2Rāth, a Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Wikipedia project, was established in 2019 by Dr. Abir Ward, a former instructor at the communication skills program at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and a current lecturer at Boston University. 2Rāth is a digital nod to the word Turāth (Arabic: تراث) that means heritage, legacy, or tradition.This project addresses the necessity for digital collaboration between students and librarians to develop an online presence for Arab authors on the world’s largest online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. Through Wiki Education, students learn how to conduct research, write well-cited articles, and build digital literacy capacity that few other learning platforms and exercises in composition and academic writing can offer. Through 2Rāth, students are engaged in preserving their Arab heritage by producing digital Wikipedia articles about it. 2Rāth Objectives include:
Established by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 2019, the CCCC Wikipedia Initiative (CCCCWI) proceeds from the conviction that it matters to edit Wikipedia, especially for academic field experts committed to building knowledge equity as a fundamental groundwork for social justice. CCCC Wikipedia Initiative is working to develop skills, cultivate inclusive community, and build structures of support and recognition for past, present, and future CCCC members who recognize the importance of engaging with Wikipedia as a form of global public humanities scholarship.
We support the efforts of WikiProject Writing and offer editing workshops and edit-a-thons to help scholars get comfortable contributing to Wikipedia.
We use Wikipedia Education to train participants and create Wikipedia pages about Arab Authors Wikipedia Education We also track our edits on [1] Previous projects include one done in the Fall of 2019and another in the Fall of 2020. The biographies of Arab authors were first written with the assistance of AUB students as part of this local effort, which was created in 2019 by Dr. Abir Ward from the Department of English and Fatme Charafeddine from the AUB Libraries. Since then, these stories have had over 15 million page views. The project, which changed its name to 2Rāth this year, decided to focus its efforts on developing pages about Arab women and AUB alumni in order to widen Wikipedia's coverage of Arab women.[1]
The first Edit-a-thon was initiated in November 17 2021 at AUB, together with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, AUB Libraries, Women & Gender Studies, AUB Press, CCCC Wikipedia, Wikipedia Education, Wikimedia Foundation, and the US-Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI). At College Hall, where the Edit-a-thon was held, 70 teachers, staff, and students attended. Together, they enhanced the coverage of Arab women in Wikipedia by editing 39 articles, adding about 16,000 words, and 133 references. For instructors, staff, and students to prepare for the Edit-a-thon, introduction seminars and a week of Wikipedia Education training were held prior to the event. Another Edit-a-thon took place after 3 months of the first one on February 2022, which brought attention to female authors of Arabic literature.[1]
This project appeared on the known daily newspaper in Lebanon L'Orient-Le Jour with the title "AUB students want to bridge the gender gap on Wikipedia".[2] The article started elaborating more on the beginning of this project, how Dr. Abir Ward merged the method of working on Wikipedia articles in her courses, training them how to be Wikipedia Editors, enhancing their knowledge and the world's knowledge on a big platform such as Wikipedia of their Arabic heritage and notifying them of the gender gap that exist especially in the Arab world. In her courses, the students published a couple of articles that talks about Arab authors specifically. She became aware of the lack of female writers on Wikipedia around this time, so she sought to motivate her students "to contribute to the preservation of their literary heritage" in general and specifically to fix or write articles female biographies of Arab heritage by initiating the first Edit-a-thon with the help of her student Faysal Shlash who assisted her in the organization of the event. The participants in the Edit-a-thon 2Rāth project have added nearly 80,500 words to the online encyclopedia, 710 references; they edited 167 articles and wrote 29 new ones and got around 17.7 Million views as claimed by Wikipedia Education Dashboard in February 2022 .[2] As the second Edit-a-thon emerged, these numbers increased. A lot of participants chose important figures to talk about such as Zaynab Fawwaz, Edvick Jureidini Shayboub, Malaka Saad and many others.
Given statistics show that 90% of the editors on Wikipedia are mean, only 17% of Wikipedia's biographical articles represent women figures and the articles that portray women in the Arab world are nearly nonexistent. The goal of this Edit-a-thon is to update and add information to pages that require it, as well as create biographies of female authors who made an impact in their day but are now mostly forgotten, in order to expand Wikipedia's coverage of women in literature in the Arab world.[3]
