Birds, bugs, and beauty: The winners of Wiki Loves Earth 2023

The international Wiki Loves Earth photo contest has announced the winners of its 2023 edition.

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Gagea minima flower

Making Wikipedia Safer: Enforcement Guidelines for Wikimedia Universal Code of Conduct provide a model for governing online behavior

The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation has unanimously approved enforcement guidelines for the first-of-its kind Universal Code of Conduct (UCoC). The code, which was developed hand in hand with more than 1500 Wikimedia project volunteers, outlines global standards for behavior across Wikipedia and all Wikimedia projects to prevent and address harassment and other negative behavior.

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SusunW Header Open the Knowledge Stories

SusunW is on a mission to write women into history with Wikipedia

Today, scientists can tell us with certainty that increased carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet. But who was the first to discover this, and when did that happen?  I’ll bet it’s earlier than you think. Meet Eunice Newton Foote: a 19th century American scientist, inventor, and women’s rights activist whose contributions to climate science….

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Women Do News Header Open the Knowledge Stories

Women Do News: Tackling the Gender Divide in Journalism Through Wikipedia

The gender gap is a pervasive issue that has garnered attention in recent years, particularly in relation to the global pay inequality between men and women. However, this disparity is not limited to pay; it persists across various issues and industries, including the newsroom. For example, despite some progress, just four out of ten US….

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Wikigap Story

Six years, 100,000 articles: WikiGap is on a mission to close Wikipedia’s gender gap

It’s possible that right now, as you read these words, a WikiGap event is being held in a Swedish embassy somewhere in the world. Created through a joint effort from the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Wikimedia Sverige, an independent Wikimedia movement affiliate organization in Sweden, WikiGap edit-a-thon events bring people together across countries….

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Art + Feminism Story

How Art+Feminism is using Wikipedia to promote equity in the art world

If you were asked to name the greatest artists in history, who would come to mind? Chances are, the first few names that pop into your head are men. “Whereas men experience presence in our art institutions, women experience primarily absence,” Judy Chicago, an American feminist artist describes, “except in images that do not necessarily….

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Women in Red Story

Closing the gender gap: Women in Red’s efforts to add more women to Wikipedia

All of the information found on Wikipedia is created and shared by volunteers around the world. However, since 2020, only 15% of these contributors are women. This imbalance has a real impact on how information is covered and presented on the world’s largest online encyclopedia. This problem is often called the “gender gap” and is….

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Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Story

Kelly Doyle Kim and this new Smithsonian museum are writing women into Wikipedia

It’s called the ‘great man theory‘: the idea that large swaths of human history can be explained by the actions of so-called great men.  These days, that theory has been resoundingly discredited—but popular history’s long reliance on it has contributed towards an imbalance of stories told about women in the history learned in schools and….

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Whose Knowledge Story

Whose Knowledge? — A movement for inclusive representation on Wikipedia

While three-quarters of the world’s online population today comes from the Global South (Asia, Africa, and Latin America) and nearly half are women, most public knowledge online has been written by white men from the Global North. The feminist collective and Wikimedia volunteer group, “Whose Knowledge?,” is working to change this.  Sunshine Fionah Komusana, the….

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Ergo Sum Story

Behind the Wikipedia articles educating thousands about the 1838 Jesuit sale of enslaved people

It’s June 19, 1838. No one knows it yet, but the American Civil War will kick off in just over two decades. Slavery in the United States will come to an end after that conflict—but for now, the sale of enslaved human beings is still legal. Now, let’s bring in the Jesuits, a Catholic religious….

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