International Women’s Day 2026: Women, visibility, and the future of trusted knowledge on Wikimedia

On 8 March, International Women’s Day asks us to do two things at once: celebrate how far we have come and stay honest about how fragile progress can be.

This year’s theme, “Rights. Justice. Action. For ALL Women and Girls,” comes at a moment that feels more timely than usual; not because women and girls have suddenly stopped advancing, but because the conditions around public participation are shifting fast. Who gets heard, who gets believed, and who gets pushed back into silence is determined by technology. UN Women frames this as a defining moment: women and girls have never been closer to equality, yet never closer to losing it.

We can feel that tension everywhere online. Visibility is easier to gain, and harder to sustain. We are also living through an acceleration in how information is produced and spread and the risks that come with it. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2026 places misinformation and disinformation among the top short term global risks. When truth becomes slippery, the harm is rarely evenly distributed. People who are already fighting for credibility often women, girls, and marginalized communities are the first to be doubted, targeted, or erased.

Personal Reflection

My reflection this year is how AI is widening the doorway to knowledge and visibility. There’s a huge opportunity. Ideas travel faster, learning is easier, and new leaders can emerge sooner. But we shouldn’t confuse speed with strength. Lasting change still depends on people’s trust, judgment, and relationships built over time. Social capital is not evenly shared, and the collaborations that shift institutions rarely happen in one big moment. They’re built through repeated, human interactions. In Wikimedia terms: tools help us reach further; relationships help us endure.

The thought of relationships helping us endure resonates deeply with me because Wikipedia is not only a website but a living practice of building trust with strangers, through process, through care, through choosing collaboration even when it’s difficult. And that’s why International Women’s Day doesn’t sit next to our movement’s work. It runs right through it. Wikimedia projects are built on a foundational belief that people who may never meet can still create reliable knowledge together not because we are always aligned, but because we have shared norms: verifiability, sourcing, discussion, accountability, and the willingness to revise. At our best, we don’t rely on authority. We rely on the community. But community doesn’t happen automatically. It depends on who feels safe enough to show up and who feels supported enough to stay. This is where the IWD theme becomes practical inside Wikimedia.

Rights are not about being able to participate. It’s the right to contribute without having to “prove” your worthiness first, the right to be treated as credible, the right to learn without being shamed for being new, the right to disagree without being punished for speaking. A right that exists in theory but feels unsafe in practice is a right that many people simply can’t use.

Justice is what happens when harm occurs and when people can trust that they won’t be left alone to absorb it. We know, globally, that online violence is real and rising, and that it increasingly intersects with AI enabled abuse. UNESCO’s global survey reported that 75% of surveyed women journalists experienced online violence in 2025, and it also documented AI-assisted online violence as part of the broader threat landscape. I am naming this here because Wikimedia doesn’t exist outside the internet. We’re part of it. The wider environment shapes who feel safe participating, and what it costs to be visible.

Action is the part that’s easiest to talk about and hardest to do consistently. It’s not only campaigns or moments of visibility. It’s the follow through, the daily work that keeps knowledge trustworthy and communities livable. It’s writing, sourcing, translating, mentoring, and repairing. And if we’re honest, it’s also maintenance of the work that rarely gets celebrated, but without which everything else breaks down.

Wikipedia as a Practice of Trust

That brings me to something that sits at the heart of trusted knowledge on Wikimedia: participation  and the gaps in participation. The Wikimedia Foundation’s Project Rewrite notes that as of January 2025, only 18.9% of content across Wikimedia projects (including biographies) is about women, and that as of 2020, only 15% of Wikimedia contributors are women. Those numbers aren’t just stats. They describe whose lives get recorded, whose expertise becomes searchable, whose work gets cited, whose contributions are assumed to be “neutral,” and whose knowledge is treated as optional.

When fewer women and marginalized genders participate, the consequence isn’t only fewer biographies. It’s a thinner record of the world and a less resilient knowledge ecosystem. In a time when information can be mass produced, the question becomes, what can be trusted, and who gets to shape that trust? This is why I feel that the gender gap is not only a content problem. It’s a participation problem. A safety problem. A credibility problem. A retention problem. And it’s also a trust problem. Because trusted knowledge is not produced by information alone. It’s produced by people and by how people treat each other while doing the work.

Patrolling as Community Care

I want to spend a moment on something that is sometimes misunderstood: patrolling. Patrolling on Wikipedia is one of the clearest places where trust becomes visible, not in speeches or strategy docs, but in everyday choices. It is not only about reverting vandalism. It is about checking sources before misinformation hardens into “truth.” It is stepping in early, so conflict doesn’t turn into a pile. It’s writing a talk page message that feels human rather than punitive. It’s choosing to guide instead of gatekeeping. It’s holding the line on quality while keeping the door open for newcomers. At its best, patrolling is community care at scale. And in a world where digital reach is exploding while deep connection feels scarce, community care isn’t an extra. It’s infrastructure.

So on this International Women’s Day, I want to celebrate women and gender diverse contributors not only for what they publish, but for what they sustain: the trust, the norms, the mentoring, the maintenance, the patience, the courage to keep showing up.

What Rights, Justice, and Action Mean Inside Wikimedia

If you are wondering what Rights. Justice. Action. can look like on Wikimedia this week, here are three small actions that genuinely matter:

1. Strengthen one article about a woman (or women’s issues) with one solid source.
2. Thank a contributor whose work you rely on. Recognition supports retention.
3. Make patrolling less intimidating for someone newer than you. Share a beginner friendly tool, a low-risk task, or simply be the person they can ask when they are unsure.
4. Participate in any of Wikimedia’s Celebrate Women Campaigns.

The lesson I am carrying into March 8 is simple: Technology can widen access,  but only people can build trust together.

Happy International Women’s Day and thank you to everyone building a Wikimedia movement where participation is safer, credibility is fairer, and trusted knowledge reflects more of humanity.

Bridgit Kurgat – Gender Lead, Wikimedia Foundation