Comments on: Community Sandbox Sessions https://wikimedia.org.uk/2026/04/community-sandbox-sessions/ Open access to knowledge Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:08:56 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.1 By: Roger Bamkin, Catherine Chavula, David Palfrey et al ... (Sara Thomas?) https://wikimedia.org.uk/2026/04/community-sandbox-sessions/#comment-83787 Wed, 14 May 2025 12:07:02 +0000 https://wikimedia.org.uk/?p=8429#comment-83787 Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Globally 600 million people live without electricity and 90% of them are in southern Africa. You’ve seen “The boy who harnessed the wind”? Well we want to harness the internet. We plan to create a country where half of the people on Wikipedia are women. Many do not complete primary education and girls become wives before they could consider a career. It requires enormous change and we can only hope to contribute. This doesn’t require an editathon… experience from other large projects (e.g. Women in Red) is that an editathon won’t even mark the surface. Women in Red has been running for ten years and in that time it has had over 300 on-line editathons and nearly 100 in-person events in Edinburgh – but its made a change. There are now many more women on en:Wikipedia and they make up 20% of the total biogs.

This new project doesn’t have a name, but it does have a budget (of zero), early partners and ambition. We have the backing of the Scotland Malawi Partnership, Women in Red, Local Rotarys, Wikimedia Scotland,. The Malawian Women in Red list was under a 100 and now its over 500. There were very few free-to-use images but we’re fixing that and we are still reaching out to gather more…. particularly in Malawi. You may be think that we are still missing stuff… we are ………. but we plan to talk to Wikimedians.

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