Whose Knowledge?/VisibleWikiWomen

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Since 2018, a collective of partners and friends from around the world made available more than 15000 images of women to Wikipedia and the broader internet. We are proud and grateful for that but also aware that there is so much more to be done. Wikipedia (and the broader internet) are still missing many images of important and influential women, especially black, brown and indigenous women.

Welcome to the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign 2021! Join us from 8 March to 8 May 2021 for the fourth edition of the campaign. Let’s make sure all women are fully seen and recognized!

The Issue[edit]

Women’s knowledge and contributions to the world are invisible in so many ways. When we look at women’s invisibility online, Wikipedia is a good proxy to explain why this is such a critical issue. Less than one quarter of Wikipedia biographies represent women. Many biographies of notable women don’t exist or are incomplete.

More often than not, women biographies don’t have images. We estimate that less than 20% of Wikipedia articles of important women have pictures. And, when women’s faces are missing from Wikipedia, that invisibility spreads. Half a billion people read Wikipedia every month,[1] and it is the 5th most visited website in the world,[2] so gaps in Wikipedia have a big impact on the broader internet.

Project organizers[edit]

Our plan for 2021[edit]

The theme for this 2021 campaign will be Feminist Realities: living our resistance and liberation. Inspired by our partner ed by our partner, Association for Women’s Right and Development (AWID), we have decided to celebrate the women/trans/non-binary people that have been embodying the feminist values to resist and dismantle patriarchy, capitalism, racism and many other systems of power and privilege throughout history.

Inspired by the results of the previous campaigns, our goal for this third edition of #VisibleWikiWomen is to bring 5000 images of notable women to Wikimedia Commons, the big multimedia library for all Wikimedia projects, including the 317 language versions of Wikipedia.

Once again we will be “Celebrating the colors of #VisibleWikiWomen” with a targeted effort to increase the images of influential black, brown and indigenous women that are being uploaded to Wikipedia as part of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign.

To reach this goal, we invite you – women’s and feminist organizations, culture and memory institutions, Wikipedia editors, user groups, chapters, and anyone who would like to give women the visibility and acknowledgment they deserve. We are excited to collaborate with previous year’s super amigxs and friends again and to welcome new partners from around the world.This year, we expect to expand and deepen our collaboration with partners in Africa.

  • Erica-Malunguinho-postcard.pdf
  • Andaleeb-Wajid-postcard.pdf
  • Maisha-Maureen-Auma-postcard.pdf
  • Nebahat-Akkoc-postcard.pdf
  • Fabiana-Barrios-postcard.pdf
  • Nomarussia-Bonase-postcard.pdf

How to participate?[edit]

You can join the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign by gathering and uploading quality images in the public domain, or under free license, to Wikimedia Commons under the VisibleWikiWomen category. These images could be photographs or drawings of women, as well as images of their work, with proper consent. Use the Upload Wizard and add the VisibleWikiWomen 2021 category to your uploads. Besides uploading images to Commons, you can also participate in the campaign by:

  • Hosting or attending local events in your communities where photos can be taken or uploaded
  • Releasing your existing photos of notable women under free license
  • Creating illustrations and drawings
  • Promoting and publicizing this project by spreading the word about it and using the hashtags #VisibleWikiWomen and #WomenofColors on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

And probably so much more! We’d love to see you coming up with new ideas that make the most sense for you and your communities.

If you need extra support for participating in the campaign, please email us at visiblewikiwomen[at]whoseknowledge[dot]org.

How to get involved?[edit]

Here are some additional ways to support the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign:

Content[edit]

  • Help make our campaign multi-lingual by translating our Meta page, resources kit and the campaign pages of our website into different languages.
  • Make lists of Wikipedia women biographies without images (by country, by occupation, by century, by activity) to raise awareness of the gender visual gap and create interesting challenges for participants.
  • Write a new Wikipedia article inspired by an “orphan” women portrait (an image without an article) and use that image to illustrate it.

Spread the word[edit]

  • Curate and share: select images you love, optionally mixed them with inspiring texts and art, and just share it with the hashtags #VisibleWikiWomen and/or #WomenofColors.
  • Collaborative covering: if you are a journalist, a blogger, a podcaster or you just like to spread ideas online, you can create a piece of content about the campaign.

