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Portland artist Taryn Tomasello and Roya Amirsoleymani, PICA's directory of community engagement, learn how to edit and create Wikipediaentries.

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On the third floor of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, or PICA, a group of men and women are huddled around a table, buried in theirlaptops.

Theyre part of a massive editing session to create more diverse voices and content on Wikipedia, with a focus on womenartists.

A study by the Wikipedia Foundation found fewer than 10 percent of site editors on the open-source website werefemale.

Roya Amirsoleymani, PICAs director of community engagement, believes that disparity is apparent in Wikipediacontent.

When you have the case of predominantly white males behind Wikipedia, then what you have is a skewed representation and perception of whats important, whats represented and whos represented, shesaid.

Garrick Imatani, Emma Colburn and Linden How at Portland's Art+Feminism Wikipediaedit-a-thon.

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Saturdays event was part of a larger campaign called Art+Feminism. The organization hosted its first Wikipedia edit-a-thon in New York in 2014. The Portland event is one of more than 50 across the globe thisyear.

I see things that are wrong, especially if its a topic that Ive done a lot of work on, said Portland State University film professor KristinHole.

Hole attended Saturdays edit-a-thon and related to the lack of female artists on Wikipedia. She has often looked up an actor or film that shes curious about, only to find that a Wikipedia page doesntexist.

I think it makes things seem almost like they dont matter or definitely like theyre less significant, Holesaid.

Others took issue with the way females in the art world were described. Portland artist Taryn Tomasello points to Jackson Pollocks page as an example. It references Lee Krasner also a famous artist but only as Pollockswife.

Whereas, Lee Krasners page references Jackson Pollock and has this very long entry about him and his art practice, Tomasello said. So the way that they are written about is totallydifferent.

Weve definitely been hearing for years about a content gap in womens coverage, said Jason Moore, a Wikipedia editor who led a workshop Saturday to teach basic coding and editingskills.

Moore has been editing pages daily for the past 10 years and estimates that hes assisted in more than 200,000 Wikipedia articles. Moore, himself a white male, knows theres room forimprovement.

People really trust that when they go to Wikipedia, theyre going to find information about what theyre looking for and its going to be reliable information, Moore said. But if theres gaps, thats where we have work to stilldo.

A second Portland Art+Feminism Wikipedia edit-a-thon will take place Saturday, April 29 at the Pacific Northwest College of Art Library from 11 a.m. to 4p.m.

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