The question of who writes for Wikipedia, and who gets written about, has long formed critiques of the platform’s aim to “create a world in which everyone can freely share in the sum of all knowledge” (“About”).

In 2008, the first survey of Wikipedia’s gender gap found that only 13% of editors were female. While the percentage of women editors has increased slightly over the years (to 16%, as of 2013), the significant gender disparity among editors continues to raise concerns. On Wikimedia, an educational non-profit attached to Wikipedia project development, the percentage is even less: a 2020 Wikimedia Community Insights Report found that among Wikimedians globally, about 12% identify as women and about 1.8% as transgender or non-binary. The report also noted that of new editors who joined roughly between 2017-2019, women are two times more likely to be new editors, two times as likely to live in Asia and three times as likely to live in Africa. Altogether, since its inception in 2001, an average of nearly 90% of contributors identify as male, and 81.8% from the Global North. While Wikipedia editor demographics appear to be changing, there is still much room to improve.

The lack of equal and diverse representation also applies to Wikipedia’s content. As studies frequently show, articles on women, people of colour, and 2S+LGBTTQIA folks face systemic barriers to getting published on Wikipedia. For instance, 500 Women Scientists notes that only 18.2% of English Wikipedia biographies are about women (see, for instance, the deletion of Nobel prizewinner Donna Strickland’s Wikipedia page). In her 2013 study of the representation and categorization of Indigenous knowledge on Wikipedia, Maja van der Velden noted that pages on “Indigenous knowledge” were routinely recategorized as and merged interchangeably with “Traditional knowledge”--a consequence, van der Velden concludes, of Wikipedia’s organizational principles that “[do] not allow for Indigenous communities to use Indigenous concepts and structures to tell a story and to present and organize knowledge.”

In their inaugural report published in June 2021, the Reading Together research project suggested that what constitutes a “reliable source” on Wikipedia “tends to centre Western knowledge formations.” As such, activists, artists, and scholars have also consistently pointed to the Eurocentric and Enlightenment structures that undergird Wikipedia’s editing and revision processes. As one Purdue study concludes, only about 1% of Wikipedia editors contribute to 80% of its content.

In particular, Wikipedia’s own tenet of maintaining a “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV) consistently poses a challenge to fostering more diversity among contributors. In 2020, Wikipedia’s co-founder Larry Sanger echoed this tenet by criticizing the growing “leftist bias” in Wikipedia contributions. Others have pointed out that co-founder Jimmy Wales’s support of Objectivism--a philosophical movement first proposed by Ayn Rand--largely still informs the platform’s largely Eurocentric and “centralized” information and knowledge practices (van der Velden). Charges of political or ideological biases thus appear, most often, during a page’s early stages to pass certain criteria. Often, these charges occur at the level of what or who even merits a Wikipedia article. For example, in Tina Loo’s North American Environmental History course, students had to negotiate charges of bias when writing articles on the social and environmental impacts of the W.A.C. Bennett Dam and the Columbia River Treaty (see her presentation for more details). As scholars often note, Wikipedia’s principle of NPOV ultimately lays open foundational questions about the processes by which knowledge is produced and verified on communal and open-access platforms.

For the public humanities, engaging with Wikipedia poses a way to interrogate the very assumptions about knowledge production and control that now actively shape our online spaces.

For more on issues of editing, writing, and knowledge production on Wikipedia, See Wikipedia as Pedagogy and Wikipedia as Public Scholarship. For more resources on risks and challenges facing marginalized Wikipedia contributors, see Resources.

A Wikipedia edit-a-thon is a community-organized event during which participants write and edit Wikipedia articles on a specific theme or topic. Edit-a-thons attract participants with varying degrees of expertise on Wikipedia and thus offer a learning opportunity for newcomers to learn to edit and write for Wikipedia.

