The biography of Concha Piquer needed to add how relevant her business facet had been and it was Concha Baeza, a journalist, who sat down one day to edit that entry that presented the Valencian artist ‘only’ as a great singer and actress. Thus, she added that Concha Piquer created her own company with which she put on her shows and she herself directed them with an iron hand. “She talked about her love and heartbreak, but she didn’t say anything about the fact that she was a very careful businesswoman. That’s why I added it,” she explains.
In this spirit, this Saturday, through the Association of Business and Professional Women of Valencia (EVAP) of which it is a part, it has promoted the event Who will talk about us if we are not on Wikipedia? in the Marina of Valencia. There, some forty women will sit down with their laptops to edit the entries of women who do not have their own profile on the Internet and who are relevant due to their professional career.
On the list they are preparing are names like Reyes MartÃ, a Valencian pyrotechnic that does have its own profile on Viquipèdia but not on Wikipedia in Spanish; or that of Deborah J. Burks, researcher and manager of the PrÃncipe Felipe de València Research Center Foundation; or that of MarÃa José Mainar, founder of EVAP and the first vice-president of the Valencia Chamber of Commerce in her history.
In the previous edition of “Editatona” (as the event in which volunteers meet to edit Wikipedia entries on a specific topic is called), Baeza remembers having added the profile of Lydia del Canto, journalist and first woman to put at the head of the newspaper Levante-EMV or Regina Monsalve, engineer and president of the Official College of Agricultural Technical Engineers of Valencia and Castellón (COITAVC).
And they are not going to stop there, they aspire to have more names. And above all that their biographical descriptions avoid gender bias, a feat knowing that only 13% of Wikipedia editors are women. “This is also sisterhood. We need to support each other, set an example and support,” explains Baeza, promoter of the initiative that will have the former journalist Patricia Horrillo, with extensive experience in the “wiki” world, to coordinate the event.
“Sometimes it is not just that they are not there, it is that if they are, they are described by the person they were married to, by their children… and what did they do? That must be stated,” Baeza replies. From EVAP they remember that in Wikipedia in Spanish, 26.8% of the words in the biographical articles of women refer to gender conditions or personal and family relationships (woman, wife, mother…); and yet, in articles by men this circumstance only occurs in 3.8% of the words. They allege that there is gender inequality here, as they point to the existence of an unfriendly editing interface, aggressiveness in debates, a sexist and even misogynistic atmosphere, or the lack of free time as some of the many factors to understand this imbalance and that today they propose to correct based on sorority.
