We, the founders of Equalpedia, Sonja Hintermeier† and Karin Kraus, have been working with our team since 2018 on the issue of the lack of representation of women and LGBTQIA+ people on the internet. By building Equalpedia, a free, gender-equitable digital encyclopedia, we want to help close the digital knowledge gap about the achievements of women and LGBTQIA+ people, other marginalised groups1Our understanding of marginalised groups or marginalisation corresponds to the definition laid down, for example, by the Diversity Arts Culture project in Berlin:
“Marginalisation refers to the displacement of individuals or population groups to the margins of society. The displacement can take place on different levels, i.e. it can be, for example, geographical, economic, social or cultural; usually it occurs on several levels at the same time.
Marginalisation takes place within a power structure and goes hand in hand with discrimination: the further a group is at the margins of society, the less power it has and the more strongly it is disadvantaged compared to the centre of society. Marginalisation involves the loss of resources, opportunities for influence and status, and can affect mental and physical health. If the marginalised group is a minority, the mental and physical consequences can also be referred to as minority stress. But marginalisation does not only affect minorities. In a patriarchal society, for example, femininity is marginalised, even though women are not a minority.” (Source: https://diversity-arts-culture.berlin/woerterbuch/marginalisierung)
At Equalpedia, we focus on people from a wide variety of fields who are marginalised, for example, on the basis of the so-called “Big 8”: “race, gender, ethnicity/nationality, organizational role/function, age, sexual orientation, mental/physical ability, religion.” (Source: Krell, Gertraude/Riedmüller, Barbara/Sieben, Barbara/Viez, Dagmar (2007): Einleitung – Diversity Studies als integrierende Forschungsrichtung. In: Idem (eds.): Diversity Studies. Grundlagen und disziplinäre Ansätze. Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus Verlag, pp. 7–16, here p. 8. and people who have stood up for them.
Our history
In 2018, we began to address the Digital Gender Knowledge Gap. In particular, the low proportion of women and their stereotypical portrayal in Wikipedia, the world’s largest digital encyclopedia, were sobering with regard to digital equality. We took this grievance as an occasion to get involved in Wikipedia work. We began our task with the intention of increasing the presence of women authors (currently 9 % in Wikipedia) and of articles on women’s biographies (currently 15 % in Wikipedia). To this end, we raised public funding, built up an editorial team and wrote articles.
We used the funds we had raised to pay for our team’s editorial work and therefore met with strong resistance from the Wikipedia community. The community opposed our work because we were paid for it and carried it out in a form of work unusual for Wikipedia culture: we are a team, we do not work anonymously and we stand up for the cause of women and LGBTQIA+ people. This contradicts the traditions of Wikipedia, which propagates neutrality without payment and whose authors usually remain anonymous.
The rest of our Wikipedia story is quickly told: we fought for our way of working – paid writing about women and other marginalised groups in Wikipedia – but were unable to prevail. On the contrary, we were excluded from the Wikipedia community several times (despite paid writing in compliance with the rules) and argued for continuing our work all the way up to the Arbitration Committee (the highest Wikipedia authority). Unfortunately, without the desired success. A small, powerful group of experienced Wikipedians (approx. ten to twelve votes) permanently excluded our entire team, which was not yet anchored in the Wikipedia system.
Our dispute with the Wikipedia community is an example of why it is so difficult for women and LGBTQIA+ people to assert themselves in this system. The power relations and the opaque decision-making processes, the so-called edit wars and the unobjective tone are, in our view, important reasons why for more than ten years it has hardly been possible to significantly increase the proportion of women in Wikipedia (both among authors and in articles).
The knowledge gap about women and LGBTQIA+ people in Wikipedia is only one part of the large knowledge gap about women and LGBTQIA+ people in the digital world. We also see that this gap – the Digital Gender Knowledge Gap – is currently growing ever larger. As a result, stereotypical images of women* are becoming entrenched, women and LGBTQIA+ people continue to be absent or underrepresented, are not found – and what cannot be found on the internet does not exist. Better representation of women and LGBTQIA+ people in the digital sphere requires a determined commitment to gender-sensitive algorithms and intensive engagement by intellectual and economic forces of and for women and LGBTQIA+ people .
In the field of free encyclopedic work, funding programmes and projects are just as necessary as in other fields in order to achieve greater gender equality – as is happening in many ways, for example, in the STEM professions. There, the issue of the low proportion of women in the scientific and technical field is to be addressed.
We have drawn the consequences from the insights of the last two years. With our team, we are breaking new ground and have founded our own platform for a gender-equitable, free encyclopedia.
For this, we found the name 
.
The founding of Equalpedia
Since the beginning of our work, we have experienced that our concept of achievement and our assessment of women and LGBTQIA+ people, of their accomplishments and their social significance, differ very clearly from the Wikipedia view.
We are not satisfied with this and have therefore set about developing appropriate notability criteria for women and LGBTQIA+ people for Equalpedia – our new platform.2Appropriate notability criteria are not a new topic: as early as 1941/1942, the historian, author and women’s rights activist Mary Ritter Beard was commissioned by editor-in-chief Walter Yust to analyse the Encyclopedia Britannica from a women’s perspective. Beard and three women scholars examined the portrayal of women in the encyclopedia and wrote a 42-page final report in which they pointed out the articles that were inadequate or missing from a women’s perspective as well as the consistently male gaze. In a whole series of articles on various topics, no women appeared in the encyclopedia at all, so that one could get the impression that there had been no women in these areas (e.g. in the entry on “The Western Frontier”) (see Lane, Ann J. (1988): Mary Ritter Beard. A sourcebook. Boston: Northeastern University Press, p. 216 ff.).
