Wikipedia was founded in 2001 as the free online encyclopedia we know today, having established its neutral point-of-view stance since. As of January 2025, more than two decades after its creation, Wikipedia—under the large umbrella of Wikimedia Foundation—has grown into the largest reference website operating through open-source governance, with over a billion page views per month and more than 60 million articles in 341 languages.
Wikipedia’s content is actively curated, written, and shared mainly by a large volunteer base—we are Wikipedians or Wikimedians—spread across the globe with interests as varied as imaginable. Wikimedia projects also accommodate specialized networks often orchestrated by disciplines and knowledge areas such as the GLAM community spanning galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Within the GLAM scope, cultural organizations, Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) included, contribute to the knowledge equity movement via open-source endeavors.
Today, with the rise of artificial intelligence and premature conversations about its impact on how we function as cultural workers and collecting institutions, the Wikimedia movement continues to make reliable information available.1 We intend to continue making the internet more equitable and accurate in for world cultures. With this in mind, we must focus on topics such as the ubiquitous gender bias on Wikipedia and its sister projects. 2 According to research data released by the Wikimedia Foundation, in 2023, only 20% of Wikipedia users identified as women, and the number of people identified as gender diverse was less than 7%. In 2024, nearly 49% of Wikipedia’s readers are women, but fewer than 20% of its biographies are about women.
The PAMM Wikimedian in Residence program is aware of gender bias within Wikipedia and the art world. In its early stages, we looked at organizations such as Art+Feminism—a comprehensive international collective working to educate, share, and lessen Wikipedia’s gender gap since its founding in 2014—to develop a structure that could accommodate such discussions from the standpoint of a South Florida-based and 21st-century global GLAM institution. Through PAMM’s digital engagement department, we witness firsthand and act on how a contemporary art museum can have a more significant impact on the digital landscape and work toward a more equitable internet through a dozen initiatives—from PAMMTV, AR exhibitions to our bilingual infrastructure and data analysis. The Wikimedian in Residence program brings artists closer to global audiences by adding images to bios, compiling and making reliable citations available, and hyperlinking relevant articles, among many other activities. However, we also saw how the history of biographies of cis and trans women and nonbinary artists is still overlooked and mostly unwritten on Wikipedia.
Along the way, we edited dozens of biographical articles and created a few others for artists Maria José Arjona, Autumn Casey, Karon Davis, Danielle De Jesus, Kathia St. Hilaire, Ad Minoliti, Njaimeh Njie, Rachel Papo, Naudline Pierre, Calida Rawles, Anastasia Samoylova, and Ilana Savdie, among others. Not surprisingly, while navigating Wikipedia’s inner workings, we encountered a few users whose editing practices go against the very nature of Wikipedia as a community. These editors were less enthusiastic about championing the achievements and perspectives of women and nonbinary artists. Wikipedia articles about artists Marcela Cantuária, Leslie Martinez, and Carol Prussia were sent to deletion under unorthodox claims of “not respecting notability guidelines,” lacking reliable sources or posing a conflict of interest (COI). These pages survived after lively article disputes that persisted in deeming women and nonbinary artists’ work as not worthy of Wikipedia. I encourage you to check the Wikipedia pages of these three artists and see whether you think they are notable.
The Wikimedian in Residence program at PAMM is committed to amplifying the institution’s work in advancing alternate art histories made by Latine American, Caribbean, and diasporic voices. In 2024 combined, PAMM dedicated solo exhibitions to the works of seven femme-identified artists—Tania Candiani, Marcela Cantuária, Carla Gannis, Kate Kapshaw, Calida Rawles, Cecilia Vicuña, and Antonia Wright. Knowledge equity initiatives are at the core of the Wikimedian in Residence program as we aim to contribute to an internet that better represents the world we live in.
As the PAMM Wikimedian and an advocate for gender issues, I believe this conversation is worth having in the museum field through Wikimedia projects and beyond.
- Alikhan, A. (2024). Knowledge Is Human. Stanford Social Innovation Review
- Tripodi, F. (2023). Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia. New Media & Society, 25(7), 1687-1707.
