Project Rewrite: Tell the missing stories of women on Wikipedia and beyond

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….

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Announcing the Heart of Knowledge contest winners

What does open access to knowledge mean to you? That was the question we posed to entrants in the Heart of Knowledge contest, an international arts competition the Wikimedia Foundation launched this April. We were blown away by the submissions we received from artists and writers across five continents. According to entrants’ self-reported data, our….

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Announcing the Heart of Knowledge contest: Help us illustrate why knowledge matters

From time immemorial, human beings have obsessed over knowledge. It’s one of our most precious resources, and our most jealously guarded. We’ve accumulated it gathering in circles under trees and squeaky chairs in sloped lecture halls, distributed it in etchings on stone tablets and inky letters on paper pages, even sought to hide it by….

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Making the invisible seen: Berkeley event connects artists and academia to improve representation on Wikipedia

Filipina American artist Dorothy Santos knows what it feels like to be a minority in your field. She said, “I thought, ‘there’s no one who looks like me in this industry!’ ” She reached out to Jennifer Wofford, co-founder of the San Francisco Bay Area-based artist collaborative Mail Order Brides/M.O.B., and years later contributed to….

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A bunch of media just entered the public domain. Here’s why that matters.

The black-and-white film flickers as a wealthy young woman, sitting on a bench in a garden, bats her eyes at the gardener’s son she is not allowed to marry. In her self-portrait, an artist wears masculine clothes against a bleak urban backdrop, dark eyes meeting the viewer’s gaze from the shadow of a broad-brimmed riding….

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