Wikipedia’s gender trouble is well documented. In a 2011 survey, the Wikimedia Foundation found that less than 10% of its contributors identify as female; more recent research puts that number at 16% globally and 23% in the United States. Further, data analysis tools and computational linguistics studies have concluded that Wikipedia has fewer and less extensive articles on women; those same tools have shown gender biases in biographical articles.

This is a problem.

When cis and trans women, non-binary people, people of color, and Indigenous communities are not represented in the writing and editing on the tenth-most-visited site in the world, information about people like us gets skewed and misrepresented. The stories get mistold. We lose out on real history. That’s why we’re here: to change it.

From coffee shops and community centers to the largest museums and universities in the world, Art+Feminism leads a do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others campaign that teaches people of all gender identities and expressions to edit Wikipedia. Informed by critical pedagogy and intersectional feminist organizing principles, Art+Feminism mobilizes, trains and supports a growing global community that collectively creates and updates articles on Wikipedia, adds images to Wikimedia Commons, expands WikiData entries, and more.

Since 2014, over 18,000 people at more than 1,260 events around the world have participated in our edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of more than 84,000 articles on Wikipedia and sister projects. To date, Art+Feminism supported events at institutions like African Women Development Fund, Accra; Spelman College, Atlanta; Mairangi Arts Centre, Auckland; Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity; Kunstmuseum Basel; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; MAMCO, Geneva; The Menil Collection, Houston; M+, West Kowloon Cultural District and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong; Kathmandu Living Labs; Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz; Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; Yale University, New Haven; Interference Archive, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Archives Nationales, Paris; Rome MAXXI; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago; University of St. Andrews; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Blitz, Valletta; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; and Afroleadership, Yaoundé.

Participants created pages for artists like Unity Bainbridge; Tina Charlie; Otelia Cromwell; Zackary Drucker; Akwaeke Emezi; Aurora Reyes Flores; LaToya Ruby Frazier; Che Gossett; Camille Henrot; Heresies Collective; Juliana Huxtable; Liz Magic Laser; Park McArthur; Divya Mehra; Anne Pasternak; and Tuesday Smillie.

Foreign Policy Magazine named the founders Leading Global Thinkers, and publications including Artforum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, CBC, Canadian Art covered the project.