Equalpedia’s first project – articles on the new women’s movement in Frankfurt am Main
In the first stage of our work, we processed the results of the new women’s movement in Frankfurt am Main – some of its protagonists and a large part of its projects – in encyclopedic form, carried out source studies, searched for photographic material and wrote articles. Despite the difficult source situation, the articles document very well what the women achieved and what changes resulted from their movement.
We would now like to complement our work at Equalpedia with new projects on the biographies and achievements of women and LGBTQIA+ people from other fields and regions.
We welcome suggestions for this. Simply send us a message.
Who we are and how we work
Equalpedia has set itself the goal of using gender-equitable and gender-sensitive language. We have therefore decided to use the gender asterisk (*) in order to include all people – regardless of their gender identity. In addition, we use the wording women and LGBTQIA+ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual) in order to include all groups marginalised on the basis of their gender identity.
We try to use language as sensitively as possible. Nevertheless, we are aware that distinguishing between the gender roles of man and woman is a necessity in certain contexts – not only to make power and domination relations between the genders clear, but also to depict historical events as accurately as possible.
We are aware that we do not yet live up to our aim of building an encyclopedia for marginalised knowledge by and about women and LGBTQIA+ people, since, for example, knowledge by and about women and LGBTQIA+ people of colour has so far not been represented, or not sufficiently. So that our project does not perpetuate the structurally determined dynamic in which “white knowledge” is still the standard, we are working to make the project more inclusive, so that other marginalised voices can also take on the role in it that they deserve.
We are open to and grateful for ideas and suggestions on how we can achieve this goal.
The Equalpedia team
There are currently four of us actively working on Equalpedia. Our wider circle includes art historians, German studies scholars, literary scholars, political scientists, physicists, biologists, social scientists, psychologists and women IT specialists. They research, write and edit the articles. For our collaboration in the Equalpedia team and with our external colleagues, we have developed our own communication standards; furthermore, we do not work anonymously.
All of us together are committed to the cause of women and LGBTQIA+ people and to gender equity on the internet.
New authors and networks
We are currently building a network of feminist organisations in order to recruit experts from the fields of culture, computer science and AI, natural sciences and engineering, music, sport and much more as authors for Equalpedia.
Embedded in a circle of committed women and men who support Equalpedia with strategic advice, we are working on networking with institutions that want to join us in advocating for women- and gender-equitable policies and greater visibility in the digital environment.
Registration form for new authors »
Notability criteria at Equalpedia
We began our encyclopedic work by revising all the articles we had previously written in Wikipedia for Equalpedia. Here we first added content and sources that had been classified as irrelevant in Wikipedia but which, from Equalpedia’s point of view, are indeed relevant. For this reason, together with our network of experts, we have developed contemporary notability criteria for encyclopedic work. The notability criteria at Equalpedia, e.g. for women’s biographies, are designed in such a way that their life circumstances are taken into account without becoming an exclusion criterion.
We are aware that knowledge changes – just as the assessment of what is worth knowing does. That is why we review our notability criteria together with our authors and continue to develop the criteria.
Equalpedia and algorithms
Through our Wikipedia work over the last two years, we have seen the effects of algorithms that are not gender-equitable. What the algorithm does not capture cannot be found – and what is not found are women and LGBTQIA+ people and their achievements.
For this reason, we are also working to make algorithms more gender-equitable.
We link our content extensively so that a reliable network of knowledge about women and LGBTQIA+ people and organisations can emerge and be seen.
Machine translation: This article was translated automatically from the German original.
- 1Our understanding of marginalised groups or marginalisation corresponds to the definition laid down, for example, by the Diversity Arts Culture project in Berlin:
“Marginalisation refers to the displacement of individuals or population groups to the margins of society. The displacement can take place on different levels, i.e. it can be, for example, geographical, economic, social or cultural; usually it occurs on several levels at the same time.
Marginalisation takes place within a power structure and goes hand in hand with discrimination: the further a group is at the margins of society, the less power it has and the more strongly it is disadvantaged compared to the centre of society. Marginalisation involves the loss of resources, opportunities for influence and status, and can affect mental and physical health. If the marginalised group is a minority, the mental and physical consequences can also be referred to as minority stress. But marginalisation does not only affect minorities. In a patriarchal society, for example, femininity is marginalised, even though women are not a minority.” (Source: https://diversity-arts-culture.berlin/woerterbuch/marginalisierung)
At Equalpedia, we focus on people from a wide variety of fields who are marginalised, for example, on the basis of the so-called “Big 8”: “race, gender, ethnicity/nationality, organizational role/function, age, sexual orientation, mental/physical ability, religion.” (Source: Krell, Gertraude/Riedmüller, Barbara/Sieben, Barbara/Viez, Dagmar (2007): Einleitung – Diversity Studies als integrierende Forschungsrichtung. In: Idem (eds.): Diversity Studies. Grundlagen und disziplinäre Ansätze. Frankfurt/M./New York: Campus Verlag, pp. 7–16, here p. 8. ↩︎ - 2Appropriate notability criteria are not a new topic: as early as 1941/1942, the historian, author and women’s rights activist Mary Ritter Beard was commissioned by editor-in-chief Walter Yust to analyse the Encyclopedia Britannica from a women’s perspective. Beard and three women scholars examined the portrayal of women in the encyclopedia and wrote a 42-page final report in which they pointed out the articles that were inadequate or missing from a women’s perspective as well as the consistently male gaze. In a whole series of articles on various topics, no women appeared in the encyclopedia at all, so that one could get the impression that there had been no women in these areas (e.g. in the entry on “The Western Frontier”) (see Lane, Ann J. (1988): Mary Ritter Beard. A sourcebook. Boston: Northeastern University Press, p. 216 ff.). ↩︎