VisibleWikiWomen 2025

It Takes a Village! Finding, Strengthening, and Sustaining Feminist Community

Banner of VisibleWikiWomen campaign 2025, under the theme: "It takes a village! Finding, Strengthening, and Sustaining Feminist Community".

“Everything worthwhile is done with other people”- Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes (Let this Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution for Reciprocal Care.)

For the past seven years, we’ve brought together a collective of partners and friends worldwide to make images of womxn, especially black, brown, indigenous, and trans, and non-binary individuals, available on Wikipedia and the broader internet. We are proud and grateful for the thousands of images the campaign has brought online and all the events, reflections, and interventions we have done through #VisibleWikiWomxn.

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The Issue Remains…

Women’s knowledge and contributions to the world are invisible in many ways. When we look at women’s invisibility online, Wikipedia is a good proxy to explain why this is such a critical issue. Less than ¼ of Wikipedia biographies represent women. Many biographies of important and influential women don’t exist or are incomplete. 

More often than not, women’s biographies don’t have images. We estimate that less than 20% of Wikipedia articles of important women have pictures. Only 21% of the images that depict human beings on Wikimedia Commons represent women (according to https://humaniki.wmcloud.org). 

When women’s faces are missing from Wikipedia, that invisibility spreads. Half a billion people read Wikipedia every month, and it is in the top 10 most visited websites in the world. In other words, gaps on Wikipedia have a big impact on the broader internet in the world.

A column graphic shows the percentage of bios of women on Wikipedia (25%), while the other graphic shows the percentage of articles of women with pictures (20%).

Those visibility gaps on Wikipedia and the broader internet widen even further when women are black, brown, trans, disabled, indigenous, not thin, or exist at the intersections of those multiple oppressions and vulnerabilities. 

Theme of the Year: It Takes a Village! Finding, Strengthening, and Sustaining Feminist Community

Every year, we sit together and discuss the spirit for our annual #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. We have tried many variations, from prompts to our team, brainstorming sessions, requesting our community of partners to share reflections, and many conversations. The result is always an overarching theme, steeped in feminist theory and practice, shared with the world to join our campaign. It is always a pleasure to see our work mirror back to us the collective contributions of our friends, allies, and partners over the 8 years we have done this campaign. And this year, although a little later than usual, is no different, but a little more special: we want to make visible not only the faces of individuals, but more intentionally, highlight the feminist connections and communities that sustain life and radical work. 

In almost every culture, at least the ones we know and come from, there is a version of the proverb, “It takes a village to raise a child.” We would like to adapt it to “It takes a village to survive in times of polycrisis.” Community keeps us safe, keeps us grounded, and keeps us accountable. We are held by the laughter of our children, the support of strangers, the solidarity of our feminist siblings across the globe, the inside jokes of our friends/comrades, and the hugs of our loved ones;  We are reminded that our humanity is not defined by just the crises we face. That we can hold each other with love and still organize towards our collective freedom.

Dismantling communities has been – and continues to be – one of the most effective tactics of colonisation. From land privatization to resource extraction, from militarization of territories to state-sanctioned violence(s) and anti-rights laws, from enclosure of digital commons to the commodification of our relationships by big tech, we witness everyday how colonial-capitalism threatens our communities, especially those of us on the margins of power–non-white, women, migrants, LGBTQI+ folks, sex workers, the working class, etc.

And yet, community remains our source of home, connection, and movement building.

We look towards and lean on each other as the ecosystems for our sustenance. Community is the essential system of support for the majority of the world: from caring for the soil in which we grow our food, to raising funding to keep our collective struggles afloat.

We sit with the contradictions of technology (and the internet), both as a harmful superstructure and a place where many of us have found our communities. 

We draw our inspiration from many examples across the globe, such as;

  • LGBTIQ+ folks everywhere, who have reclaimed access to housing through opening and sustaining shelters, opening up their homes to each other, or even buying and managing their hotels.
  • Our own liberatory archives and memory workers that create and sustain our community archives from erasure.
  • The communities of Indigenous women and territory defenders that collectively continue to protect each other, their children, and their land.
  • Feminist and activist communities online that are created and sustained by solidarity beyond colonial national borders, including feminist Wikipedians, whose work nourishes our knowledge justice work.
  • Communities of artists (writers, poets, designers, painters, zine-makers, gardeners, etc), who create and curate for us the revolution in ways that speak our souls’ language.
  • Women community builders who, amid genocide and displacement, resist patriarchy and colonization, from Palestine, to Sudan, to Congo, to Haiti, and beyond.   
  • Migrant workers and their families everywhere who build the pillars of our economies and enrich societies across borders.

The clarion call with our theme this year is to remain deeply committed to our feminist communities and community building as an antidote to the regression and threats facing our lives and work. 

Our resistance is staying connected to one another, relishing in each other’s joy, and holding space for the plurality of our emotions in this moment.

We invite our partners, allies, friends, and comrades in the revolution for our collective freedom to join the 2025 #VisibleWikiWomxn campaign by sharing images of yourself, your community (with consent), community activities, communities we should support, communities we should remember, and communities we should celebrate. 

We also invite you to share with us what community means to you at this moment.

Our goal for 2025

Our goal for this 8th edition of #VisibleWikiWomen is to bring  3000 images of women and non-binary individuals to Wikimedia Commons, the big multimedia library for all Wikimedia projects, including the +300 language versions of Wikipedia.

