Category: Equity

September 28 2021, Johannesburg, South Africa – Today, on the International Day for Universal Access to Information, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that operates Wikipedia, is launching a campaign in collaboration with the South African creative community to showcase the power of knowledge and everyone’s right to access, create and share it. Over the next….

Today marks the start of a Heritage Month focused on celebrating the history, culture, and influence of Latinx communities in the United States.  The official name of the month itself (National Hispanic Heritage Month) is a living example of the power of language — its history and inequities in who controls it, and its impact….

8 September 2021 — Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, the global nonprofit organization that supports Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects, announced six inaugural grants as part of the newly launched Knowledge Equity Fund, an effort to close knowledge gaps and address racial inequities in its projects. The first round of grants will be given to….

Think of a historical event, one you learned about in school. Maybe an expedition, a treaty, or a speech. How about a years-long atrocity, or a record-breaking achievement? When you picture this event, who are the central characters? Now, ask yourself if you know the women’s side of the story. For as long as written….

Growing up, my father was the storyteller of our family. He would use stories to encourage me, to remind me of how important it was to be proud of who I am, to teach me about our family history, and to make me laugh. Before I knew enough to ask questions, I was soaking up….

George Floyd’s death last week at the hands of law enforcement in Minneapolis lays bare the tremendous inequalities and racism that black people face in the United States on a daily basis. In the past few weeks, his name, along with Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and David McAtee have joined a staggering register of victims….

Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects form the largest collaborative collection of free knowledge – written in roughly 300 languages, and built by and for the world. At the Wikimedia Foundation, the U.S.-based nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, we strive to reflect the communities we currently work with, and those we hope to work with in….

In recent weeks, the world learned about Dr. Donna Strickland, only the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. It also learned that Wikipedia lacked an article on Strickland amongst its over five million articles. Wikipedia subsequently received justifiable criticism for its low percentage of female editors, its editing culture, and its….

The news that optical physicist Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page before winning the Nobel Prize in Physics brought renewed attention to Women in Red, a long-standing volunteer effort to add more biographies about women to the encyclopedia. After the announcement, the Women in Red WikiProject had one of their best weeks ever,….

This post ran in the Los Angeles Times on 18 October 2018. When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize this month, she became only the third woman in history to receive the award in physics. An optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, Strickland is brilliant, accomplished and inspiring. To use Wikipedia parlance, she is very….