PROJECT: The Dinner Party Wikipedia Project 1

Alexandra Thom of the Brooklyn Museum discusses her experience with The Dinner Party Wikipedia project. The Dinner Party is an installation by Judy Chicago featuring the names of 1,038 women in history, and the project aimed to provide Wikipedia citations for all 1,038 women. Thom discusses the challenges she faced in the project, both in the existing historical record and resistance to her efforts to amend the record from her fellow Wikipedia editors. She states, “I would argue that there is very limited information on many of these historical women because in their lifetimes, their accomplishments were probably deemed unworthy of recording for the sake of posterity. Their accomplishments were also often attributed incorrectly to men…Now, we have the opportunity to give these women their due by recording what we know about their lives in Wikipedia, the most public, accessible source available today.”