A project of Visibility of women in lyrics on Wikipedia in cooperation with the Teatro de la Zarzuela

Women of Zarzuela is a historical memory retrieval project through Wikipedia. It comes from a simple question: How many women who shaped Spanish lyrics remain invisible in the most consulted encyclopedia in the world?

Since 2025, Wikisphere has been working together with Teatro de la Zarzuela (@teatrodelazarzuela) to answer that question article by article, image by image. The project unites university researchers, public archives and cultural institutions with a shared objective: that these women exist on Wikipedia.

Beyond learning to edit, the proposal seeks to encourage a A Critical Look at Inequality on Wikipedia, integrate publishing as a common practice and be part of an international community committed to making visible the stories that still need to be told.

> Results

Among the editions carried out so far, these are the cumulative results:

>> 2025 edition | [ chronic ] | [ Video Presentation ]

• 1 month course · 4 virtual training sessions · 1 closing edition in May 2025
• 25 participants · 18 articles published · 22 images released · 6 universities

>> Edition 2026 | [ chronic ] | [ Video Presentation ]

• Course of 3 months · 4 virtual sessions resolution doubts · 1 editatona of closure in May 2026
• 47 participants · 44 articles published · 26 images released · 10 universities

> Project design

Women of Zarzuela It works because it unites three types of knowledge and knowledge that rarely work together:

• Council of Wise Men. Before editing, you have to know who to make visible. A group of experts in the history of Spanish lyrics, coordinated from the Teatro de la Zarzuela, identified and prioritized the biographies of women whose artistic career deserved to be on Wikipedia - many of them without any previous entry.
• The Teatro de la Zarzuela brings institutional legitimacy, its own archive and connections with other cultural institutions (BNE, museums, archives) to facilitate access to historical sources and images.
• Wikisphere provides methodology, Wikipedia editing training and community of practice It turns that knowledge into free, verifiable and accessible content for anyone in the world.
• The researchers know who these women are. University students of musicology and history provide the knowledge of primary and secondary sources necessary to write rigorous encyclopedic articles.

The result is a replicable model: Any cultural institution with an archive and a network of researchers can become a generator of free knowledge for Wikipedia.

> Images

One of the big problems we face in making women visible on Wikipedia has to do with their images: the 25th% of biographies of women that exist on Wikipedia, only a 20% has an image, which limits its impact and visibility on the encyclopedia itself. Sometimes it is thought that, if there are images on the Internet, they can be used freely by ignoring the rights of use.

In the case of the project Women of Zarzuela, biographies are historical figures, so access to royalty-free images is even more complex. Although many cultural institutions guard valuable photographic archives, they are not always released under licenses that allow their use in free knowledge projects such as Wikipedia.

For this reason, the institutional contributions of the National Library of Spain (BNE), the National Museum of Performing Arts Almagro, or the Centre for Documentation and Museum of Performing Arts of the Theatre Institute In Barcelona, they represent an important step to visually enrich the free encyclopedia and allow the biographies of these women not only to have reliable and verifiable sources, but also with a face that represents them. The collaboration of public archives and museums with projects like this demonstrates the value of opening up documentary heritage to drive fairer and more diverse representation in digital spaces of knowledge.

In the category of Wikimedia Commons (the audiovisual repository of Wikipedia) created by Wikisphere for Women of Zarzuela, you can see the 48 images of the project These have been released between 2025 and 2026.

> Gallery

> Collaborate