Closing the Gender Gap on Wikimedia

Closing the Gender Gap on Wikimedia
By Lucy Crompton-Reid, Chief Executive, Wikimedia UK

This essay was first published in March 2018 as a chapter of the Museums Etc.
publication Feminism and Museums: Intervention, Disruption and Change (Volume
2)
Wikimedia is a global movement and Wikipedia, the most well known and well used
of the Wikimedia projects, exists within nearly 300 languages and is read by millions
of readers every week. The free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit is one of the most
influential sources of information in the world, and the vision of Wikipedia is a world
in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
However while the encyclopaedia strives for accuracy and a neutral point of view, this
is inhibited by systemic bias, which is exacerbated by the shared social and cultural
characteristics of the majority of editors. In particular, there is a significant and
well-documented gender gap on Wikimedia, in terms of both editors and content.
This chapter will explore some of the reasons behind the gender gap on Wikimedia
and initiatives to address it, focusing on partnerships with museums and the wider
cultural sector designed to increase online representation of women. As well as
sharing some examples from the UK it will draw on case studies of excellent practice
across the global Wikimedia movement, showcasing projects with galleries, libraries,
archives and museums including those where the gender gap is compounded by
geographic and linguistic bias.
The lack of gender diversity on Wikimedia is apparent both in its editor base and in
the content of the encyclopaedia. Much has been written about the fact that the
overwhelming majority of editors are male, and a number of articles and research
studies have tried to identify why women don’t edit in high numbers. It has been
1
suggested that women are less likely to contribute to the Wikimedia projects because
of a lack of time, and gender differences in confidence; both in terms of technical
skills but also, critically, the value placed by women on their own knowledge and
expertise . The same research also pointed to the somewhat adversarial nature of the
2
community and the high level of conflict involved in the editing process, with women
generally placing a higher value on consensus and collaboration.
The reasons why women are less likely to edit than men are often framed as a
combination of the culture and community of Wikipedia, and the supposed innate
behaviours and characteristics of women. The culture of an online platform, however,
doesn’t have to be innate, and can and should adapt to accommodate differing
perspectives, and different ways of sharing and valuing knowledge. Indeed, as we
know that collective intelligence depends on these differences, Wikimedia will almost
certainly fail to fulfil its vision if it doesn’t embrace new forms of contribution. In
their recent paper ‘Anyone can edit' not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia provides a useful starting point for
this research with a comprehensive list of articles, essays and research papers on the topic
2
"WP: clubhouse?: an exploration of Wikipedia's gender imbalance" by Lam et al., WikiSym
2011
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, Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman move away from the deficit model of the gender
3
gap by drawing on the theoretical tools of feminist science and technology studies,
making the case that certain aspects of Wikipedia's infrastructure define it as a
masculine project. These include the epistemological foundations of what constitutes
encyclopaedic knowledge, as well as Wikipedia’s software and policy infrastructure.
More striking even than the lack of female editors is the gender gap on Wikipedia in
terms of its content. As an illustration of this, by July 2017 the proportion of
biographies about women on the English Wikipedia was just over 17%. Whilst it
seems clear that the gender bias in content is related to the lack of diversity of its
editor base, another important factor is the relative dearth of reliable secondary
sources about women and their achievements. This reflects entrenched gender roles
as well as bias in reference materials; as whilst historically women may have
struggled to carve a role outside the home, even those who made extraordinary
contributions in fields such as science, medicine and the arts were written about less
extensively than their male counterparts. The tone of what was written was also
different, with women often being described in relation to men. This underlying
gender perspective also permeates Wikipedia, adding an additional dimension to the
gender gap that is less obvious but arguably more insidious and pervasive.
Museums are fundamentally concerned with telling stories, and those stories usually
revolve around human beings – even if this is in relation to the natural environment.
