The “Revisiting Cyberfeminism” event took place in Berlin from December 7th to 8th, 2024, with a follow-up session on 14th December. Organised by Wiki Riot Squad, Who writes his_tory?, and Athina Petsou, in cooperation with bildwechsel/GuterGrund GmbH and Khoj Studios, the event was financially supported by Wikimedia Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The primary goal was to revisit and update Wikipedia articles related to cyberfeminism, ensuring that the content reflects diverse experiences.

The concept of cyberfeminism, which emerged in the early 1990s, has been a critical framework for understanding and challenging the power structures embedded in technology and online platforms through a feminist perspective. This movement focuses on how biased technology can challenge or reinforce gender norms, questioning who controls information, who gets to participate, and how gender influences and is influenced by these dynamics. The December events were in Berlin and online, aiming to refresh and expand the discourse around cyberfeminism through collaborative efforts on Wikipedia. Among others we created and translated articles in English, German, French and Spanish Wikipedia, about Frauen+technik, Old Boys Network, etc.

I loved the fact that the event brought together different participants: artists, historical figures who were part of the Cyberfeminist movement in the 90s, wikipedians, students, researchers and theoretics. The Berlin event took place in an artist atelier and included a series of workshops, readings, and collaborative editing sessions. It was lovely to hear stories and have a look in the archival material of the different groups (-Innen, frauen·und·technik, Old Boys Network).

More importantly for me, the event was structured as a hybrid gathering, with participants joining both on-site in Berlin and online from various locations, including a parallel workshop hosted by Khoj Studios in New Delhi, following the tradition of the cyberfeminism movement itself.  

Cyberfeminism has historically been underrepresented in online spaces, and this event aimed to address that gap by bringing together diverse voices and perspectives. We also read poems from the archives and from contemporary poets working on cyberfeminist topics. The collaborative nature of the event allowed participants to learn from each other, share their expertise, stories and new ideas and create a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of cyberfeminism. Also, the intergenerational nature of the event is a good heritage on the online and in flesh feminist discourses.  The “Revisiting Cyberfeminism” event was more than just an edit-a-thon; it was a collaborative effort to engage in knowledge production that challenges the systemic biases inherent in online platforms and technological products. By updating and expanding articles on cyberfeminism, participants contributed to a more inclusive and accurate representation of feminist work in the technological landscape. Also, it was a chance to reflect on our own lives and work, discuss and connect. Hopefully, meeting you all again soon and on our new projects.

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Over the last eight years, Wikimedia UK has been actively tackling inequality and bias across the Wikimedia projects. One of our primary strategic goals is to enhance the involvement and portrayal of marginalised individuals and topics on Wikipedia. Women’s representation has been a vital aspect of this.

Many editors have risen to the challenge of closing the wiki gender gap, so we’re by no means alone in our efforts. Projects like Women in Red and Art+Feminism are well known across the global wiki-movement, and have inspired thousands to start editing for women.

If you’d like to join an event during Women’s History month, here’s a some to get you going:

For anyone who’d like a trip to Glasgow, there’s a trilingual editathon on contemporary women writers from Germany, France, and Scotland. Join us at the Goethe-Institut Glasgow on Wednesday 6th March, from 4-8pm. No previous editing experience is needed, as our Scotland Programme Manager, Dr Sara Thomas will be on hand for the technical introduction to Wikipedia. Guests are invited to work on authors of their choice in either English, French and/or German. Please bring your own laptops and dinner snacks to make the most of the friendly atmosphere. Book your ticket on eventbrite.

The Women in Red editathons at the University of Edinburgh are long running and much loved by those who have attended. The next session – which is open to everyone, not just students – will be on Friday 8th March, from 1-4:30pm in the Digital Scholorship Centre. It’s both in person and online if you can’t make it to the library. No prior editing experience is required, with Ewan McAndrew and Ellie Whitehead on hand to get you started. It’s a great opportunity to celebrate the lives of inspiring women on International Women’s Day. Please bring your own laptop. Book your ticket on eventbrite.

