More Women for Wikipedia

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Wikimedia CH's initiative More Women for Wikipedia

Wikimedia CH has started this initiative on 8 March 2024. We want to contribute to the global efforts to bring more women into Wikipedia and to close the gender gap. For this objective, we invite organisations, groups and institutions to partner with us. Together we want to gather sustainable funding for future Wiki-projects. We are happy to welcome our first partner the Zonta Club Lausanne.

Wikimedia CH’s Strategy 2022 – 2026

The current situation you can help to change

Wikipedia is one of the world’s most popular websites – but it is failing to accurately reflect our society and history: Women are missing from Wikipedia pages, both as subjects and editors: Less than 20% of the biographies on Wikipedia are those of women. Less than 10% of the contributing editors are women.

Flyer to download and share

To whom we adress to

This initiative focusses on organisations, associations, foundations, think tanks, and committed groups who stand for objectives like empowering women and girls, standing for gender equity, giving more visibility to women, supporting women in education or in the tech field, seeking for attractive talks and topics, seeking for attractive activities for their members (f.e. Wikipedia workshops), or seeking for a modern way to fulfil their objectives.

Why Wikimedia CH is doing that

Wikimedia CH supports each year a lot of projects in Switzerland which contribute to close the gender gap. We intend to play a more active part in this task and therefore, we want to shift this engagement on a more structured level in creating a focus “More Women for Wikipedia”as a part of the Community programme.

The objectives which are aligned with WMCH’s mission: promote and sensibilise for this issue, make more women visible on Wiki platforms, encourage people to start new projects, motivate more women for editing, ensure an efficient infrastructure for the work on this field, create a network for different groups in Switzerland, and use the result for outreach and fundraising objectives.

Advantage for local groups funded by Wikimedia CH

Local groups have one central funding source for their Wikipedia activities with equal guidelines for all of them. They don’t need to waste time on fundraising and have more capacity to concentrate on content creation. Wikimedia CH works as a national hub for exchange of knowledge and experience. This initiative is a contribution to strengthen the national identity and help to create multilingual content.

klein Editathon 500 women Scientist, ZH 20200305 (2) (1)

Five good reasons to become a partner

1

Partners help to reduce gender stereotypes, to foster inclusion of important information and to increase representation of women in all areas of the society.

2

An engagement in this way is a commitment that partners want to take over responsibility for equity in the digitalisation of our society.

3

An engagement in this way is a proof that partners are connected to the digital development and follow a modern approach to support women’s standing in the world.

4

This engagement allows the donor’s/partner’s organisation an interesting story telling about a different approach to reach their own objectives.

5

Partner organisations can benefit to invite their members to Wiki-workshops or invite Wiki-Editors to give a speech about their articles about an interesting topic or person.

Five reasons for funding Wikimedia CH

1

Wikimedia CH is part of a global Movement and has a huge national and international network. As association we help to create global visibility of Swiss content.

2

Wikimedia CH has already an existing network of contributors, a clear grant strategy to provide donated money to local players, has experience in project financing and is a reliable partner.

3

Wikipedia is among the top ten websites of the world and the only non commercial. To keep Wikipedia and its sister platforms independent, Wikimedia CH is funded by donations only. You contribute directly to close the gender gap.

4

Wikipedia and its sister platforms have a major impact on the development of Artificial Intelligence by providing a vast amount of training data for machine learning algorithms. With this initiative you help Wikimedia CH to fight for fair outcomes to reduce discrimination.

5

Wikimedia CH is political neural and independent. With your partnership you stand with us for diversity and unbiased free knowledge.

Our partners

This year's projects

2025 – June, Schaffhausen– The ArtWomenUp project, a platform for women in contemporary art by Simone Kornfeld, is constantly evolving. The pictures will be presented to the public for the first time in Schaffhausen in June 2025. Read more

2025 – 6 May 2025, Zürich – The 13th Edit-a-thon “For more visibility on Wikipedia” will enter its 13th round with the support of Ringier, the EqualVoice initiative, Wikimedia CH, ETH and TX Group! Topic: Women in sport. Read more

2025 – 20 to 23 March, Aarau – GLAM-on-Tour will be stopping off at the Aarau Cantonal Library. Two themes: First, there are numerous unwritten biographies of women or biographies in need of improvement, and second, Aarau, as the once capital of Switzerland, is an important location in Swiss history. Read more.

2025 – 17 February, Berlin – The NGO Loreley Films (Basel) organizes the event “MAKE THEM VISIBLE!” to highlight documentary cinema by women directors of the 20th and 21st centuries. The objective: to update the existing information of female film critics and more on Wikipedia. Read more

2025 – 14 February, Bern – The Institute of Theatre Studies at the University of Bern, the Swiss Archive of the Performing Arts (SAPA) and Wikimedia CH invite you to a Wikipedia writing workshop on biographies of female stage artists. Read more

2025 – 100 days until 8 March – The Wiki community‘s #100WomenDays writing project. Read more