Once again, we will be focusing on increasing the number of images of  Black, Brown, Indigenous, Trans women and Non-Binary people that are being uploaded to Wikipedia as part of the #VisibleWikiWomxn campaign.

To reach this goal, we invite you, women’s and feminist organizations, culture and memory institutions, Wikipedia editors, user groups, chapters, and anyone who would like to give the plurality of women and non-binary people the visibility and acknowledgement they deserve. We are excited to collaborate with previous years’ friends, allies, and co-conspirators again as we welcome new partners from around the world. 

Key moments of 2025

#VisibleWikiWomen is a yearly campaign, but certain celebrations and commemorations of the year can work as special moments to engage. We want to highlight the following key moments for our communities throughout the year: 

  • June: LGBTQIA+ Pride Month
  • 5 September: International Indigenous Women’s Day
  • 28 September: International Safe Abortion Day
  • October: Black History Month [UK, Ireland, The Netherlands]
  • 25 November to 10 December: 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence
  • And more…

How to participate

You can join the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign all year long, by gathering and uploading quality images in the public domain, or under free license, to Wikimedia Commons under the VisibleWikiWomen category. These images can be photographs or drawings of women, as well as images of their work, with proper consent.

Besides uploading images to Commons, you can also participate in the campaign by:

  • Hosting or attending local events in your communities where photos can be taken or uploaded
  • Releasing your existing photos of women and non binary people under free licenses
  • Creating illustrations and drawings
  • Promoting and publicizing this project by spreading the word about it and using the hashtags #VisibleWikiWomen, #VisibleWikiWomxn,#LuchasMultiples #OurPluralResistance#WomenofColors, #on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
  • Co-organizing and hosting an online event with Whose Knowledge? to bring the campaign to your local communities
  • Creating a feminist corner at your public events, by installing a #VisibleWikiWomen photobooth.

And probably so much more! We’d love to see you come up with new ideas that make sense for you and your communities. 

If you need extra support for participating in the campaign, please email us at visiblewikiwomen[at]whoseknowledge[dot]org.

How to get involved?

Content

‣ Help make our campaign multi-lingual by translating our Meta page, resources kit, and the campaign pages of our website into different languages.
‣ Make lists of Wikipedia women biographies without images (by country, by occupation, by century, by activity) to raise awareness of the gender visual gap and create interesting challenges for participants. 
‣ Write a new Wikipedia article inspired by an “orphan” women portrait (an image without an article) and use that image to illustrate it.

Spread the word

‣ Curate and share: select images you love, and optionally mix them with inspiring texts and art, and just share it with the hashtags #VisibleWikiWomen and/or #LuchasMultiples #OurPluralResistance.
‣ Collaborative covering: if you are a journalist, a blogger, a podcaster, or you just like to spread ideas online, you can create a piece of content about the campaign.
‣ Find all you need to know for sharing the campaign in our Social Media Toolkit (PDF).

Support the campaign

‣ If you are a feminist organization, cultural and memory institution, media or other potential partner organization, become an institutional partner
‣ If you are an individual connected to potential partners (like the ones mentioned above), please introduce them to the campaign!
If you are connected with potential funders who may be able to fund and support this campaign, please bring them to the campaign!
‣ If you want to volunteer to support this year’s campaign, drop us a line at visiblewikiwomen[at]whoseknowledge[dot]org. There’s always room to welcome new allies!
‣ If you would like to financially support this year’s campaign, click here: 

What we’ve done so far

In 2018, we launched the VisibleWikiWomen pilot edition, followed by six other successful campaigns in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022,  2023, and 2024. 

In 2024, we embarked on our 7th year of our #VisibleWikiWomen campaign under the theme, Our Resistance is Plural: Feminist solidarity, liberation, and peace. By December 2024, over 5000 images were shared through the campaign.

Our campaign launch this year showcases;

  • Images from the #VisibleWikiWomen Photobooth at the 15th AWID Forum in Bangkok, where we had the incredible opportunity to document the joy and plurality of over 200 feminists from across the globe, depicting their joy and plurality. We cannot think of a better time to share them than the launch of our 8th Edition 
  • The stories of our friends and community supporters. Last year collaborated with our community in projects along the year including convening with HOLA Africa, a queer Africa edita-thon on the sidelines of Wikiindaba in Johannesburg, cohosting with Feminists in Kenya and Africa Feminism a panel during the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa in Dakar and supporting Ghanaian wikimedians to document women in Accra.
  • #VisibleWikiWomen at CSW69: In March, women gathered in the streets of New York for the 63rd Session of the Commission on the Status of Women. We joined to be part of the moment commemorating 30 years of the Beijing Platform for Action; and took some pictures including some women and queer folks who were in Beijing in 1995, those who joined the lesbian tent protest, and many others, who said yes, when we asked if we could take their picture. 

In a world now marked by deepening divisions, we at #VisibleWikiWomen invite you to honor community as a means of resistance with us this year.  Together, let’s bridge these divides and stay rooted in our collective power.

Our partners & friends

 

 

 

Resources

If you have never uploaded images to Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons before, don’t worry, we have you covered! We created this #VisibleWikiWomen resource kit, where you will find instructions and practical advice on how to navigate the Wikiverse, especially how to use Wikimedia Commons.

The resource How to upload images to make women visible on Wikipedia and the Internet is particularly useful as it will guide you through the process of uploading images for this campaign.

Other related resources to help you are:

…and if you need inspiration, here are some lists of articles that are missing images of women on Wikipedia.