As part of UCL’s pledge to confront its history of eugenics and ongoing legacies, they’re running two events on The Women Scientists of UCL’s Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. You are invited to join students from UCL’s Public History MA programme and UCL Special Collections, in conjunction with the Eugenics Legacy Education Project (ELEP), for an interactive workshop about the women scientists who worked on eugenics research in the early twentieth century at in the Galton Laboratory. The events will examine how can we critically understand the historical work of women that developed and advanced oppressive ideologies against the backdrop of today’s women in STEM movement. Participants will be using Wikipedia to increase visibility of the archival evidence of eugenics at UCL and women in science. There’s two dates available, which you can book on eventbrite:

Tuesday 12th March, 12:30-1:30pm, UCL East in Marshgate

Tuesday 19th March, 1:30-2:30pm, Bloomsbury on Gower Street

We celebrate Women’s History Month in March, yet the work to close the gender gap is a year round activity. Take a look at just some of the examples of the fantastic efforts we’ve seen across the UK:

Protests and Suffragettes

Protests and Suffragettes is a creative initiative and social enterprise. They’re made up of artists, activists, and local historians dedicated to uncovering and honouring the stories of female activists throughout Scotland’s history. They have hosted a number of editathons committed to enriching the information of Scottish women’s activism on the Wikimedia projects. Protests and Suffragettes spoke at our Community Meeting in November (watch here) at which some of the other guest speakers commended their workshops as part of their own editing journeys.

Nurses in Red

At the same meeting we awarded the Royal College of Nursing’s History of Nursing Forum as our Partnership of the Year for their Nurses in Red project. The forum is open to anyone who has an interest in history, and in 2022 they set up lunchtime Wikithons to add notable women nurses to the Wikimedia projects. Women make up 90% of the nursing profession, but their important achievements are severely underrepresented in historic accounts both on Wikimedia and beyond. You can find out more about the project and its brilliant achievements in this video.

The Hunger Strike Medal

Becky Male has been a volunteer at Glasgow Women’s Library since 2019. Becky digitises the archive at the library, photographing their collection of objects. She started editing Wikipedia on the Hunger Strike Medal’s article, overhauling much of the page and adding over 100 references so the historic significance of the medal was reflected by its article. You can see Becky talking about her wiki-journey and the medal in this video.

Do let us know if you too are celebrating Women’s History Month with related wiki activities by getting in touch at info@wikimedia.org.uk, or tagging us on social media.

You can support this work with a donation. We’re so grateful to our supporters, who enable us to continue diversifying the Wikimedia projects so they better represent us all.

The post Women’s History Month 2024 – exciting events and projects appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

On Sunday 26th November we were delighted to host our 2023 Community Meeting. It was a chance for our community to gather online, share the work that’s taken place over the last year, recognise that work through the UK Wikimedian of the Year awards, and find out more ways to get involved. 

We were welcomed by our Chief Executive Lucy Crompton-Reid, and then we launched into a series of Lightning Talks.

Lightning Talks

Dr Sarah Rogers, from the Royal College of Nursing’s History of Nursing Forum, told us about the Nurses in Red project.

Alexander – Patient Zero – told us about his journey with Wikipedia, from a young editor to one of the most active 10,000 editors on English Wikipedia.

Richard Davies told us about the work he’s been doing in the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons coverage of the Welsh town of Wrecsam (Wrexham).

Becky Male told us about her work on the Hunger Strike Medal article, and how this led to a surprising discovery about the collection of Suffragette Pennies at the Glasgow Women’s Library.

Jonathan – WereSpielChequers – told us about the process of becoming an admin on English Wikipedia, and how the project needs more admins.

And Gill Ryan told us about the project that she ran in partnership with Perth Library this year on the Women of Perth.

In memoriam

In the last few years, we’ve sadly lost a few members of the UK Wikimedia community, and so we took some time to recognise the contributions that Lisa Lodwick, Jo Pugh, Richard Haslam, Les Barker and Richard Lawson made to the movement. They will be very much missed. 

UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards

Next we announced the winners of the UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards. For the full details of who won the awards, the fantastic work they’re doing, and who received an honourable mention, you can see this blog.

UK Wikimedian of the Year: Nick Sheppard

Partnership of the Year: Royal College of Nursing’s History of Nursing Forum – Nurses in Red

Up and Coming Wikimedian: Heidi Berg 

Opportunity Fair

And finally we closed with something new for us; the Opportunity Fair. Here we had a selection of projects with which we’d invite our community to get involved, as well as a range of ways that Wikimedia UK can support the community.

