Building Bridges Across Communities: Women in Wikipedia 2025 as a Reciprocal Collaboration

By Armine Aghayan-Flisch, long-time Wikipedian and campaign initiator

In 2025, the Women in Wikipedia campaign became an opportunity for me to rethink how Wikimedia communities can collaborate beyond borders. What began as a local initiative evolved into a reciprocal, intercommunity collaboration between the Armenian Wikimedia community and Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire, showing how shared ownership and mutual trust can lead to meaningful results.

From a local campaign to a global idea

I first organized Women in Wikipedia as a campaign focused on Armenian editors, to address the gender gap on Wikipedia by creating and improving biographies of notable women. The results of the first edition were encouraging, but they also prompted me to consider how such initiatives could extend beyond national borders and become part of a broader exchange within the Wikimedia Movement.

For the second edition of Women in Wikipedia in 2025, I wanted to try something different. Instead of running the campaign only within my local community, I reached out to Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire to explore the idea of a mutual collaboration. The goal was simple: not only to create content, but to learn from each other and work together as equal partners.

A reciprocal partnership with Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire

The collaboration brought together 7 editors from the Armenian Wikimedia community and 4 editors from Wikimedia Côte d’Ivoire. Instead of each community writing only about its own context, we adopted a cross-writing approach:

• Editors from Armenia created 26 biographical articles in Armenian about women from Côte d’Ivoire
• Editors from Côte d’Ivoire wrote 29 biographical articles in French about Armenian women who previously lacked Wikipedia coverage in those languages

This approach encouraged editors to engage deeply with unfamiliar histories and cultures, while also strengthening content diversity across languages.

Focus on biography and translation

The campaign followed the broader framework of the global Women in Wikipedia initiative, with a clear focus on biographical content and translation. Translation proved to be especially powerful: it allowed existing knowledge to travel across languages and helped make women’s stories visible to entirely new audiences.

At the same time, the process highlighted how uneven coverage can be across language editions – and how much impact even a small group of editors can have when working together with a clear purpose.

Beyond content creation

Of course, the numbers matter. But for me, the most meaningful outcome of this collaboration was the human side of it. Editors exchanged messages, asked questions, shared sources, and supported one another throughout the campaign. It reminded me that Wikimedia projects are not only about articles, but about people and relationships.

As User:Arsho, an editor from the Armenian community, reflected:

“What stood out to me was how many women’s stories are underrepresented internationally, even when their impact is significant within their own countries. Writing about them felt like bridging a visibility gap and contributing to a more balanced global knowledge space.”

From the Côte d’Ivoire community, User:Papischou highlighted the collaborative aspect of the experience:

“It is a way to learn about another culture. It is also an opportunity to collaborate with people who have the same passion as us: open knowledge.”

These reflections capture what made the collaboration meaningful – learning across cultures while working toward a shared goal.

This experience showed that intercommunity collaboration does not have to be complicated. With trust, clear communication, and shared responsibility, even small communities can create something that resonates far beyond their own language editions.

A model worth sharing

This collaboration shows that reciprocal intercommunity campaigns are not only possible but highly effective. Writing about each other’s cultures helps reduce systemic bias, broadens perspectives, and creates a sense of shared responsibility for global knowledge.

The Women in Wikipedia 2025 collaboration between Armenia and Côte d’Ivoire offers a replicable model for other Wikimedia communities interested in expanding local initiatives into global partnerships, particularly around gender equity, translation, and underrepresented voices.

By sharing this story on Diff, I hope to encourage other Wikimedia communities to experiment with similar forms of collaboration. For me, Women in Wikipedia 2025 was not only about improving content, but it was also about discovering new ways of working together.