Wiki Women in Religion: Publicly Engaged Scholarship to Address Systemic Bias in Online Resources

The WikiUser Group, Women in Religion, launched at the Parliament of the World's Religions in 2018, seeks to create, update, and improve Wikipedia articles pertaining to the lives of cis and transgender women scholars, activists, and practitioners in the world's religious, spiritual, and wisdom traditions. We seek to write women back into history, especially those who have made an impact in their faith and religious communities. Wikipedia suffers from an intersectional gender gap in both contributors and content: 80% of active Wikipedia editors identify as male, and 81% of biographies on English Wikipedia are of men. Yet, English Wikipedia is the 6th most referenced online resource on the planet. In fact, even as many educators doubt its reliability, Wikipedia serves a leading role in the democratization of knowledge creation and sharing. With over 6.7 million articles and over 4 billion visitors per year, Wikipedia has disrupted and largely replaced other encyclopedias. Its role in our information habits permeates key sectors of our society--for example, in addition to the general public, recent studies show that Wikipedia is used by doctors, judges, and journalists as they encounter and seek to understand new topics and concepts. With such a central role in shaping public knowledge, Wikipedia’s gender bias can have a far reaching and regrettable impact on culture. Our work has also demonstrated that this bias spills over into unreliable and hegemonic knowledge production (junk in; junk out). Wikipedia feeds potentially biased information to search engines, Google Knowledge panels, Siri and Alexa, and is a principle source for most generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT. With Wikipedia’s large and systemic role in online information consumption, it is critical to develop transnational strategies across cultures with communities that are actively addressing its biases. We believe that this is an opportunity for publicly engaged educators and scholars of religion. Wikipedia content about women religious leaders, women’s religious organizations, feminist and womanist scholars, and topics important to understanding central the role women play through the worlds religious and justice seeking movements can be created and improved by well-meaning people in classrooms, scholarly societies, and volunteer organizations. In this Round Table we will discuss the challenges, barriers, and rewards of working on Wikipedia as publicly engaged scholars who seek to address gender bias on topics related to women in religion. The Table will include a diverse group of participants: librarians, archivists, religious scholars, retired professors, professors in the classroom and experienced Wikipedians interested in religion. We will discuss the various ways the Wikimedia User Group, Women in Religion, is deepening interfaith and intercultural commitments and developing new friendships through scholarly engagements with people inside and outside of the academy. We will also share the group’s approaches to practicing publicly engaged scholarship to address gender bias. In particular, panelists will discuss: The role of scholarly publishing: Wikipedia policies require the use of reliable, published, secondary sources. Many important women in religion, however, have been overlooked in scholarly publishing. To address this gap, we have worked with publishers to create a Women in Religion series of open access, scholarly monographs that feature biographies of women in religion. As of January 2024, three volumes have been published, and one more is in development. These monographs provide scholars a peer-reviewed avenue to publish biographical essays, to edit monographs focusing on marginalized women, and to create secondary sources that raise the visibility of women who are marginalized across the globe. The work of fostering a global community of contributors: The Women in Religion user group includes diverse participants from across the United States, Kenya, Australia, and elsewhere. With participants from various professional backgrounds and differing interests, we have supported each other in the practice of public scholarship, in learning new skills, and in finding ways to overcome sexism in the Wikipedia community. We will share how we have raised the visibility of marginalized women on several continents. Wikipedia as publicly engaged scholarship: Women in Religion participants have effectively used Wikipedia editing in the religious studies classroom. Our faculty participants have also used Wikipedia as a dissemination tool. We will discuss the challenges of using and contributing to Wikipedia in an academic setting. We will also share why we consider writing for Wikipedia to be scholarly, public-engaged publishing. In particular, we will share how our published articles on Roman Catholic sisters and peace activists have contributed to better representation for women in Catholic and mainstream media. The systems of systemic bias: As a large, open access, and widely used digital platform, Wikipedia and its related sites are key contributors to other information systems and websites. These include linked data sites, large language models, and generative AI tools. We discuss how our group has learned about these technologies and how we have experimented in using them to reduce gender inequity while also seeking to counter the biases they reproduce. Most importantly this round table will highlight the creativity of tackling gender, ethnicity and racial gaps in public knowledge as a transnational community of scholars who work regularly together. Our website does not identify scholars by name: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Religion_User_Group