Category: Equity

Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects form the largest collaborative collection of free knowledge – written in roughly 300 languages, and built by and for the world. At the Wikimedia Foundation, the U.S.-based nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, we strive to reflect the communities we currently work with, and those we hope to work with in….

The internet has a problem: across much of the world, women’s access, and participation, and representation on the internet are below that of men.* For online communities like Wikipedia, the internet’s missing women help contribute to our gender gap—both in our content, which is biased towards male biographies, and in our contributors, which are overwhelmingly….

Filipina American artist Dorothy Santos knows what it feels like to be a minority in your field. She said, “I thought, ‘there’s no one who looks like me in this industry!’ ” She reached out to Jennifer Wofford, co-founder of the San Francisco Bay Area-based artist collaborative Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., and years later contributed to….

In recent weeks, the world learned about Dr. Donna Strickland, only the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. It also learned that Wikipedia lacked an article on Strickland amongst its over five million articles. Wikipedia subsequently received justifiable criticism for its low percentage of female editors, its editing culture, and its….

The news that optical physicist Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page before winning the Nobel Prize in Physics brought renewed attention to Women in Red, a long-standing volunteer effort to add more biographies about women to the encyclopedia. After the announcement, the Women in Red WikiProject had one of their best weeks ever,….

This post ran in the Los Angeles Times on 18 October 2018. When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize this month, she became only the third woman in history to receive the award in physics. An optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, Strickland is brilliant, accomplished and inspiring. To use Wikipedia parlance, she is very….

Maybe you’ve already heard the story of how the global edit-a-thon known as Art+Feminism got started. It goes something like this: Five years ago, four friends—Siân Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, Michael Mandiberg, and Laurel Ptak—gathered together to discuss an idea for promoting Wikipedia as a place to challenge one of the ways women are silenced: through….

Donna Strickland is an optical physicist at the University of Waterloo. She is also the winner of a Nobel Prize in Physics (as of two days ago), a former president and fellow of the Optical Society, and early in her career was the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. What did she receive these honors….

In April 2017, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Community Resources team launched the Gender Diversity Mapping Project to gather feedback from Wikimedians at the forefront of gender equity efforts in the Wikimedia movement.  Our plan was to identify active movement leaders and document what they have learned from their work so far.  We had three goals in….

Last May, Prince Harry, fifth in line to the British throne, married Meghan Markle, an American actress and activist. The event captivated millions upon millions of people for several weeks, and many of them journeyed to Wikipedia to read the encyclopedia’s curated content about the British monarchy, the wedding plans, and the people involved. Unfortunately,….