Virtual Pride panel: Exploring experiences of LGBTQIA+ Wikimedians

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On 15 June at 17:00 hrs UTC, join a Pride month panel on improving LGBTQIA+ representation within the Wikimedia movement and projects. You can watch live on YouTube.

Throughout the Wikimedia movement and its projects, many identities and backgrounds are represented and celebrated. Unfortunately, within general online spaces, there are still a lot of challenges for Queer individuals and groups that steers them away from joining communities due to their identities. 

This Pride month, on 15 June, LGBTQIA+ folks from across the Wikimedia movement will share their experiences from within the movement and talk about the achievements and challenges they continue to face in online spaces. What are some of these challenges? There is still a clear lack of representation of the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as a big gender gap in the Wikimedia projects. There’s also a lack of representation in terms of the people who build our communities: only 1% of all editors identify as trans, and less than 1% of Wikipedia biographies cover trans or nonbinary people. 

According to the open data project Humaniki, the majority of content about people on all Wikimedia projects is about men. For example, as of May 2022, only 18.38% of content in all Wikimedia projects, including biographies on Wikipedia, are about women.

Also, much of the content about LGBTQIA+ projects, activists and history, suffers from damaging edits. According to research conducted by the Foundation, 8.8% of some 500 edits made to Marsha P. Johnson’s biography were . 

This panel will be hosted by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion team, and will shed light on perspectives experienced by folks in different areas of the movement, all with different tenures. 

The panelists are:

  • Andrea Denisse. Based in Mexico, Denisse is a Site Reliability Engineer with the Wikimedia Foundation, working on the Observability project.
  • Vic Sfriso. Sfriso is Cooperation and Inclusion Program Assistant with  Wikimedia Argentina.
  • Rae Adimer, User:Vermont. Adimer is a new Movement Communications Associate with the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as a Wikimedia Steward and Admin/CU on Meta-Wiki and the Simple English Wikipedia. They are also part of the Universal Code of Conduct Revisions Committee and the Leadership Development Working Group.
  • Marinus Uys. Based in South Africa, Uys is a Lead Learning and Development Specialist with  the Wikimedia Foundation. He is also a Wikipedia editor and volunteer in LGBTQIA+ organizations within South Africa. 

You can join the event on 15 June at 17:00 hrs UTC. Watch live on YouTube.

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