This post was originally written by Zoe E Breen for Cheeruplove.com. It is available here.
Well, “Why wouldn’t you want to interview Helen Arney?”, you might ask?
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Helen Arney (Photo: Vera de Kok)
Of course she is super-smart, funny and chic, that’s undeniable. Which is why, when I was booking my tickets for Festival of the Spoken Nerd at The Lowry, I was struck by the fact that she did not have a Wikipedia page dedicated to her.
Almost a year before the gig, I’d been to a Wiki Edit workshop run for Manchester Girl Geeks by Wikimedia UK.
From this experience I learned two things:
- Editing Wikipedia is really pretty easy
- More than 80% of Wikipedia editors are male (according to some research)
What did I do with this knowledge? Pretty much nothing until I noticed that Helen Arney didn’t have a Wikipedia page.
Then I remembered something.
Fellow Manchester Girl Geek Karen Pudner (@kpudner) had created a Wikipedia page for code-breaker Joan Clarke, who worked alongside Alan Turing on the Enigma Project at Bletchley Park.
Karen started the Wikipedia page in 2013 having attended a previous Manchester Girl Geeks Wiki Edit Day.
This was the year before Joan’s contribution to the team at Bletchley Park was recognised in The Imitation Game. Since then the page has been added to and edited by dozens of other users.
If another girl geek could write a woman into Wikipedia then maybe I could give it a shot?
I was so excited by the prospect that it was with some abandon that I launched into writing my first lines of words on Wikipedia.
So I’ve made a start on Helen Arney’s page, which is currently a described as a ‘Singer stub’. If you would like to add an edit of your own I’d be extremely happy.
So, why did you interview Helen Arney?
As well as her obvious fabness (see above), I thought it would be lovely to have something that I had written to be linked to from the Wikipedia page. And reciprocal linked (of course!).
You can read what Helen had to say on physics, funnyness and frocks right here.