PGathered in the back room of a feminist bookstore in Madrid, 17 women hunched over laptops, passing around snacks, chatting and laughing, the sounds of typing punctuated by thunderous applause, each time marking a milestone in the group’s steady push to close perhaps one of the world’s most pervasive gender gaps.
Just under a fifth of Wikipedia’s content, including biographies, focuses on women, explain That’s just about 15 percent of the site’s volunteer editors. “Those numbers are pretty scary,” says Patricia Horrillo, who has spent much of the past decade working to close that gap by cultivating a community of Wikipedia editors dedicated to publishing women-focused content.
As a result, Spain WikiSferaone of Small groups From around the world Whose knowledge? Italy in the United States Wikidonne Other groups, such as Switzerland’s Les Sans Pages, have stepped up to address Wikipedia’s gender balance issue.
This is something the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, has long acknowledged: “Wikipedia is run by humans and is therefore subject to human biases,” the foundation said. “It also reflects the structural and historical inequalities experienced by women around the world.”
The foundation notes that Wikipedia has historically been edited by more men than women, all of whom rely on existing published sources to verify facts within articles. “But in many places around the world, women have been left out of historical narratives and traditional sources of knowledge.”
In recent years, the foundation has supported organisations like Horrillo’s Wikiesfera, helping them to redress this imbalance. “For the first time, civil society has the power to make women visible,” Horrillo says. “History has always been told by those in power, but now we have that power.”
With this belief, more than a dozen women packed into La Fabulosa bookstore in Madrid on a sunny Saturday to create and translate Wikipedia entries about women in the arts.
“We are writing history here, right now,” says Encina Villanueva, who has been attending Wikiesfera events since 2016. While she sometimes writes original content for Wikipedia pages about women, she also edits existing pages to balance text that prioritizes women’s appearances or connections to notable men over their accomplishments.
She has often watched in awe as her writings reverberated across the internet. “Over the years, I’ve seen things I’ve written pop up everywhere, repeated in articles,” she says. “The impact has been immense.”
Sitting next to her was Celia Hernandez-Garcia, who Maria Blanchard’s artworkSpanish painter who created a distinctive Cubist style in the early 1900s.
Hernández García, a middle school teacher, learned about Wikiesfera online and began attending the group’s events in 2017. “As soon as I saw it, I knew this was the place for me,” she said.
For years, she has been frantically putting together women-focused content in the hopes of giving students some exposure to the achievements of women who are often overlooked in textbooks. “One day, I picked up a textbook and skimmed through all the descriptions of men and women. The difference was shocking.”
She participated in her first Wikiesfera activity with no technology skills whatsoever. “I didn’t know anything,” she said, laughing. “Patricia is a very patient person.”
It’s a nod to the community that Holillo aspires to. The seeds of Wikiesfera were planted a decade ago, when she was working at a cultural center. She was fascinated by the question of why people didn’t contribute more to sites like Wikipedia. When she started asking around, the answers suggested a much bigger barrier than technical knowledge. “One woman said to me, ‘But I can’t write history.'”
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With this in mind, Holillo started Wikiesfera, envisioning a support group that could help people struggling with questions about what content to write and how to write it. As Holillo seized on the idea of addressing Wikipedia’s gender gap, she began to focus on women as she combined her passions as a tech and activist.
While the group’s activities are open to men and women of all ages, its most frequent participants are women in their 40s to mid-60s. “They have plenty of time, and they tend not to have children or dependents,” Holillo said. “That’s one of the reasons we don’t see many women editors, and that’s an important point: editors’ work takes time.”
Research over the years has revealed other reasons why women remain marginalized on the site: There is a lack of reliable sources documenting the achievements of women throughout history, and biographies of women are often written in a haphazard way. Candidates for deletion.
Still, Holillo is determined to get more women onto one of the world’s most-visited sites. “What we’re doing is so important because there’s nothing else like Wikipedia,” she said.
A total of 33 articles were added to Wikipedia during Saturday’s marathon session. Sculpture by Luisa RoldanShe is known as the oldest female sculptor in Spain. Artwork by Marie BlackmondShe was one of the prominent women in the Impressionist movement.
Each submission was, in Holillo’s words, a small, concrete step toward confronting the horrific structures that have rendered most women invisible for so long. “You have to start somewhere, and that’s how you fight injustice, but not get overwhelmed,” she said. “When you start asking what you can do to change the world, the answer gets a little complicated, but this is something that’s within our reach.”