Edit-a-thons are largely tied to advocacy efforts, as many meet-ups focus either on underrepresented topics or on recruiting more diverse Wikipedia contributors. There are many grassroots organizations and collectives dedicated to training new editors and generating and editing content. Launched in 2021, Wikimedia’s Project Rewrite ran a campaign to publish more biographies of notable women on Wikipedia. Art+Feminism organizes edit-a-thons in several parts of the world that are “committed to closing information gaps related to gender, feminism, and the arts” on Wikipedia. Honouring Indigenous Writers on Wikipedia is an annual edit-a-thon at UBC focused on expanding representation of Indigenous writers on Wikipedia.

Edit-a-thons are also a great way to utilize and better publicize specific digitized collections, archives, or open educational resources within the hosting institution. With Wikipedia’s wide reach, sources linked to particular archival references in Wikipedia articles also increase the visibility of that archive, collection, or open-access resource.

Wikimedia Foundation offers funding opportunities for hosting edit-a-thons and other Wikipedia projects. To find out about other funding opportunities, visit the Resources page.

Edit-a-thons Created by UBC scholars:

UBC Library: Honouring Indigenous Writers. #HonouringIndigenousWriters is an annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon hosted “ to improve the coverage of Indigenous writers on Wikipedia and to encourage diverse community editors to actively work to dissuade assumptions about Indigenous literature by raising their profile in this increasingly influential information source.” Includes resources on how to prepare an Edit-a-thon, how to use Wikipedia, citation templates, etc. Contact Erin Fields if you’d like to get involved.

• View the Wikipedia:Meetup/HonouringIndigenousWriters project page to see goals, identified articles, and outcomes.

Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery: Art+Feminism. An annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon hosted “to help correct Wikipedia’s gendered biases and improve the content of under-represented persons on the tenth most visited site in the world.” Contact Christine D’Onofrio if you’d like to get involved.

• View the Wikipedia:Meetup/Vancouver/ArtAndFeminism 2021 project page to see goals, identified articles, and outcomes.

Edit-a-thons by non-UBC organizations:

• Art+Feminism: aggregates a list of global edit-a-thons, meetups, and other Wikipedia events.

• Black Lunch Table: hosts edit-a-thons to “mobilize the creation and improvement of a specific set of Wikipedia articles that pertain to the lives and works of Black artists.”

• Kundiman: hosts a “Wiki-Week” virtual edit-a-thon to address the “erasure of Asian American writers online.”

• Linguist Society of America: hosts a Pride Month Wikipedia edit-a-thon to “celebrate queerness in linguistics.”

• UNCC’s J. Murrey Atkins Library's Visualization Lab: hosted a Wikipedia edit-a-thon to celebrate women in the arts and humanities.

Guides and Toolkits

• Editing and Organizing Materials (Art + Feminism): Guides to editing for Wikipedia and organizing edit-a-thons and other Wikipedia events.

• “How to be included on Wikipedia” (The Creative Independent). By Amber Berson: A guide for creating and editing your own Wikipedia page.

• Security toolkit (Art + Feminism). As part of the Safe/Brave Space Policy, this toolkit offers resources and guidance for dealing with harassment, trolling, and other misbehavior on Wikipedia.

Reports/Studies

• Closing the Gender Gap on Wikipedia (Art+Feminism): presentation on the gender gap on Wikipedia.

• Community Insights (Wikimedia 2018)

• Community Insights (Wikimedia 2020)

• “Unreliable Guidelines: Reliable Sources and Marginalized Communities in English, French, and Spanish Wikipedias” by Amber Berson, Monika Sengul-Jones, and Melissa Tamani, Art + Feminism 2021. Inaugural report from the WikiCred-supported project, Reading Together: Reliability and Multilingual Global Communities.

• “The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation” by Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw in PLoS ONE, vol. 8, no. 6, 2013. Revisits two demographics reports from Wikimedia Foundation and Pew Research Center to conclude that the total percentage of female editors globally was higher than originally reported (16.1% rather than 12.7%).