Reflection
editPrior to writing this reflection piece, I created a Wikipedia page on Lady Jean Fforde. My interest in her comes from visiting her previous workplace, Bletchley Park. Whilst touring the place I got to learn and understand a lot of the work that was put in by the women of Bletchley Park. Their coding and language skills were incredible and they helped end the war. This peaked my interest and made me wonder why I hadn’t heard about these women before? That made this assignment a perfect opportunity to look into one of the women working in Bletchley Park, and collect information about her so that others can learn about the great work all the women were doing.
Creating a Wikipedia page for significant women in computing is not only a learning experience for myself, but it also means that I can help contribute to closing the gender gap in Wikipedia. “Wikipedia has fewer and less extensive articles about women or topics important to women” [1] It is a pressing issue and something they are aware of themselves. The gender gap is not only relevant when it comes to the lack of wikipedia pages on significant women, but also female editors writing and editing. Marit Hinnosaar did the first comprehensive study on gender equality in new media like Wikipedia, and came to the conclusion that ” I find that men and women tend to contribute to different topics. This implies that gender gap among contributors leads to an unequal coverage of topics”[2] By discovering this she made women that are interested in computing and media more aware of the gender inequality issues. Having learned that, it motivated me to write this article and I found a new interest in the world of wikipedia.
I chose to create a new page for Lady Jean Fforde, and use my word count on only one page. By doing this i got a deeper understanding of her life, her experiences and her time at Bletchley Park. She was an interesting woman who did a lot in her years, not only did she work in Bletchley Park, she was also a land owner and socialite. She worked directly under Alan Turing in hut 8.She was also an author and wrote a book about her experiences as a coder at Bletchley Park called "Feet on the Ground - from Castles to Catastrophe".
My interest in wikipedia started at our first meeting about the women of Bletchley Park in October, and has bloomed whilst I have been learning more. Our field trip and edit-a-thon was a big motivator and contributed to the excitement around Lady Jean Fforde and the other coders at Bletchley park. I learnt a lot by doing this assignment, not only in the terms of creating a blog, but also opening my eyes to the gender gap and wanting to be a part of fixing the problem.