Wikimedia Foundation/Communications/One Billion Women

This page from the Wikimedia Foundation is kept for historical interest. Any plans, policies, projects, or strategies mentioned may be obsolete.

The Wikimedia Foundation Communications department is working to make Wikipedia meaningful to 1 billion women as a part of the department's goals for the 2018-2019 fiscal year. If we succeed, Wikipedia will be meaningful to one billion women-identifying people by July 2019.

One Billion Women
Making Wikipedia meaningful to 1 billion women

Why one billion women?

Wikimedia’s vision is for every human to share in all knowledge. In order for that to happen, we need to reach every human on earth. Knowing about Wikimedia is the first step in participating in this global knowledge project. We want to explore what it means to make that happen. Women are roughly half the population on earth, yet our movement has historically fallen short of reaching and representing them. On our path to making Wikipedia, knowledge, and history reflective of the world, we are focusing our efforts on making Wikipedia meaningful to women.

Why should you care?

Wikimedia has and will continue to evolve. To ensure it is useful and relevant to the world, we need participation from everyone, and we have a lot more people to reach!

Join us!

Help us to improve our ideas and collaborate on the goals we all share. Talk to us on this project's talk page - we would love to work with you.

What do we mean by meaningful?

We added "meaningful" not to be a truly measurable statistic (unless we figure out how) but to make sure that there is intention behind our awareness efforts. We not only want people to be aware, but to understand why their participation (as a reader or contributor) is meaningful. We want people to have an idea of what Wikimedia can do for them, perhaps in terms of practical information, or in terms of balancing representation. We wanted to remember and reflect for ourselves why awareness of Wikipedia is meaningful.

How will we measure this?

We are reviewing a wide range of things, from numbers in our social media to general internet participation. This is the early stage and we’re assessing metrics. What do you think?