirut bringing in a group of 12 contributors from Lebanon as well as Palestine and Syria. Then in December 2018, a third small wiki training took place in Tunis and a group of 6 contributors was formed. The two new groups formed their own system of editorial meetings, coordinating with the Wiki Gender core team and collaborating within group and across groups on different pages and indexes.

Since the beginning of 2019, the work has been focused on further gardening and enhancing our original content, and curating and archiving efforts. We are also responding to the growth of the project - on regional, contribution, and content levels - by collectively rethinking our structural formation and organising tools and policies, an effort we started during two recent retreatsl, one in Beirut and the other in Cairo.

Collaborative work is going on; developing content plans and pages, revising and enhancing our editorial policies, and holding regular meetings and intensive retreats to learn and apply new wiki techniques and make major decisions together!

Our objectives

Producing cumulative and collaborative feminist knowledge in Arabic, in the fields of gender, feminism, and women's issues, using the Wiki platform;
Curating and Archiving different documents produced in Arabic, be them in written or multimedia forms, enabling researchers, journalists, writers, students, and other interested and curious individuals to access such resources in one place;
Networking and exchanging experiences between those interested in gender, feminism, and women's issues, whether individuals, groups or institutions;
Encouraging and stimulating discussion and interaction with the content we create and curate, both on the wiki and on other platforms.

Our activity and mode of work

Wiki Gender is a semi voluntary project, where most of our content contributors and editors are interested individuals who volunteer their time and effort in researching, writing, gardening, proofreading, collecting, and archiving Arabic content on the Wiki.

We work individually and together, starting from self started research and pages, to teams based content projects, to day long meet-ups, and finally to our favourite intensive collective working retreats. We also hold regular editorial meeting, whether a on weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis, depending on location.

We attend and participate in local, regional, and international conferences, panels, workshops, and networking events that intersect with our areas of interest, objectives, and ethics. We consider these events as opportunities to spread knowledge about Wiki Gender, to discuss our feminist organizing methods and collaborative work, and to gauge the interest of other interest groups in using the Wiki platform to organize their work in a collaborative, open, and more horizontal way.

Our audience comes from different countries inside and outside of the Arabic speaking region. Wiki Gender managed to appear first on google research for some topics in Arabic on gender and feminism, ie: Intersectionality نظرية التقاطعية. We have a closed Facebook group that contains a few hundreds of our closes allies and followers including feminist activists, academics, writers, journalists, students, researchers, and other interested practitioners. We also have a twitter account that is growing in followership @WikiGenderAr.

In 2018, we launched "Reading from Wiki Gender", a series of themes events where we propose reading certain pages and documents from Wiki Gender, and meet with interested subscribers to discuss them. The discussions during these sessions feed back into the topic pages as a way of collaborated enhancement of our content.

Since we are currently spread over different countries: Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Western Sahara, Algeria... we hold most of our meetings online, and soon we are planning a regional meeting for all contributors to meet and plan next content projects.

Our content

We produce, translate, and collect content on gender, feminism, and women's issues in Arabic from a feminist perspective. Our content can be divided into the following indexes:

Organizations, groups, collectives, initiatives and projects working in these field and related topics;
Profiles of individuals who are affecting or have been affecting change in the feminist thought, journalism, literature, and art; and women human rights defenders;
Books, both literary and philosophical, which discuss feminism, gender and/or any related women's issues.
Glossary of gender terms and concepts in Arabic; these include terminologies and expressions related to gender, sexuality, sexual health, and GBV etc, as well as feminist concepts and theories, both historical and contemporary.
Movies, TV Series, Plays, Radio shows, Songs, and Podcasts that intersect with gender and feminist issues. For each of these works, we attempt developing a critic from a feminist perspective;
Campaigns run by women rights NGOs and feminist groups. We document these campaigns and collect all relevant disseminated material including posters, stickers, press releases, photos, and papers;
Incidents and legal cases intersecting with sexism, gender based violence and oppression;
Documents and files - be them written or multimedia - produced and disseminated by feminist NGOs, artists, writers, journalists and researchers such as articles, op-eds, press releases, reports, studies, position papers, statistics, photos, graphic designs, illustrations, comics, cartoons, graffiti, and info-graphs;
Translations of articles and papers discussing our areas of interest, whether done by our wiki members or by other sources.

Content license

Original work and translations produced by our community of researchers and contributors is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike v 4.0, unless otherwise stated.

All other works collected, for the purpose of preservation and availing to researchers, have has their rights reserved by their authors and/or publishers and are attributed to them accordingly.

Our Logo

Our logo was designed by our late co-founder Ola Abulshalashel. The logo was conceived during our very first intensive 2-day retreat held at ADEF in Cairo, November 2016.