Museums and other cultural bodies help us to make sense of the world and ourselves,
and at their best they can inspire, challenge, inform, excite and nurture us. But
museums have a serious gender issue as well, from their leadership and management
through to their collections, with the stories that are told about our past and our
present continuing to exclude the contribution and voices of women. Clearly,
increasing and improving the online representation of women means addressing
issues of curation and presentation as well as content. This is where museums can
play a significant role in working with Wikimedia to address androcentricism and
gender inequality; bringing their knowledge and understanding of how to engage
with and curate collections, as well as digitising and sharing their content under a
free license so that it can be accessed online. Moving beyond curated knowledge and
working together in spaces that are semi-curated could also enable Wikimedia
communities and museums to address issues of representation by stepping outside
more traditional structures for participation, and reimagining what’s possible.
Over the past few years a wide number of initiatives have been developed to try to
address the gender gap on Wikimedia, with community-led projects on the English
Wikipedia alone including the Gender Gap Task Force, WikiProject Feminism,
WikiProject Women’s History, WikiProject Women artists, WikiProject Women
scientists, WikiProject women writers, WikiProject Jewish women, WikiWomen’s
User Group and Wiki Loves Women. Whilst all of these projects have an online
presence, in person ‘edit-a-thon’ events (similar to a hackathon, but focused on
editing Wikipedia) have been run across the world for a number of years, often
focused on generating content about women as well as encouraging women to edit.
The Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon started in 2014 with an event at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York and is now an annual global campaign.
3
Ford, Heather and Wajcman, Judy (2016) ‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia
and the gender gap. Social Studies of Science ISSN 0306-3127
2

Art+Feminism events around the world address gaps on Wikimedia on and around
International Women’s Day, by inviting women and participants of all gender
identities and expressions to add and improve Wikipedia articles relating to art and
feminism. Events generally include workshops for new editors, resource materials,
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childcare and other programming and the focus of entries is expansive, with women
contributing to articles on technology, comics, social advocacy, black contemporary
art, and much more.
In 2017, the organisers of Art+Feminism called on potential volunteers and
participants to “organise, not agonise” at a time when affirming the work of women,
people of colour, immigrants, the LGBTQIA+ community and other marginalised
people felt more pressing than ever. The data from Art+Feminism 2017 is still being
collated but it is estimated to have involved over two hundred events, while the 2016
campaign saw over 175 events take place in 28 countries on all 6 inhabited
continents, with an estimated 2500 participants globally and over 3000 Wikipedia
articles created or improved. Events have been held in a wide range of spaces
including Archives Nationales, Paris; Banff Center for the Arts; Frank-Ratchye
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh; ICA, Boston;
Los Angeles County Museum of Art; McGill University, Montreal; Museo
Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; The Museum of Modern Art, New
York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Yale University, New Haven.
As the national charity for the global Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia UK works in
partnership with the cultural and education sectors to make knowledge freely
available, usable and reusable online. Our work aims to build an inclusive online
community and increase the quality and quantity of coverage of underrepresented
subjects on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects, in order to ensure that these
reflect our diverse society and are free from bias. Wikimedia UK participated in
Art+Feminism for the first time in 2016, coordinating events in nine partner
institutions including Dulwich Picture Gallery, ICA, Leeds Central Library, National
Library of Wales, Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain. The aim of these
events was three-fold: To raise awareness of the gender gap on Wikipedia, to increase
coverage of women in the arts, and to recruit and train new editors. For
Art+Feminism and International Women’s Day 2017, we expanded our reach with
events at Newnham College, Cambridge and the Royal Academy of Art, plus
grassroots events at venues including the Hyde Park Book Club in Leeds, organised
and facilitated by local volunteers.
The Wikimedia movement works across many other institutions in the cultural sector
and beyond, and emerging insights and practice from these interventions could
potentially be applied and replicated within the museum sector. There is a
particularly strong body of work in collaboration with libraries; indeed, Wikipedia
has its own virtual library, to help contributors gain access to the vital reliable sources
that they need to improve Wikipedia, and to support knowledge professionals in
sharing their collections with the public.
