Imagine a world in which every woman on the planet finds a representative and diverse sum of all human knowledge about women+* available on Wikipedia and on the internet. This is what the Celebrate Women campaign has been trying to accomplish since 2022. 

Every March, during Women’s History Month and in celebration of International Women’s Day (March 8th), the Wikimedia community gathers both online and in person to edit and improve the content available on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects about women+. The editing happens as part of edit-a-thons, workshops, training sessions, and many other types of gatherings, which are spread around the world, with events on every continent. 

For 2026, we had one of the biggest campaigns so far. Considering all the gatherings globally, we had 112 events listed on the official page, which were divided into these sections: 

• Global: 21 events
• Africa: 20 events
• Asia: 15 events
• Europe: 38 events
• Latin America: 12 events
• Middle East: 1 event
• North America: 3 events
• Oceania: 2 events

These numbers clearly demonstrate the global impact of this campaign, as well as serve as a testimony to Wikimedia’s reach and potential for collaboration, even when the world seems to be divided. In 2026, our communities were able to not only come together, but also edit and collaborate towards that one single goal.

In the last few years, this purpose was also achieved. By checking the pages for the previous campaigns, we had 59 events in 2025, 100 in 2024, and 121 gatherings in 2022. However, when we also consider the Programs & Events Outreach Dashboard campaigns (see more about this topic below), we have another 144 events in 2022; 137 events in 2024; 171 events in 2025; and 155 events in 2026. 

For 2026, we were able to assemble some statistics. In terms of engagement, considering the P&E Outreach Dashboard and gatherings using Event Registration (a new CampaignEvents feature), we were able to identify that this year’s campaign assembled 207 organizers and 2,658 event participants, which can be divided into:

• Beginner (less than 10 lifetime edits when participation begins): 1,388 users
• Junior (>= 10, <100 edits): 435 users
• Experienced (>= 100, <300 edits):  189 users
• Very experienced (>= 300 edits): 647 users

When it comes to content, or knowledge being added or improved through events, we had 238,222 unreverted content edits and 2,499,773,577 bytes added. After a few months from the end of the campaign (March 31, 2026), we have a total of 32,388 undeleted content pages added.

Celebrate Women is also responsible for increasing the number of events held in the Wikimedia community. Considering Event Registration usage only, we can see in the next image a major increase from 2025 to the 2026 campaign, and a peak in February and March compared to last year.

In March 2025, we had 152 events created using Event Registration, while in March 2026, we had 251 events. This is a 65% increase. However, for Celebrate Women, it’s also important to consider February, when a good portion of the events are created for organizers in preparation for the early March events, especially around International Women’s Day. In February 2025, 130 events were created, while in February 2026, 240 events were created. This is an 84.6% increase.

Wikimedia Foundation’s support in 2026

Celebrate Women is a community campaign and the result of volunteers and community members from all over the world. The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has been helping this campaign by providing support for communities and organizers.

In 2026, we started the support by renovating the Celebrate Women portal. We changed the campaign’s header, reorganized it, and even added a press toolkit tab to help organizers develop a media plan or get media coverage from local journalists and media outlets. This new page includes sections about how to explain Wikipedia and the gender gap, key Wikipedia and gender gap facts and figures, inspiring gender stories, and a list of campaigns and groups dedicated to decreasing the gender gap on the Wikimedia projects. 

We also added resources and guides for how to use the CampaignEvents features, Content Translation Suggestion feature, and Central Notice Banner Editor. Additionally, we collaborated with the WMF Comms team on social media posts, which were shared throughout March on the Foundation’s channels.

We also contacted major gender organizers and community members (via email and talk page) and discussed the idea of adding the Event Registration header to help us understand the campaign’s participation. With Event Registration, the campaign reached 617 registered participants. According to the Connection team, who developed this feature, Celebrate Women 2026 is currently the 3rd biggest event in terms of participation so far, only behind Wikipedia 25 Virtual Celebration, with 3,187 participants, and the Africa Wiki Challenge 2025 with 790 participants.

During the pre-campaign community consultations, we received a request to not only have an Event Registration way to track the campaign, but also an Outreach Dashboard campaign dedicated to 2026. We created the campaign here.

