Hi everyone,

To respond to the gender gap and create opportunities to strengthen the gender diverse content on Wikipedia, the Gender Organizing community in the Wikimedia Movement hosts an annual campaign during International Women’s Month. This campaign is an important opportunity for the Wikimedia movement to engage with the work of different communities highlighting the gender gap in each Wikimedia project.

On 16 February 2023, the Campaigns Programs team held an office hour with Gender Organizers from across the movement. Some key highlights from the discussion included:

• An overview of the volunteer-led Central Notice banner for this year’s International Women’s Day campaign, with a request for translation support for the banner and feedback.

• An overview of the new event registration tool to support gender organizers with an improved user-experience for newcomers joining events. 

• An overview of community planned campaign events surrounding gender on the Projects for this year’s campaign.

Participants to the event also highlighted a desire for more strategic support in:

• Ensuring an intersectional approach to gender content on the Projects, including facilitating gender visibility on key content areas such as climate and sustainability, and elevating LGBTIQ+ content to ensure that gender campaigning was inclusive, reflexive and expansive.

• Facilitating and coordinating ongoing gender campaigning on Wikipedia, and other projects (like WikiData),  to ensure lively and ongoing content curation in this important area beyond Women’s History Month (March).

• Bringing in strategic partnerships at an international, regional and local level to support and amplify gender campaigns on the projects e.g. a similar partnership to the UNHRC and #Wiki4HumanRights.

Specific Product Support requested by gender organizers in the office hour included:

• A request for an on-Wiki calendar of events that allowed participants to view and plan their contributions more systematically.

• A request to review the Women in Red redlists, which are updated by Listeria Query service, but are not updating often any more. This is an issue connected to ongoing maintenance of key volunteer-built listbuilding tools. 

You can learn more about the discussion by watching the recording here.

What happens Next?

As an immediate priority, there is a request for support with translating the Central Notice banner, and adding planned campaign events to the Event landing page. There is also a request for support for updating translations of the event page itself.

During March, there is also an opportunity to share your events with the WMF for amplification with the movement and external audiences via social media. Have an event you’d like to share or have profiled? Get in touch with the Campaigns team for more information.

On 15 March 2023, you are also invited to join the Wikimedia Research Showcase,  which will be focused on gender and equity on Wikipedia. The session will feature research presentations by Sneh Gupta, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, and Jiao Sun, University of Southern California. You can join the livestream and ask questions in the chat..

Lastly, look out for future announcements for how we plan to address the identified gaps and opportunities elevated in the Office Hour.