Wikipedia can be a powerful tool for libraries, particularly in parts of the world where
access to other resources and information is limited. In January 2016, to celebrate
Wikipedia’s 15th birthday, the Wikipedia Library Team ran a social media campaign
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http://www.artandfeminism.org/
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asking libraries to imagine a world where every librarian added one more reference to
Wikipedia. By providing targeted messaging with a clear call to action they created a
global campaign that involved librarians all over the world in a conversation about
how librarianship can benefit and help the global audience of Wikipedia. Catalan
libraries were the first to be involved, closely followed by West Virginia University,
National Library of Wales and librarians in Australia, Netherlands and Denmark. The
#1lib1ref campaign was highly influenced by the model and design of Art+Feminism
and aimed to be as decentralised and locally empowering as possible, while
improving the research ecosystem of Wikipedia for its readers and editors and
targeting a profession that is mostly women. This philosophy of local community
empowerment also underpins a new collaboration with the Online Community
Library Center (OCLC), a global library co-operative supporting thousands of
libraries in making information more accessible and more useful.
In the UK, working with Wikimedia can enable libraries as well as museums,
galleries, archives and other content-holders to increase their public engagement and
reach, as well as to develop responses to the exclusion or misrepresentation of
women. Our partnership programme includes digital and outreach activities,
advocating for changes to policy and practice, and the discovery and presentation of
hidden ‘herstories’ by opening up institutional collections. In November 2015, Senate
House Library held an edit-a-thon called Revealing Local History as part of the Being
Human Festival, aimed at helping researchers in the humanities make their research
more accessible to the public. More recently, Senate House hosted a day long
edit-a-thon event, organised in partnership with Wikimedia UK and the UK Women’s
Classical Committee and attended by 25 female classicists who learnt to edit and
improve Wikipedia. While on a larger scale, our Wikimedian in Residence at the
Wellcome Library, Alice White, has focused on exploring, sharing and highlighting
women’s contribution to medicine through a programme of research, events,
outreach, advocacy and partnership building.
As the UK chapter for Wikimedia a considerable amount of our work takes place
outside England (or indeed London, where most of our staff team is based), with
diverse programmes of work in both Wales and Scotland. Wikimedians in Residence
have been based at National Library of Scotland and Museums Galleries Scotland,
with a current residency at University of Edinburgh. We are also working in
partnership with the National Library of Scotland on a language residency,
appointing the first salaried Gaelic Wikipedian in January 2017. At the Scottish
National Gallery, a Wikipedia Editathon was held to mark the opening of the
exhibition Modern Scottish Women in January 2016, led by Sara Thomas, who was
the Wikimedian in Residence at umbrella body Museums Galleries Scotland. The
exhibition covered the period from 1885, when Fra Newbery became Director of
Glasgow School of Art - the year, incidentally, that Sir William Fettes Douglas,
President of the Royal Scottish Academy, declared that the work of a woman artist
was “like a man’s only weaker and poorer” - until 1965, the year of Anne Redpath’s
5
death. The event focused on expanding or improving Wikipedia entries for the artists
exhibited and providing an expanded context for their work and practice. After the
success of this event, a follow up was held during Art+Feminism 2016, by the end of
which all but one of the artists featured in the exhibition had a Wikipedia biography.
5
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/modern-scottish-women-painters-and-sculptors-18
85-1965
4

Following these events, an editathon was organised at the Centre for Contemporary
Arts in Glasgow, co-organised with and funded by the Glasgow School of Art and
open access journal British Art Studies. The event was part of the Fourth Wave of the
British Art Studies Conversation Piece series Still Invisible.
Other recent work with the cultural sector in Scotland includes several events at the
Glasgow Women's Library; the only museum dedicated to women’s history in the UK
and a Recognised Collection of National Significance to Scotland. The museum holds
rare and unique items that explore every aspect of women’s lives, and was the ideal
location for Sara Thomas to deliver training and events addressing the gender gap.
The first of these was with library volunteers and drew on items from the collection
and other resources to add and improve content on Wikipedia relating to women and
women's history. The second event was held in partnership with Govan’s Hidden
Histories, a creative team of artists, activists and amateur historians who have hosted
guided walks and conducted oral histories and archival research to recover women’s
voices and stories relating to the 1915 Rent Strikes, and more recent protest
movements in and around Govan. This was a successful and well-attended event
where participants learnt to edit Wikipedia before creating and improving articles
relating to Glasgow’s Suffragettes, Rent Strike organisers, and other notable women
of the Clydeside.
