A project of visibility in Wikipedia in collaboration with the Teatro de la Zarzuela

In July 2024, since the coordination of educational and cultural activities in the Teatro de la Zarzuela (INAEM, National Institute of Performing Arts and Music, Ministry of Culture), contacted Wikisphere with a specific concern: many relevant women in the history of Spanish lyrics did not have an article on Wikipedia, despite the fact that the theater's documentary collection kept a lot of information about them.

From Wikisphere we saw right away that This proposal was fully aligned with our goal of reducing the gender gap in the free encyclopedia.. For us, it was key to connect this institutional knowledge with the community of editors, generating a collective learning space with a real impact on access to knowledge.

> Project design

From the beginning, we proposed the project Women of Zarzuela as a collaboration between cultural institutions, experts in the history of Spanish lyrics and the community of Wikipedia editors. The first step was identify women whose artistic career should be visible, using the specialist knowledge of a "Council of Wise Men" coordinated from the Teatro de la Zarzuela itself. This mapping and curating work made it possible to define a set of priority biographies that, for the most part, did not yet have entry in the free encyclopedia or presented little information.

At the same time, we set out to train people interested in the subject so that they could create, translate or improve those articles. From the Teatro de la Zarzuela, who have contact with the music degrees of various universities, they thought of offering students and researchers the possibility of receiving this training. This is how the collaboration with six universities: University of Alcalá (UAH), Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), University of Granada (UGR), University of Oviedo (UO) and University of Salamanca (USAL), whose departments facilitated the participation of students linked to music research, musicology and the digital humanities.

We design a training process consisting of four virtual sessions in which the keys to editing Wikipedia with a gender perspective, the use of reliable sources, the translation of content and the correct structuring of an encyclopedic article were addressed. As a closure of the process, we organize a virtual editatone in May 2025 in which participants applied what they learned by creating, translating and improving entries on women in zarzuela, thus contributing to expanding accessible and free knowledge about Spanish lyrics.

> 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 and aware of the importance of this issue, from the Teatro de la Zarzuela they made specific efforts to address it. After a meeting with the team of the National Library of Spain (BNE), the institution released 15 images linked to women of the Spanish lyrics, who have been incorporated into the articles that needed them, significantly improving their visibility. In addition, the National Museum of Performing Arts Almagro also joined this initiative, freeing 7 images They are already part of the articles published on Wikipedia as a result of the project.

These institutional contributions represent an important step to visually enrich the free encyclopedia and allow these women's biographies not only to have reliable and verifiable sources, but also to have 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.

> Editions

Between February and May 2025, a total of five activities under the project Women of Zarzuela: four virtual training sessions and an editatona in which the articles developed during the previous months were finally published, contributing significantly to Making women visible in Spanish lyrics on Wikipedia.

The trainings were mainly aimed at students from six Spanish universities, with the participation of 32 people They learned to create, translate and improve articles in the free encyclopedia from a feminist perspective and with a focus on the musical field. The process culminated in the Saturday 3 May 2025 with the virtual editatone #3M, in which they participated 25 people – mostly women – who applied what they had learned by editing directly on Wikipedia.

Thanks to this collective work, they were published 18 articles: 10 of creation y 8 translations, and improved 8 existing items with relevant information, references and links. These results represent a significant contribution to the recognition of women in the world of zarzuela, expanding their presence in the largest repository of free knowledge in the world.