Support the campaign[edit]

  • If you are a feminist organization, cultural and memory institution, media or other potential partner organization, become an institutional partner.
  • If you are an individual connected to potential partners (like the ones mentioned above), please introduce them to the campaign!
  • If you are connected with potential funders who may be able to fund and support this campaign, please bring them to the campaign!

Resources to help you[edit]

The following resource guides offer some answers to common questions about working with images. Feel free to adapt, add, and translate to suit your own needs! And feedback on any of these guides is welcome.

Worklists
Finding or creating images
Uploading images
Licensing
Other guides we like

Super amigxs and friends in collaboration (Join us!)[edit]

===Partners in previous campaigns (2018-2020)

New 2021 partners: welcome![edit]

Social media (Join the conversation!)[edit]

Events and edit-a-thons (Find an event near you!)[edit]

In March, there will be many local events to improve the visibility of women in Wikipedia. Edit-a-thons, editing workshops and other activities are being organized by wikipedians around the world.

If you want to be part of such events, search for an event near you, or contact your Wikimedia local chapter. Remember that in addition to creating articles about notable women, you can also take or look for pictures to illustrate them.

Would you like to organize a specific event for the VisibleWikiWomen challenge? We can give you some ideas, resources and support to carry out this plan. Just contact us at visiblewikiwomen@whoseknowldge.org and let's talk!

If you are an Wikimedia event host, like an edit-a-thon, you can join the #VisibleWikiWomen challenge, inviting participants to upload photos of notable women to Wikimedia Commons and to illustrate articles in Wikipedia. We suggest you add some activities related to this challenge in your event. Why not set up a photographic set and invite some notable women from your city to be photographed for Commons? Or maybe do a specific workshop on the use of images in Wikipedia? Join the challenge adding your event below.

Alphabetical by country, Global events with event pages at top

Language When Trainer/Organiser Country or region or language Event page
English March and April Women in Red Global VisibleWikiWomen Women's History Month
Spanish March 8 to April 4 Wikimedia Argentina Regional / Latam Ilustratona
English March 19 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM Pacific Time Afrocrowd US Close the Wikipedia Knowledge Gap on Women
Spanish March 22 20:00 UTC / 17:00 Chile Wikimedia Chile Regional / Latam Wikicafé Concurso Ilustratona via Instagram LIVE @wikimedia_cl
French March 20 13:00 UTC/ 8:00 Caribbean Noircir Wikipédia France/Suisse Noircir Wikipédia
Portuguese April 24 14:00 Brazil Wiki Movement Brazil User Group Brazil Editatona Festa da Lusofonia
English April 27 WorldPulse and Whose Knowledge? Global Images edit-a-thon
English, Spanish, French May 4 AWID and Whose Knowledge? Global Feminist Realities: living our resistance and liberation

What we’ve done so far[edit]

In 2018 we launched the VisibleWikiWomen pilot edition, followed by other two successful campaigns in 2019 and 2020. . Highlights from our last year’s campaign include:

  • Even in the midst of a global pandemic, our partners – Wikimedia communities, feminist and women’s organizations and GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) institutions – brought over 3000 women’s images to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia during the third edition of the #VisibleWikiWomen 2020 campaign. The number of images is now over 4000 as our partners and communities uploaded new images under the VisibleWikiWomen_2020 category on Commons all year long, even after the end of the campaign in May.
  • In the last three years, the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign brought over 15,000 new images of women to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.
  • The theme of this year’s campaign was women in the critical infrastructures of care in response to what we were (and still are) experiencing during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Our posts celebrating and honoring women doctors, nurses, researchers, farmers got the most engagement in our social media channels.
  • We hosted our first bi-lingual #VWW edit-a-thon during this year’s edition. We partnered with #SheTransformsTech campaign from World Pulse and Take Back the Tech campaign from Association for Progressive Communications (APC) to share our best practices and expertise with their feminist communities. This event allowed us to develop, test and improve our methodologies for introducing Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia to new partners who’ve joined us this year. We have recorded the training sessions and made it available as training materials for everyone interested in making women more visible on Wikipedia and beyond.
  • In 2020, we have partnered with 13 new organizations who joined our existing partners.


External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ↑ NY Times, 2014.
  2. ↑ alexa top sotes.
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