Outside of our work with the cultural sector in Scotland we are working extensively
with the University of Edinburgh, who appointed a Wikimedian in Residence, Ewan
McAndrew, in January 2016. The resident has made a concerted effort to create
public engagement events that appeal to a female audience - with edit-a-thons on the
history of medicine, Samhuinn and women in espionage having a particularly strong
focus on women - and 65% of attendees at over 30 events during 2016 were women.
Prior to this, Ally Crockford, Wikimedian in Residence at National Library of
Scotland from 2014 to 2015, led a series of events as part of the University of
Edinburgh's Innovative Learning Week in 2015, hosted and supported by the
University's Information Services team. These Women in Science and Scottish
History events brought together archivists, academics and Wikimedians to improve
the quality of articles about women in Scottish history, such as 'the Edinburgh Seven',
the first women to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh and who caused a
riot by doing so.
The driving forces behind the University of Edinburgh’s engagement with Wikimedia
UK are education technologist Lorna Campbell and Melissa Highton, Assistant
Principal for Online Learning. In a blog post on the Dangerous Women Project,
Melissa writes that Wikipedia “was supposed to transform the ways in which
information was collected, contributed and shared. It was supposed to offer new ways
of democratising participation, overturning old structures, and yet it has become a
place where women do not choose to contribute and do not choose to spend time.
What has gone wrong?” Lorna and Melissa are both Wikipedia editors themselves –
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with Lorna editing both the English Wikipedia and the Uicipeid (the Scots Gaelic
Wikipedia) - and they illustrate the importance of having champions within partner
institutions, both for Wikimedia and for gender diversity and equality.
6
http://dangerouswomenproject.org/2016/10/10/wikipedias-women-problem/
5

Wikimedia UK’s programme in Wales is led by native Welsh speaker Robin Owain,
who is working with a wide range of individuals and organisations to develop the
Welsh language Wikipedia. This work also has a strong focus on closing the gender
gap and in December 2016, Wicipedia Cymraeg achieved gender balance in terms of
biographies, the first Wikipedia with over 10,000 articles to do so. This is a very
significant achievement and reflects the fact that, while we are actively trying to
diversify the Wikimedia community in the UK, a large number of male editors in the
UK and around the world also recognise the importance of closing the gender gap in
terms of content. Male editors may be the cultural norm on the site, but they have
spent many hours contributing articles about women and their works, training and
developing new female editors, and supporting feminist initiatives on Wikimedia.
Wikimedia UK’s ongoing partnership with the National Library of Wales has been a
crucial factor in the growth of of Wicipedia Cymraeg and in promoting gender
equality. For Art+Feminism 2016, the Wikimedian in Residence at the library, Jason
Evans, capitalised on the interest and enthusiasm of a group of mainly female artists
and art enthusiasts who met up regularly at a local book shop, arranging an initial
training event at the library followed by an edit-a-thon at the bookshop. As Jason
reports, “the group clearly recognised the importance of Wikipedia as the world’s
largest information sharing platform and the desperate need to address the gender
imbalance. With coffee and homemade cake, it was a relaxed affair, but more new
articles were created and the group has maintained contact with me. Of all the
edit-a-thons I’ve hosted, this and the BBC 100 Women event in Cardiff saw the most
impassioned and driven editors. Beyond the obvious desire to address gender
neutrality online many editors have told me they were driven to create content about
people who have inspired them in their lives, in the hope that the articles they create
will in turn help inspire women around the world."
