The difference in the number of women editors and men editors on Wikipedia affects the representativeness of articles and the quality of content, to the detriment of the project’s aspiration to create a universal encyclopedia that compiles all human knowledge. Only a fraction of those who edit are women, and there are entire countries in Latin America whose local reality, municipalities, communities, and history barely appear on Wikipedia.

The Escuela de lideresas of the UG Muj(lh)eres latinoamericanas en Wikimedia was founded on a simple premise: to create a safe space exclusively for women from different Latin American countries where they could learn, without feeling embarrassed or intimidated, the technical and editorial tools of Wikipedia and its sister projects. The school’s mission is to develop editing and management skills, foster women’s leadership, and provide support to women’s communities to collaborate with Wikimedia projects, so that they can sustain the Wikimedia community in Latin America in the long term and, at the same time, reduce the content gaps that disproportionately affect some countries in the region.

El Salvador is an example of a double absence: gender-based and territorial gap. In this new training program, one of the participants, Kat, from El Salvador, identified a specific gap: following the legislative reform that restructured the country’s territorial organization in 2023, several of the new municipalities had no article of their own at all, or had only scattered mentions on other pages. From this observation came the idea of creating three new articles about the municipalities of Santa Ana Oeste, Santa Ana Norte, and Santa Ana Este. Kat researched, looked for official sources, read the new Special Law for Municipal Restructuring, verified demographic and geographic data, and applied Wikipedia’s policies on reliable sources and encyclopedic style that she had learned during the school’s training sessions. She also learned how to categorize and correct articles.

Other articles created by Kat include Las 14 familias de El Salvador, a term coined by the press to describe the Salvadoran oligarchy, and Las Dignas, a feminist political organization founded in El Salvador in 1990. She is now drafting a rather ambitious article on the history of feminism in El Salvador. Each of the articles that Kat created during the training represents Salvadoran territory that was previously, in terms of free knowledge, practically invisible. When a locality does not have an article on Wikipedia, it does not appear in search results, does not feed voice assistants or artificial intelligence systems that are now trained on this open data, and remains outside the shared knowledge ecosystem that millions of people consult every day.

In addition, Kat created an article about Brenda Cerén and another about Claudia Ortiz on Wikiquote, and has been learning to edit Wikidata. She also uploaded photos of her country to Wikimedia Commons. Kat tells us about her experience in her own words:

Bubulina26, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

P: Before participating in the Women Leaders School training sessions, did you have any previous experience in writing, research, or history?

A: -I have been a Wikipedia reader for almost my entire life, for academic reasons and simply out of curiosity. When I want to learn more about a topic, I go to Wikipedia to read. I studied social communication, so we did cover a lot of national and international history, as well as writing techniques. That helped me feel “at home” during the courses and familiar with some resources such as Google Scholar and academic repositories.

P: What motivates you to edit?

A: -I like to think that there are more women and people in general like me who are curious. I want to give them a starting point on the topics I edit, so that they can then do further research and, hopefully, contribute so that the cycle of learning continues.

P: What topics did you edit, and why did you choose those topics?

A: -I have edited articles related to the area where I live. It is little known, and through the links within other articles, it can gain greater visibility. I am also interested in topics related to feminist organizations and national history. I came to these topics when I noticed the “red links” within other articles, especially because they refer to important, interesting, and useful topics that no one had yet had the opportunity to create. When I saw my first article published, I felt proud of my effort, even though on Wikipedia we are all really anonymous. Seeing the article you researched and corrected published, learning about the topic along the way, and knowing that people visit it is a really wonderful feeling.

P: How did you feel, and what difficulties did you encounter when editing?

A: -For now, only paid resources have been an obstacle, because some publications are restricted and can only be accessed by purchasing permission, so you have to work with what is available. Another challenge is finding time to edit, between work and other commitments. Even so, it is worth trying. During the course, I felt welcome. At all times, I felt like an equal, and that the course was a place to learn. There is no need to be ashamed of making mistakes or asking questions, no matter how simple they may seem. From the facilitator to the other participants, we all helped each other. In addition to learning how to write an article from scratch, I learned very useful tricks that make editing easier, resources and websites that can help, things that should not be done while editing or that a published article should not contain, among other things.

P: What would you say to another woman who is thinking about starting to edit but is still hesitant?

A: -It is necessary for women to be editing Wikipedia. For a long time, we have been made invisible in art, science, and many other spaces, both as people and in terms of the topics that interest us. Editing Wikipedia is an opportunity to share what you know or to complement and contribute to biased or incomplete articles.