Education/Newsletter/November 2013/Wikimedia Diversity Conference 2013 in Berlin

The topic of diversity and the challenges arising from its lack have repeatedly been addressed in the Wikimedia universe. Despite the number of people participating in Wikimedia projects and albeit both, amount and quality of content being produced increasing, many social groups, cultures and languages remain under-represented. Amongst other things, this under-representation is reflected in the type of knowledge we access through Wikipedia and its sister projects.

In order to tackle the issue of diversity, about 80 Wikipedians and Wikimedians from all over the world gathered in Berlin last weekend to join the first Wikimedia Diversity Conference. The conference was hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland, Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia UK and the Wikimedia Foundation. It gave us the unique chance to share our knowledge and understanding of diversity topics. We engaged in discussions about our work in the field of gender diversity and geographic diversity.

In 26 sessions, presentations as well as workshops, the participants discussed different strategies and approaches that aim to foster more diversity, exchanged best practices and created new ideas for future projects together. The different aspects of diversity that were discussed during the conference ranged from gender-related issues, such as the inadequate proportion of women or LGBT groups, over more technical questions like “how can we reduce barriers and make the Wikimedia projects more welcoming and friendly to new editors in order to prevent scaring them away?”, to geographical aspects, such as the low representation of languages and editors from the so-called “global south”.

You can find an extensive documentation of the conference including etherpads and presentations for all sessions, Photos and Video-Interviews (coming soon) with all speakers at the documentation page.