As the most influential source of information in the world, it matters that women are
not yet equally represented on Wikipedia, and that women’s lives and achievements
are not fully recognised. For millions of people coming online for the first time in the
next few months and years, Wikipedia may well be their first experience of the
internet (particularly through the Wikipedia Zero project) and is therefore a critical
source of knowledge and information. This view is shared by the founders of Women
in Red, an international content-related initiative which was established in July 2015
to reduce the gender gap in a positive way through ‘turning redlinks into blue’ - in
other words, to create Wikipedia links to articles about women and their works,
replacing links that are non-existent or have been deleted. Women in Red has
collaborated with museums including Guggenheim, the Smithsonian and the
Metropolitan Museum of Art - as well as other institutions from the cultural sector
and beyond - developing best practices and bringing a unique perspective as an
international virtual membership. One of their first partnership projects was a
Women in Architecture editathon with the Guggenheim Museum and the Wikiproject
Women Wikipedia Design (WikiD), in the autumn of 2015. In addition to the event at
the Guggenheim, about a dozen other in-person events were held at museums,
architectural associations and universities around the world, which were
synchronised with Women in Red’s online efforts and led to an amazing 40% spike in
Wikipedia biographies about women in architecture. Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight,
one of the founders of Women in Red and a leading Wikimedia activist for gender
equality, told me “we were new at this and had no expectations, but it was very well
received by the (Wikimedia) community as you can see by the number of people who
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participated, creating and improving articles and adding images. That was in the
early days when we were focused on the English Wikipedia but we now work across
different language communities.” Indeed, a follow up event was held soon afterwards
at the Guggenheim to accompany an exhibition featuring artists from the Middle East
and North Africa, But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise, with participants editing in
Arabic and other languages.
Rosie mentions that all of Women in Red’s partnerships with cultural institutions
have come about because of a personal connection between the institution and a
Wikimedian; highlighting the importance of individual human relationships and
advocates when trying to effect change, even when the thing you’re trying to change is
an online encyclopaedia with over 40 million articles. “We’re trying to move the
needle, and every extra article that someone writes is one article further to achieving
gender balance”, says Rosie. Wikimedia UK recently worked with Women in Red on a
partnership project with the BBC in December 2016, with a multi-lingual,
multi-location global editathon to raise awareness of the gender gap on Wikipedia,
improve coverage of women and encourage women to edit. Events took place in
London (at BBC Broadcasting House), Cardiff, Glasgow, Reading and around the
world in Cairo, Islamabad, Jerusalem, Kathmandu, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Rome,
Sao Paulo and Washington DC. Virtual editathons were also organised by Wikimedia
Bangladesh, and by Wikimujeres, Wikimedia Argentina and Wikimedia Mexico for
the Spanish-language Wikipedia. Women in Red were a strategic partner for the
project, facilitating international connections between the BBC and local Wikimedia
communities, helping to identify content gaps and sources and improving new
articles that were created as part of the project.
#100WomenWiki was the finale of the BBC’s 100 Women Series 2016 and attracted
substantial radio, television, online and print media coverage worldwide. The events
were attended by many hundreds of participants, most of them women and first-time
editors, with thousands of articles about women created or improved during the
campaign. Participants edited in languages including Arabic, Dari, English, Hausa,
Hindi, Pashto, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese, and
were encouraged to live tweet the event using the shared hashtag #100womenwiki.
Fiona Crack, Editor and Founder of BBC 100 Women, commented that “it was a
buzzing event here in London, but the satellite events from Kathmandu to Nairobi,
Istanbul to Jakarta were the magic that made 100 Women and Wikimedia’s
partnership so special.”
Clearly a project like #100womenwiki, focused on a single day of events, can never be
a panacea for the gender gap on Wikimedia, but events and partnerships like these
demonstrate that this is not an entirely intractable issue. Within the global
Wikimedia community, there are a significant number of people who are motivated to
create change and willing to give up their free time contributing, organising events,
training editors and activating other volunteers and contributors in order to achieve
it. Of course, the infrastructural and cultural barriers to closing the gender gap in the
global north are compounded by additional issues in emerging communities.
Decision makers in these countries are usually men and for some people,
participating in gender activism – or indeed the open knowledge movement - means
risking their personal safety. In Mexico and some other South American countries,
specific women-only Wikimedia events are held for safety reasons, as women don’t
always feel comfortable in traditional male spaces, with events being planned and led
7

by women. Groups such as Wikimujeres are also addressing more subtle signifiers of
exclusion, including gender perspective, and feminising the language of our work to
hold ‘editatonas’.
