Digital activists are using Wikipedia to change the narrative around women and climate work

Picture from Wikipedia for Peace: Queer [Edit] 2022 in Vienna, Austria. Image by Walid1205, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Of the women biographies that do make it through the deletion gauntlet, many do not have images. Only 20 percent of images that include people, found in Wikimedia Commons, depict women, said Mariana Fossatti, the decolonizing Wikipedia coordinator for the global nonprofit Whose Knowledge?. The organization focuses on bolstering the online representation of marginalized communities, which Fossatti pointed out makes up the majority of the global population.

Fossatti, who is based in Uruguay, said that increasing representation on Wikipedia also increased visibility on other content providers like Google, which pulls from the site. “So if you have inequalities and a colonial perspective biasing Wikipedia, that bias spreads across the internet.”

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