Protests & Suffragettes are looking for translators of articles they’ve been creating and improving about Scottish Suffrage/ttes, as well as help improving those articles – more information on their project page, or contact sara.thomas@wikimedia.org.uk.

Nadege Forde-Vidal, Historian & Community Project Developer at Sankofa London Schools is also looking for assistance, in the shape of after-school workshop leaders: www.sankofalondonschools.co.uk / nadege@sankofalondonschools.co.uk 

The National Library of Scotland uploaded a large number of Scottish Chapbooks to Wikimedia Commons / Wikisource during lockdown, with staff proofreading that work. There are still a number of these to be proofread and transcribed, and they can be found here. If you’d like to know more about how to become involved, or are interested in learning more about Wikisource, please contact sara.thomas@wikimedia.org.uk.

Dr Richard Nevell, Programme Manager, talked about Wiki Loves Monuments and Wiki Loves Earth – we’re in need of assistance with Wikidata for Wiki Loves Earth, and a campaign organiser or organisers for Wiki Loves Monuments – if you’d like to know more please contact richard.nevell@wikimedia.org.uk.

Dr Lucy Hinnie told us about Let’s Connect, a peer learning group for any Wikimedian who is part of an organised group – there are regular events and a whole host of resources, and they can be found through their meta page. Lucy’s slides are here.

Karla Marte, our Programme Evaluation Coordinator, explained our Project and Volunteer Grants, and how they can support individual volunteers – there’s more information about this on our website where you can see examples of past grants, and there’s also an online application form.

Last but not least, our board member Rod Ward told us a little about the Community Development Committee, a new Board subcommittee, whose purpose is to advise the board on community and volunteer issues generally, and to consider any community-related matters that may be delegated to the Committee by the board.

Join us

If you’d like to hear about future UK community events and how you can get involved please sign up for our newsletter, or join our membership to help govern the charity.

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The goal of Wikipedia is to create a world where everyone has access to all available knowledge, but in order to do this, we need to reflect all global viewpoints. Increased engagement and representation of marginalised groups and topics on Wikipedia has been a significant strategic goal of Wikimedia UK’s work to combat inequality and bias. While there are many ways that institutions of power and privilege can exclude people, we will be focusing on the gender gap this Women’s History Month and critically examining how women are portrayed on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects.

It is crucial to fight to improve the representation of women, non-binary individuals, and related topics on Wikipedia. We must ensure that the free global information resource, which is read more than 15 billion times a month, is conveying everyone’s narrative if “you can’t be what you can’t see.” Women, people of colour, persons with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and people who reside outside of the United States and Western Europe are included in this. Those individuals and their tales already exist; they don’t require a Wikipedia entry to make them come to life. The “first stop” for many of us, though, when we want to learn about the world is Wikipedia.

On Wikimedia, people of any gender can and do devote time and effort to solving gender inequity. This could be done in a variety of ways, including writing fresh stories on women, hiring more female editors, increasing awareness of the gender pay gap, etc. Editing Wikipedia is becoming more and more recognised as a type of knowledge activism that addresses information gaps and sparks debates about how knowledge and information are produced, vetted, and challenged online.

At Wikimedia UK we organise projects that help close the gender gap on Wiki, like our partnership with The National Galleries of Scotland worked with us to achieve greater gender parity for the artists represented on Wikipedia. In our lead volunteers – volunteers who organise events and projects supporting our work – we have achieved gender parity.

If you’re interested in attending events aimed at closing the gender gap, check our events page for upcoming opportunities.

The post International Women’s Day and the wiki projects appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

Knowledge equity refers to the expansion and diversification of valued knowledge. It looks to engage with the understandings, expertise and experiences of communities who have historically been excluded from social discourse.

Systemic bias and historic repression are key reasons for this marginalisation, yet by increasing knowledge equity on platforms like Wikipedia we all benefit from the shared resource we’ve improved.

Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has developed into a central hub for the world’s knowledge to coexist, accessed across the planet and enabling us to learn, contribute and share. As the validity, trustworthiness and editorship of Wikipedia has grown, so has its reach and diversity of content. With over 260 million page views per month, the online encyclopaedia has become an almost all-encompassing source of information.