Later, we chose to understand the impact of previous Celebrate Women years using the Outreach Dashboard too. We created campaigns dedicated to 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 and decided to search and include all gender events organized during those years using the dashboard. Now, we can better understand the impact of the gender content gap efforts for the past 5 years. 

Finally, by using Event Registration, we were able to communicate with the 617 participants who registered. Once a week, we sent a reminder with the events that were taking place that week, divided into regions, and including day, time, place, and how to register. This established a recurring way to connect with community members and remind them about the campaign as a month-long commitment.

Wikimedia Foundation’s events

The Wikimedia Foundation also organized three events to support the community in organizing their Celebrate Women gatherings. We planned the campaign’s kick-off event and 2 pre-campaign trainings dedicated to Wikimedia organizers.

• On February 25, we had the Content Translation training. This session aimed to empower organizers with the skills to use Content Translation, with a focus on the article suggestion feature. 

• On February 26, we had the Event Registration and Collaborative Contributions session. The training aimed to equip organizers to effectively accomplish event registration, metrics tracking, outreach, and sustained community engagement. 

• On March 5, we held the campaign’s Welcome Session, which covered the 2026 campaign, some of its events, and some of Wikimedia’s Gender Gap milestones presented by Chinmayee Mishra. Participants also learned a bit about Event Registration, Content Translation, and two tools that help organizers with small but powerful edits: Gender Bias Detector and Wikipedia Microtask Generator. 

On the page for the three events, all the resources are available: recordings, slides in different languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, French), and other useful information.

WikiWomen+ Summit 2026

In August 2026, the WikiWomen+ Summit 2026 took place during Wikimania’s pre-conference day. At this gathering, we were able to present about the Celebrate Women and the impact of this campaign in the context of Wikipedia’s content gender gap. 

Please find the recording for this presentation on YouTube. The slides are also available on Wikimedia Commons.

To understand more about the campaign or to stay tuned, check out the Celebrate Women portal on Meta-Wiki.

* The usage of the “+” sign after the word “women” means we are including anyone who identifies as a woman in some way, that being a cis woman, transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, or any gender identity not listed here.

After 21 years as a Wikimedia contributor, I consider myself a veteran Wikimedian. I have attended many Wikimedia conferences around the world, but Wikimania always feels special. They create incredible opportunities to meet fellow Wikimedians, listen, and learn. However, the highlight of the event for me this year was not the main conference itself, but a pre-conference event: the WikiWomen+ Summit, where I was also honored to give a talk.

During the icebreaker, we shared stories about the first articles we ever wrote and whether we had ever experienced the deletion of a biography about a woman we created. When the talks began, I learned more about the Celebrate Women Campaign and fell in love with its vision, which is deeply inspired by Wikimedia’s overall mission: “Imagine a world in which every single woman can freely share in the sum of all knowledge, and where representative information about all women and non-binary individuals is accessible to everyone, everywhere.”

Sukkoria’s presentations gave us a lot to think about in a short time, from what could potentially go wrong from a WikiWomen+ perspective to how we can responsibly integrate generative AI into wiki workflows.

Leila Zia from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) gave a presentation about Wikipedia readers, revealing that women are underrepresented not only as editors but also as regular readers. I was surprised by this statistic: roughly 65% of readers are reported to be men. This was the first time I had seriously considered what we can do to encourage more women to become frequent Wikipedia readers. 

Among the many great tools and projects introduced at the summit, we were also introduced to a new Wiki Gender Stats tool. I was delighted by Natacha’s roleplay, which brilliantly illustrated what features were needed and why male editors with technical skills often struggle to understand and prioritize those needs. Her roleplay perfectly captured the moment when women decided to take charge:

“Now I want to be a woman in progress! I will design our own tool according to our own needs, doing it ourselves.”

In my presentation, I addressed how governance and editorial decisions on Wikimedia projects can have consequences far beyond individual content disputes. I shared my concerns about contributors, particularly women+, being blocked or banned because of off-wiki disputes rather than their actual editorial work, and discussed how this can affect both content neutrality and the health of our communities. I explored these questions further in my presentation, “How Editorial Decisions Reach Beyond Wikipedia”, which you can watch here.