Afro Free Culture Crowdsourcing Wikimedia (AfroCROWD), also brings an effective
intersectional approach to inclusive action. Based in New York, AfroCROWD’s focus
is on increasing the number of people of African descent who actively participate in
Wikimedia and the free knowledge movement, raising awareness of race and gender
in this context and holding monthly multilingual editathons in partnership with
cultural institutions such as the Brooklyn Public Library, the Studio Museum in
Harlem, MOMA, the Caribbean Cultural Center, African Diaspora Institute and Haiti
Cultural Exchange. Whilst this work with the African diaspora in the United States
and other developed countries is important, developing active and well-supported
Wikimedia communities in Africa itself is imperative. Editors in Africa are already
doing great work in writing African women into Wikipedia, and the annual Wiki
Loves Africa photography campaign asks underrepresented communities to choose
how their own culture is represented, placing their photographs, video and audio
alongside the broader global record. Postcolonial Northern Europe can play a key role
here as well, collaborating with individuals, networks and organisations in Africa to
increase access to the continent’s rich cultural heritage. A noteworthy initiative is the
Netherlands and the World project, based on the idea of repatriating colonial records
of the past held in Dutch collections by uploading them to Wikimedia Commons.
Whose Knowledge? is a global campaign co-founded by Anasuya Sengupta and Siko
Bouterse that aims to correct the skewed representations of knowledge on
Wikimedia. The campaign was launched in 2016 and is partnering with individuals,
communities, movements, Wikimedia user groups and other organisations worldwide
to create, collect and curate knowledge from and with marginalised communities,
particularly women, people of colour, LGBTQI communities, indigenous peoples and
others from the global South. The work involves building bridges between Wikimedia
communities that are aiming to address systemic bias on Wikimedia projects, and the
individuals, communities, organisations and movements worldwide that hold
marginalised forms of knowledge still missing from Wikimedia projects; with
Anasuya and Siko bringing experience and skills in critical feminist scholarship and
human rights activism, intersecting with a deep knowledge of internet technologies
and online community organising. Galleries, libraries, archives and museums can all
contribute to this work by hosting events and workshops, identifying and sharing
relevant content from within their collections and collaborating with the campaign to
encourage diverse forms of engagement, participation and content creation.
The visual image is a hugely important component in women’s representation online
and one in which museums can play a significant role. In October 2015 Dr Martin
Poulter, Wikimedian in Residence at Bodleian Libraries, held the first ‘image-a-thon’
as part of a week of events to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day . The Smithsonian Museum
7
had recently released images of women scientists and so participants at the event
used those, as well as some from other sources, to illustrate Wikipedia biographies.
Museums can support events like this by sharing freely licensed images and
descriptions on sites like Flickr, where they can be drawn into Wikimedia Commons,
7
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or they can directly upload images to Commons and tag with the name of the
depicted person. Museums who are prepared to be more proactive in addressing the
gender gap online could even look at lists of ‘wanted’ images or biographies -
produced and updated regularly by Women In Red and other wiki projects - and find
images and materials specifically related to these known content gaps.
The need to increase gender diversity on Wikimedia is not limited to the
encyclopaedia but encompasses the other open knowledge projects such as
Wikisource, Wikibooks and Wikidata. Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base
that can be read and edited by both humans and machines, and acts as central
storage for the structured data of Wikipedia, the other Wikimedia projects and other
sites and services. The content of Wikidata is available under a free license, exported
using standard formats, and can be interlinked to other open data sets on the linked
data web. This has huge potential for sharing information about museum collections
with a far wider audience, however one of the barriers to uploading metadata about
female artists and their works to Wikidata is the reliance on external sources;
specifically, data from museums, who may be reluctant to share this for a range of
reasons. The other major barrier is the fact that in general, museum collections are
principally made up of works by men.