Helping Wikipedia to represent the sum of all human knowledge is no simple task however. The systemic biases and cultural inequalities we see in the world around us are reflected in Wikipedia’s content. These biases are widely varied, relating to gender, culture, geography and religious worldviews among others. In addition, the biases on Wikipedia and its sister projects like Wikidata are both internal and external. Factors such as the availability of published sources, internet accessibility and political censorship result in a highly unbalanced level of engagement with Wikimedia across the world, the result being that European and North American issues and culture are covered more extensively. 

Knowledge Equity is a strategic focus for Wikimedia UK – our work in this field has resulted in a significant impact on the breadth and quality of cultural content on Wikimedia projects, as well as the diversity of groups and communities engaging with open knowledge. Together with key collaborators we have worked extensively on closing the gender gap, preserving minority languages, and delivering projects that increase access to underrepresented cultural heritage.

Our work with community groups, museums, galleries and educational institutions has made significant contributions to addressing inequality and knowledge gaps on Wikipedia.

For example, our partnership with the Khalili Collections – launched in 2019 – led to a research project in 2021 focusing on the diversity of visual arts content on Wikipedia. The research undertaken by Dr Martin Poulter and Waqās Ahmed highlighted significant biases, showing that Wikipedia gives many times more coverage to visual art from the Western tradition than for all other cultures’ visual art combined. Through this research, we have been able to propose actions that will give Wikipedia a more global perspective on visual arts. It also highlights to the global community of editors where the knowledge gaps lie, resulting in work to significantly improve articles on previously underrepresented culture. 

Through a University Arts London (UAL) staff secondment, the Decolonising Wikipedia Network was formed. The network ran training events for staff and students so they could play an active role in the decolonisation of knowledge, making their Wikipedia editing a form of knowledge activism. We also run our annual Celtic Knot conference, showcasing innovative approaches to open knowledge and open data that support and grow Indigenous language communities

Supporting Wikimedia UK for this year’s Giving Tuesday will enable us to continue engaging new organisations, communities and individuals to deliver impact through these unique projects. Together we can support communities across the UK to create and share knowledge, wisdom and experience where systemic bias and other barriers have previously inhibited representation.

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On International Women’s Day, I ran training for long-term Wikimedia UK partners Protests & Suffragettes and Women’s History Scotland. The editathon focused on Scottish Suffrage(ttes), and is just one of a series of events that they’ll be running over the next few months.  

A few days after the event, I was tagged in a brilliant Twitter thread from one participant and new Wikipedia editor Becky Male. Becky had been working on the Hunger Strike Medal article. I was really struck not only by her new-found enthusiasm for Wikipedia editing, but also by this quote: “Knowledge activism matters because, for most people, Wikipedia is their first port of call for new info. I did the Cat and Mouse Act in GCSE History. Don’t remember learning about the medal or the names of the women..” 

We often talk about Knowledge Activism in the context of fixing content gaps that pertain to voices and communities left out by structures of power and privilege, and how the gender gap manifests in different ways on-wiki. I thought that this was a great example of how the Wikimedia community’s work is helping to address those gaps, so I reached out to Becky to ask if she’d like to write a blog for us which you can read below. Thanks Becky!

By Becky Male, @beccamale

Joining Wikipedia was one of those things I’d thought about doing from time to time – I’d come across an article that was woefully short and think to myself “someone should probably do something about that”. But fear of accidentally breaking something stopped me.

But then it’s International Women’s Day, and Women’s History Scotland, Protests & Suffragettes and Wikimedia UK are organising an Editathon to get some of the information P&S has found – they’ve created fantastic educational resources on the Scottish suffrage movement – added to Wikipedia. This is the Knowledge Gap: even when things are known about women, that knowledge hasn’t made it on to Wikipedia. It’s most people’s first port of call for new information, which makes this a big problem.

So I signed up and did the intro tutorial. A misspent adolescence on LiveJournal meant the leap from basic HTML to editing in source was fairly small. And there’s something about sitting in a Zoom call of two dozen women, all a bit nervous about this process too and being told “It’s okay, you really can’t screw this up that badly” that’s genuinely reassuring – failure’s a lot less scary when you’ve got backup.

Offline, I volunteer at Glasgow Women’s Library digitising artefacts. Creating the article on the Suffragette Penny sounded like a perfect extension of that. But it was wisely suggested that I should pick an existing article for my first. The Hunger Strike Medal needed work and was similar enough to get me started.

