On 2 November 2016, The Department of Spanish & Portuguese, along with students from the course "Gender and Power in Latin American Cultures" hosted Hagerty Hall's first "Edit-A-Thon!" You may ask: "What is an 'Edit-A-Thon'?" Well, I asked one of the co-organizers, Leila Vieira de Jesus Gemelli, to explain what this is and how the idea came about.

This semester, Professor Paloma Martínez-Cruz of the department teaches a course on Gender and Power in Latin American Cultures, and part of the course is to design a community outreach project. "I wanted something to involve OSU students and had heard about Wikipedia Edit-a-Thons, so we thought that having students translate articles would be a good idea for them to 1) learn about women that are not very well-known in the US and 2) practice their language skills." For Leila, connecting OSU students with the subject matter was a clear way to both promote language skills and broaden access to information about Latin American women. 

By opening this wealth of information to the English-speaking world, one of the goals of the project is educate not only students at OSU, but also the Internet-using public about accomplishments and power of Latin American women. The event beat the organizers' projections with 65 participants in total, and an impressive 32 Wikipedia articles completely translated into English, along with 23 more in-progress! Leila hopes that the students, "got inspired by them, and that is why students can choose which women they want to translate based on their field: biology, medicine, dance, aviation, etc."

When designing this community project, the team wanted a wide representation of Latin American countries and a variety of voices. Many famous Latin American women, such as Eva Perón and Dilma Rousseff, are not included in the list of women the edit-a-thon will translate because their Wikipedia pages are already quite extensive. The team spent quite a few hours investigating women whose pages were not well developed in English, and included at least one woman from every Latin American country. When the team members began to research US Latinas, they were surprised to learn that "their Wikipedia pages in English are very good."