A Wikidata query in February 2017 on all museum collections with over 1400
paintings provides some evidence for this. The results show the overall number of
paintings and the proportion painted by men and women in over 50 of the largest and
most well known art institutions in the world, such as the Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Finnish National Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Musée d’Orsay,
Museum of Modern Art, Royal Collection and Tate. Discounting for works where the
gender is unknown, or hasn’t been recorded on Wikidata, the proportion of female
artists represented in collections ranged from 0.7% to 24%, with a median average of
6.7%. When you take into account the number of individual paintings by women in
these collections, the figures drop even lower; with the proportion of female works
held ranging from a paltry 0.4% to 22.4%, and the median being only 5.4%. Of
course, this data only relates to paintings, and excludes other art forms held by
museums, including more contemporary disciplines where there may be more equal
gender representation. It must though, at least in part, account for the significant
gender gap on Wikipedia in terms of paintings. As of February 2017, works by women
made up only 1.77% of articles on the encyclopaedia, while the proportion of
biographies of female painters is somewhat higher at 5.24%. At the same point, the
number of paintings on Wikidata was about 200,000 and the proportion of those by
female painters around 6%; although this is only the proportion of works where the
creator’s gender is known, and a surprising amount of metadata for collections does
not include this information.
Another somewhat less well-known project in comparison to its big sister is
Wikisource, the digital free library that anyone can improve. Hosting public domain
texts, films and similar material, Wikisource can be used to provide the full text of
documents, further reading or sources for citations, or simply as a resource in its own
right. The site has nearly half a million texts in English at the time of writing, and has
author profiles and subject portals which gather many texts around a specific issue;
for example, the portal for Feminism contains a list of feminist works and
commentaries, poetry, fiction, biographies and criticism. Importantly, these lists link
directly to openly licensed, freely readable versions of these texts, which can be
9

shared and remixed by users. Wikisource can also host documents and ephemera,
such as petitions and posters from women’s suffrage campaigns. A transcribe-a-thon
event at Oxford University - also part of the Ada Lovelace series in 2015 - created
Wikisource editions of a book and paper by Mary Somerville, a pivotal figure in early
19th
century science for whom there were no electronic texts available.
Museums and cultural institutions can support the growth of Wikisource by sharing
high quality scans of works by and about female authors, which can then be imported
by Wikimedia volunteers. For example, some of the writings of Elizabeth Blackwell -
the first woman to train as a doctor in the US – are now available on Wikisource
thanks to the Wellcome Library, the US National Library of Medicine, and other
institutions who shared the scans. Museums can also share scans of art to help
improve Wikipedia biographies, Wikisource author profiles, Wikidata visualisations
and educational materials in Wikibooks, and each time the image is traceable back to
data about its provenance, including the catalogue record of the host institution. This
can enable enormous international reach for museums and other content holders -
for example, the French article on Ada Lovelace is illustrated by a painting from the
collection of Somerville College, Oxford. Indeed, working with Wikimedia can
significantly increase the reach of cultural collections, with the images and other
heritage assets shared through Wikimedia as a result of the UK Chapter’s current
Wikimedian in Residence partnerships having received 600 million views by March
2017.
At a global level, the emerging strategic direction for Wikimedia to 2030 – developed
through extensive consultation and participation during the first half of 2017 –
embraces the need and the potential for Wikimedia to reflect the diversity of our
world, and to welcome and include people from a wide variety of backgrounds, across
language, geography, income, education, gender identity, religion, age, and more.
Within the UK, we have further plans to work with museums to diversify Wikipedia’s
content and contributors, and support the delivery of global initiatives such as
Art+Feminism. As part of our advocacy role, the charity will continue to highlight the
benefit to cultural organisations of working with Wikimedia to open up their
collections and engage new audiences. In line with our strategy, we will continue to
focus on the opportunities to address systemic bias and issues of diversity and
equality, both on Wikimedia and in cultural institutions’ own collections and
programmes; and we look forward to developing new relationships and new ways of
working across the museum sector.

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Closing the Gender Gap on Wikimedia

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Closing the Gender Gap on Wikimedia