For the last 20-plus years, if you wanted to know something about a topic, Wikipedia is probably where you landed. Whether you painstakingly used Wikipedia’s own search field, Googled it, looked at the knowledge panel on a search results page, asked Siri a question, or requested information from ChatGPT, the answer you’ve gotten was probably based on knowledge that’s on Wikipedia.
And in many cases, that answer was probably pretty good. English Wikipedia has nearly 7 million articles, far eclipsing any information that was available in any print encyclopedia. The last print edition of Encyclopedia Britannica had 32 volumes; if you printed Wikipedia today, even without images or references, it would take up 3,624 volumes.
It’s easy to look at these numbers and think, wow, Wikipedia is pretty great. And it is! It’s a grassroots-driven, independent, openly licensed source of information, with a nonprofit hosting it whose primary revenue stream is small-dollar donations from users, meaning it’s free from the corporate or government influence that dooms many other sites on the web. In an increasingly commodified internet, Wikipedia remains true to the original promise of the world wide web.
But if you look beyond the surface level, you can see plenty of challenges in this model. Because Wikipedia relies on volunteer writers and editors, it’s an encyclopedia written by those who show up and volunteer. And, for many years, it’s been a relatively homogenous group of people who do show up and edit Wikipedia, especially in the United States context. That matters because who is part of the editing community influences what articles are on Wikipedia and what perspectives are present in articles.
To accurately reflect the full spectrum of human experience, especially in the United States, Wikipedia has a long way to go. But Wiki Education, and other groups in the broader Wikimedia movement, are helping close those gaps.
The contributor gender gap
Wikipedia’s gender gap is one of the most talked about gaps on Wikipedia. (It even has its own Wikipedia article!). While women make up slightly more than half of the world’s population, the percentage of content contributors (known as “editors”) on Wikipedia who identify as women is grim. Worldwide, the Wikimedia Foundation’s most recent Community Insights Report found that only 14% of editors identified as women and 5% as gender diverse, with the caveat that users could select multiple categories. A total of 80% of users identified as male, with 4% preferring not to say.
The numbers are a little better within the United States. While there has been no statistically significant change in recent years, the number hovers around 16–18% identifying as women.
Wiki Education has long worked to tackle this problem by bringing in a community of diverse editors. In contrast to the 18% women peak of editors in the United States, Wiki Education’s own program participants in 2024 were 58% women and 5% gender diverse. While 80% of Wikipedia editors are men, only 37% of Wiki Education’s program participants are.
Wiki Education – and many other organizations in the Wikimedia movement – are working hard to address this gender gap. We’ve made great progress; recently, English Wikipedia hit the milestone of 20% of all the biographies are of women. This may seem paltry, but it’s due to the hard work of a coalition of organizations, including Wiki Education, and a dedicated group of volunteer editors tackling this gap. When the English Wikipedia community started focusing on women’s biographies as a clear example of the gender gap 10 years ago, less than 16% of biographies were of women.
The contributor ethnicity gap
While the gender gap is pronounced, the gap in ethnicity of Wikipedia editors in the United States, especially in comparison to the general population, is also quite pronounced. Based on the 2024 Community Insights Report, we find that particularly, Black or African-American and Hispanic or Latino/a/x editors are quite underrepresented in the United States.
While 14.2% of the population in the U.S. is Black or African American, according to the 2020 Census, only 3% of the Wikipedia editing population in the United States is. Similarly, 19.5% of the US population is Hispanic or Latino/a/x, according to the 2020 Census, but only 3.2% of the Wikipedia editing community is.
Wiki Education’s programs, targeting diverse college campuses, bring substantially more diverse contributors to Wikipedia.
- 14.9% of Wiki Education’s program participants in 2024 self-identified as Black or African American, slightly higher than the U.S. population and substantially higher than the 3% of existing Wikipedia editors.
- 14.8% of Wiki Education’s program participants in 2024 self-identified as Hispanic or Latino/a/x, slightly lower than the 19.5% of U.S. population but substantially higher than the 3.2% of the existing Wikipedia editors.
Indeed, Wiki Education’s program participants are demographically less likely to be White than either Wikipedia editors or the general population. While 80.3% of Wikipedian editors and 71% of the US population identify as White, only 56.9% of Wiki Education’s program participants do.
Why are Wiki Education’s program participants more likely to be ethnically diverse in comparison to the general U.S. population? In general, college-aged students are more diverse than the general population, which helps, but it is also due to outreach Wiki Education has done, particularly to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs), as well as to institutions whose student bodies are more diverse.
By specifically targeting colleges with diverse student body populations, Wiki Education can actively work to better reflect the demographics of the United States population than the current English Wikipedia community can.
The resulting content gaps
Why does Wiki Education work so hard to reduce these contributor gaps? It’s not diversity for the sake of diversity: Instead, it’s because Wikipedia gets better quality content when there is a broader base of contributors. People with lived or studied expertise in different cultural areas are able to identify perspectives missing from Wikipedia.
Being female doesn’t automatically give you expertise in feminism, though, just as being Black doesn’t give you expertise in African-American literature. That’s why Wiki Education’s programs pair outreach to diverse institutions with outreach via disciplinary channels to instructors who teach in those content areas. By working with academic associations in diverse content areas, conducting outreach to professors who teach in disciplines whose focus is on historically marginalized voices, and creating resources to support student editors as they tackle these gaps on Wikipedia, we are able to help build a corpus of student editors who are studying these equity topic areas and can write about them on Wikipedia, under the guidance of their subject-matter expert instructor. This two-pronged approach enables us to bring both diverse content and contributors to Wikipedia.
For examples, see these articles edited by our program participants:
- Asian American feminism
- Benin ancestral altars
- Black masculinity in American media (new article)
- Climate change in the United Arab Emirates (new article)
- Contemporary Palestinian art (new article)
- Discrimination against homeless people
- Environmental impact of war
- Farangi-Sazi
- History of antisemitism in the United States
- Indigenous science
- Internalized ableism (new article)
- Ni una menos
- Paracas culture
- Perinatal bereavement
In each of these examples, students in our Wikipedia Student Program identified content gaps relevant to axes of what we call “knowledge equity” – according to the Wikimedia Movement Strategy, “the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of power and privilege.” Using the expert guidance of their instructors, their wealth of sources available through their campus libraries, and their own learning, they crafted knowledge about previously under-represented topics on Wikipedia.
As Wikipedia’s millions of readers – and the many more who access Wikipedia content via generative AI services – seek information about these topics, they will have a more full picture of knowledge, thanks to our program participants.
In today’s fractured media landscape, having one neutral, fact-based resource, where information is independent and open to all, is more important than ever. That’s why Wiki Education remains committed to ensuring that the content on Wikipedia is accurate, representative, and complete.
We aren’t there yet, but we’re helping close the gaps. Please join us! If you’re a college or university instructor in the United States or Canada, assign your students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment with our support. If you’re a subject matter expert, take one of our Wikipedia courses. Or if you’re just a supporter of our work, we – as a small nonprofit organization – always welcome donations.
