Last month, the Wikimedia Blog featured a special collection of stories on women and gender diversity in the Wikimedia movement — to celebrate International Women’s Day and WikiWomen’s History Month.
Our goals for that month’s editorial focus were to show how women around the world are contributing to Wikimedia projects today, to invite more women to participate, and to identify best practices for increasing gender diversity in our communities, as well as in the content we create together.
We published 15 different stories on this theme, ranging from profiles of women who contribute to the Wikimedia movement, to reports about programs that encourage gender diversity, to recommended articles about women on Wikipedia.
Here are the most popular stories we featured this month on this topic:
Meet some of the women who contribute to Wikipedia

Zinaida Good grew up in Russia, studied in Canada and started editing Wikipedia in 2008, as a college assignment. Photo by Victor Grigas, freely licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Art+Feminism Events on International Women’s Day

Art+Feminism Edit-a-thon in Madrid, Spain. Events like these took place around the world on International Women’s Day. Photo by Carlos Delgado, freely licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
15 women who made a difference

Malala Yousafzai is one of the inspiring women recommended by our community for this month’s search for high-quality women’s biographies. The youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate, she is a human rights advocate for education and for women in Pakistan. Photo by Russell Watkins, CC-BY-SA-2.0.
Gender as a text field: What Wikipedia can learn from Facebook

Andrógino by Ismael Nery. Public Domain.
Inspire Campaign to fund new gender diversity initiatives
Complex issues require collective action. Last month, the Wikimedia Foundation launched the Inspire Campaign, inviting community ideas to increase gender diversity in Wikimedia projects. In response to this call to action, over 266 ideas were submitted, with 629 people joining the campaign, as outlined in this update. Read more.Serbian women edit Wikipedia together in new FemWiki project

Photo by BoyaBoBoya, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Why Italian fashion history should be just a click away: Virginia Gentilini
Italy is a global leader in the fashion industry. But Italian fashion history is not well covered on Wikipedia. Librarian Virginia Gentilini explains why. She thinks the dearth of Italian fashion articles results from a lack of female writers and editors on Wikipedia — as well as the misconception among some users that fashion is strictly a female topic. Learn more.Thanks to our contributors
We are very grateful to everyone who made this special series possible!
Special thanks to story authors Juliet Barbara, Siko Bouterse, Tilman Bayer, María Cruz, Siân Evans, Victor Grigas, Michael Guss, Katherine Maher, Amanda Menking, Dorothy Howard, Jacqueline Mabey, Michael Mandiberg, Sanja Pavlovic, Andrew Sherman, Heather Walls and Alex Wang, for taking the time to share your news and ideas with our community.
Together, we featured a diverse collection of insightful stories, which introduced us to some amazing women — and helped surface promising ideas for encouraging more gender diversity in our projects. We hope you learned as much from this exploration as we did.
And our deepest thanks go to all the women featured in these stories: your wonderful contributions and dedication to free knowledge is truly inspiring!
What do you think?
What do you think of this special focus on Women and gender diversity? Was this topic interesting to you? Did you learn anything new?
Should we focus on other monthly themes in the future? If so, which topics would you recommend? Should we do this regularly, or just once in a while?
Please share your comments below — or on the blog talk page.
We look forward to hearing from you, so we can share more stories that match your interests — and help grow and diversify our movement!
Fabrice Florin
Movement Communications Manager
Wikimedia Foundation