While thousands of Michigan and U fans stood tailgating around the stadium on Thursday, a small band of librarians, students and faculty sat around desks filling in the gaps of Utah’s history.

The Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon, funded and set up by the Utah Librarian Association, focused on editing and creating pages for influential and powerful women in the state’s history. The event also taught people how to edit and contribute to the website.

Rebekah Cummings, a research assistant librarian, said the idea for the event came from a presentation she attended called “Frenemies to Friends: Embracing Wikipedia.” The program taught librarians to edit and improve the sources on Wikipedia, as well as utilize it as an effective resource.

“Librarians have had reservations about using Wikipedia because it is so open and anyone can edit it,” Cummings said. “But the reality is it’s the first place where everyone goes to get information about a topic.”

Catherine Soehner, associate dean for research and learning services, said she often uses Wikipedia to begin research.

“Knowing that there are people like us who edit it and make Wikipedia better and more reliable makes it easier to go there for information,” Soehner said.

The event focused on articles about women who are extremely underrepresented and under-researched on Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, said in an interview last year with the BBC that they would be working to correct the tendency to focus on male achievements and biographies, a disparity likely stemming from the fact that 84 to 91 percent of the site’s editors are male.

Dustin Fife, a librarian from UVU, said this imbalance needs to change.

“It’s one of the most used, especially for quick reference or quick information, resources of the world,” Fife said. “It’s important that it’s representative of the world in which we live and the history that has existed.”

Cummings said the editing will do more than inform people about women in Utah’s history.

“When people are looking at Wikipedia, sometimes the information’s really good, but they don’t have access to all those primary source documents,” Cummings said. “We can create links between our special collections and the Wikipedia page, which benefits both sides.”

Some of the new or improved editions include Marie Ogden, a spiritualist who founded a Utopian society in southern Utah in the ’30s, and Reva Beck Bosone, the first female representative from Utah.

Cummings said there may be future webinars like these held at other colleges around the state to accommodate librarians and teachers who couldn’t attend this one. The Edit-a-Thon is unconnected to the U’s Women Enrollment Initiative, a current U program aimed at improving female enrollment and experiences on campus.

The event ran from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. The number of people ranged from four to 10 people at a time with the amount of editors trailing off towards the evening as the game started.

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