I studied the Cat and Mouse Act for GSCE History so I already had some background knowledge of the suffragette tactic of hunger striking. I cleaned up the lead, separated the information into sections and added a few other interesting titbits – as I learned at the Editathon, Wikipedia users love trivia. But the biggest change I made was to the list of medal recipients.

The medal was the WSPU’s highest honour – not only had a woman been gaoled for her beliefs, she’d risked her life and health for the cause. The hunger strikes and subsequent force-feeding by prison authorities contributed to early deaths, caused serious illnesses, and destroyed women’s mental health. They suffered horrifically and their sacrifices deserve to be remembered.

The list is now over 90 names, each one sourced, each medal confirmed. Some I found in books, maybe just one line about them. Others I found with a Google search, the suggested images showing me new medals the deeper I went, leading me to the sites of auction houses and local museums. My favourites, though, are in newsreels from 1955, women well into their 60s still proudly wearing their medals.

There’s another 60+ hunger strikers whose medals haven’t been found yet. Some names I moved to the Talk page if the evidence doesn’t support them on the list. I can’t say for sure that this is the most comprehensive list of WSPU hunger strikers but I think it’s likely – I certainly haven’t found one anywhere else.

And I’ve still got that Suffragette Penny article to write.

The post Women’s suffrage and the Hunger Strike Medal appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

The event runs for a whole day to ensure that anyone with access to a computer, anywhere in the world, can join at a time when they are free to. In the UK with the easing of covid restrictions, it is possible to join either in person or online.

Participants will learn how to edit Wikipedia, working from redlists of notable women in science and mathematics who do not yet have Wikipedia articles. Everyone’s efforts will be contributing to reducing the online gender gap.

The event is organised by the international group Women in Red, a volunteer organisation within Wikipedia whose aim is to reduce the gender gap in the disportionate number of Wikipedia biographies devoted to men. It takes its name from red links in the online encyclopedia; ones which are yet to have a corresponding article. Women in Red was started six years ago in Mexico by two volunteers, a British and an American, and now has thousands of followers and hundreds of active editors but no budget, office, or hierarchy. When the group was formed, 85% of Wikipedia biographies were about men. Since then the community has created over 167,000 new articles about women, at a rate of about 70 a day. Together participants work in parallel on Wikipedias in over 30 other languages to reduce the online gender gap and give visibility to notable women from the past and present.

The date chosen, 12th October, is Ada Lovelace Day, named after the 19th century British mathematician, daughter of the mathematician Lady Byron and Lord Byron. Ada is regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). 

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia began in 2001 and now has 6 million articles in English and over twenty million more in hundreds of other languages. It is now the eighth most visited website and one of the few that is run by a non-profit. The Wikimedia Foundation, based in San Francisco, keeps Wikipedia running but major decisions about its content and future direction are made by the global community. All the content is written and kept up to date by about 250,000 active volunteers around the world.

For more information on how to join the UK editathon see the Wikipedia event page. For more detail on the global event go to WikiAda24.org.

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In July 2021, #WCCWiki marked an important milestone. The initiative, designed to improve the online representation of those who identify as women and non-binary, held its fiftieth Wikipedia editathon. Since 2016 when the initiative began, our community has come together each month to edit Wikipedia pages for women and non-binary people, share resources and practical tips for editing, and to offer training for those new to the task. Organised through the Women’s Classical Committee UK, #WCCWiki has done fantastic work in transforming the online representation of classicists who identify as women and non-binary, and helping to challenge Wikipedia’s intractable gender gap. Classics is very broadly conceived, including historians, archaeologists, theorists, translators, poets, and others who work on the ancient world.

But the implications of our success reach far beyond one platform. #WCCWiki has spread awareness and understanding of Wikipedia and why it’s so important, especially to those invested in knowledge transfer, as much of our community is. We have upskilled classicists to use and improve Wikipedia, tools which have then been transferred into classrooms around the world. We have built an activist network based on solidarity and dynamic action, and we have demonstrated how hard-won research skills really are transferable and can make a huge difference to environments beyond grant applications and writing articles.

Before #WCCWiki got started, the heritage of women and non-binary people in classics, both historical and contemporary, was a largely unrepresented online demographic. An estimate in 2016 found that only 7% of biographies of classicists on Wikipedia featured women. #WCCWiki has worked hard to make this demographic a highly visible and accessible part of classics.

We’ve created or edited more than 450 Wikipedia pages for those classicists who identify as women and non-binary, including path-breaking foremothers who were only referred to on their husband’s pages, such as Dr Miriam T. Griffin, Dr Annie Ure, and Professor Leslie Brubaker. One of our long-standing members, Richard Nevell, calculated that, as of 28 July 2021, 17.7% of the total of biographies of classicists on Wikipedia feature women. This is a significant rise from December 2019 when the number of biographies of women classicists was 16.3%. With every month, the proportion of Wikipedia biographies featuring classicists who identify as women or non-binary continues to increase.

Our pace of change means that on average every other day, a page for a woman or non-binary person is created or edited. #WCCWiki articles have featured regularly on Wikipedia’s front page and an increasing number have achieved Good Article status. #WCCWiki franchises have been inspired internationally, from Durham in the UK, to Winnipeg in Canada, to Ohio in the US. Our Wikipedia pages have been viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, and we have boosted their impact on social media, mainly on Twitter, where posts have reached 50,000+ people.

Richard’s calculations demonstrate the huge leaps #WCCWiki is taking, especially in comparison with Wikipedia in other languages. 34% of new articles about classicists on the English Wikipedia created between December 2019 and July 2021 feature women, which is twice that of the German Wikipedia, and triple that of French. Whilst #WCCWiki edits and creates pages in a variety of languages, English does predominate. Richard’s stats reveal the gender bias on Wikipedia without initiatives like #WCCWiki working against them.

Initiatives like #WCCWiki and the Wikiproject Women In Red are still essential in tackling Wikipedia’s gender gap. Between 84% and 91% of Wikipedia editors are male, and only around 19% of biographical pages feature women overall. At 17.7%, the representation of those classicists who identify as women and non-binary still lags behind the more general gendered trend. So, there is much more to do. Everyone is welcome to join us online as we edit together on or around 22^nd of each month, 13.00-15.00 GMT+1. For more information, check out our Project Page, and #WCCWiki on Twitter. Now we’re looking forward to our 100^th editathon, come and join the party!

The post Celebrating #WCCWiki at 50! appeared first on Wikimedia UK.

In Summer 2020, I organised my first Wikipedia Editathon as part of the Women in STEM Connect series. With an eye-opening talk, physicist and Wikipedia diversity advocate, Dr Jess Wade introduced me to the issue of underrepresentation on Wikipedia and left me, and seemingly all our attendees, feeling inspired to start editing Wikipedia. With training from University of Edinburgh Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan McAndrew, and a total of 15 editors, we were able to contribute fourteen thousand words, edit forty-two articles and add five new articles to Wikipedia by the end of the event. I created my first Wikipedia article on Dr Jessica Borger, an Australian T-Cell immunologist, and caught the editing bug!

To celebrate International Womens’ Day 2021, Edinburgh University Women in STEM (EUWiSTEM) has joined forces with 5 other female and gender minority lead societies: Edinburgh University Women in Business, Women in Law, Women in Politics and International Relations, EconWomen, and Hoppers, the society of women and gender minorities in Informatics. Together we are hosting Women EmpowerED, a week-long celebration aiming to showcase the achievements of women in different fields and discuss the issues women currently face, with a focus on cross-disciplinary inclusion. 

The theme of International Womens’ Day 2021 is #ChooseToChallenge. Fitting with that theme, it is important we acknowledge the achievements of diversity and inclusion initiatives but it is equally crucial that we continue to challenge the norms and push for further improvements. Women EmpowerED has chosen to kick-off our celebrations on March 6th with an event that fits these aims perfectly – a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. At this event, we aim to improve the representation of women and gender minorities on Wikipedia, focusing on those who have chosen to challenge societal norms, and inspirational women in the host societies’ fields. Ewan McAndrew will be providing editing training during the event, helping us to make Wikipedia editing accessible to all. 

We are pleased to be welcoming Bruce and John Usher Professor of Public Health in the Usher Institute, Dr Linda Bauld, to give a talk on the importance of representation online at the Edit-a-thon. Online platforms now have a massive influence on society, and most of these platforms are rife with internet ‘trolls’, and political agendas. As the fifth most visited website worldwide, and what is designed to be a source of reliable information for users, it is crucial that Wikipedia is free from bias and abuse. As Jess Wade explains in a 2018 TEDXLondon talk, “the majority of history has been written by men, about men, for other men.” 

But we can start to change that through Wikipedia. 

In our event, not only will we add and improve articles for women and gender minorities, but we also hope to increase the diversity of its editors, making a lasting impact on Wikipedia. 

If you would like to learn how to edit articles or assist in our mission to improve diversity on Wikipedia, you can get tickets to our editathon on eventbrite.

For more information on Women EmpowerED visit our website.

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Wikipedia’s vision is a world in which everyone has access to the sum of the world’s knowledge, but to do this, we must have representation from all the world’s voices. For the past five years Wikimedia UK has been working to address inequality and bias across the projects, with a key strategic aim being to increase the engagement and representation of marginalised people and subjects on Wikipedia. Whilst there are all sorts of ways in which structures of power and privilege can exclude people, during Women’s History Month we will be shining a light on the gender gap, and thinking critically about how women are represented on Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects. 

In a world where women are still systematically oppressed in many countries – and where, even in countries with gender equality written into the legislative framework, systemic bias still pervades – the ‘gender gap’ can feel like an intractable issue. We have seen how the Covid-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected women, and deepened pre-existing inequalities, despite men being more likely to die from the disease. Globally, according to the UN, even the limited gains made in the past decade on issues such as education, early marriage and political representation are at risk of being rolled back. Here in the UK, a report by the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee acknowledges the particular and disproportionate economic impact on people who are already vulnerable, and highlights how existing gendered inequalities have been ignored and sometimes exacerbated by the pandemic policy response. 

Within this context, working to increase and improve the representation of women, non-binary people and related subjects on Wikimedia is more important than ever. If ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ then we need to make sure that the world’s free knowledge resource – which is read more than 15 billion times a month – is telling everyone’s story. This includes women, people of colour, disabled people, LGBTQ+ folks and those living outside the United States and Western Europe. Those people, and those stories, exist – they don’t need to be written into Wikipedia to come alive. But for many of us, Wikipedia is the ‘first stop’ when we want to learn about the world. By writing women’s stories into Wikipedia and the wider information ecosystem – by making them more discoverable – we will be helping women around the world discover who they are and can be. 

People of any gender can, and do, commit time and energy to addressing gender inequality on Wikimedia. This might be by creating new articles about women, training new female editors, raising awareness of the gender gap or myriad other things. Increasingly, editing Wikipedia is being recognised as a form of knowledge activism which helps to address gaps in information, and generate discussions about how knowledge and information is created, curated and contested online. 

Fixing the gender gap on Wikimedia is a huge challenge. Much has been written about the reasons for this, as well as the many initiatives and tools that have been developed to try to address the lack of parity on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects. I’m not going to repeat that here, but instead I’m going to introduce some of the extraordinary people involved in this work. I’m pleased and proud that Wikimedia UK will be talking to the following four amazing women as part of a special Women’s History Month series of interviews, with one video to be released every Monday in March:

• Kira Wisniewski, Executive Director of Art+Feminism – an intersectional feminist non-profit organisation that directly addresses the information gap about gender, feminism, and the arts on the internet. 
• Dr Rebecca O’Neill, Project Co-ordinator at Wikimedia Ireland, Vice-Chair of Women in Technology and Science Ireland and Secretary of the National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology.
• Dr Victoria Leonard – Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Postdoctoral Researcher in Late Ancient History and Founder and Co-Chair of the Women’s Classical Committee – who will be talking about her work to increase the visibility of women in classics on Wikipedia, through #WCCWiki.
• Dr Alice White, Digital Editor at Wellcome Collection and former Wikimedian in Residence at Wellcome Library. 

I will be giving the final interview in March to round up the series and reflect on the future priorities, challenges and opportunities for Wikimedia and the gender gap.

Recognising our own privilege when it comes to knowledge and information is important. I feel very privileged to be writing this blogpost for Women’s History Month for Wikimedia UK; to have this platform when so many women’s voices aren’t heard. On that note, if there’s anything you would like me to include in my interview later this month, please let me know. I’m keen to hear about and to showcase all the different ways in which people and communities are addressing underrepresentation on Wikimedia, so please contact me on info@wikimedia.org.uk or by twitter (@lcromptonreid) if you would like me to share your story.

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