Wikisphere

In 2014, Patricia Horrillo joined the team of the Medialab Prado cultural center in Madrid. Within its line of research on Citizen Journalism, launched a working group: Wikisphere. Among other things, I wanted to understand Why there were so few people editing on Wikipedia. And, after developing a segment, found two problems:

1. The first referred to a technological barrier, since to edit in Wikipedia you had to learn a tag language (similar to HTML) and it was a brake for many people. There is now a visual editor that facilitates this approach to article creation.
2. The second, something more complicated to solve than the previous one, was related to a feeling of lack of legitimacy to intervene in Wikipedia: the people who participated in the sessions did not feel sufficiently trained or were not experts to contribute because, in the words of one of them ‘Who am I to write history?’.

New technologies allow us to collectively create texts and generate collaborative documentation in wiki environments. We are aware of the importance of more and more people join the work of telling our History and that no new elites are created who decide what is and what is not relevant. Digital tools are a means for our voice and our contributions to be heard and read in the common spaces of consultation increasingly recurrent as the case of Wikipedia.

After several years working to reverse this situation, minimizing systemic knowledge gaps and increasing the presence of women in free digital spaces, at the end of 2022, Wikiesfera was established as a WikiLabs, a Non-Profit Association It seeks to promote citizen innovation, transform social reality and achieve a fairer world through the use of digital technologies and the promotion of collaborative practices, networking, and knowledge transfer and documentation.

Our values underpin everything we do, how we work with other people and how we behave and communicate, to successfully achieve our vision.

• Care of the collective: Take care of work-life balance, and encourage team members and the community to prioritize taking care of themselves and others. Avoid as far as possible situations and conditions of precariousness that may lead to the exploitation of the people of our community. 
• Trust: Be brave and make a conscious effort to recognize our vulnerabilities and value our strengths while challenging ourselves and others to improve through self-reflection and empathetic mutual feedback. 
• Collective responsibility: Collectively agree on the objectives and create spaces for those who are part of the team and the community to participate and lead the decision-making processes on equal terms and in a transparent way.
• Diversity, equity and inclusion: Recognize, celebrate and promote diversity in the group by expanding our worldview beyond the Global North. Facilitate access to the necessary resources and opportunities, taking into account different starting points and different needs. This means that we are committed to ensuring that there is no discrimination on any of the following grounds: age, disability, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, pregnancy and motherhood, race, physical appearance or religion.
• Power distribution: Use and share our power responsibly to transform systems and facilitate equal opportunities. Harnessing individual and collective power to create spaces for women. Recognize the work of other women and engage ethically and non-extractively with group members and the community.
• Open knowledge: Knowledge is a public good that benefits everyone and contributes to the development of a fairer and more equal society.
• Happy co-creation: Create, foster and ensure a space of collaboration and mutual respect where people enjoy meeting.
• Feminism: Recognize, honor and stand in solidarity with the feminist movement to create lasting change and impact regarding the gender gap, knowledge gaps and social justice. We are feminists and we generate knowledge that transcends us individually, in search of a collective good that positively impacts all women.

Although the objectives have varied slightly since its launch, Wikiesfera has always tried to be a space in which to share learning and knowledge using free tools. This group works mainly for identify and correct gaps in the representation of knowledge within the Wikimedia universe (Wikipedia, Wikidata, WikiCommons...), for which it is essential to increase the number of Wikipedians belonging to minorities, underrepresented groups or other social groups that have not had access to information technologies.

We understand that a diverse and neutral encyclopedia can only be achieved:

• increasing the number of female and male editors to prevent the creation of a new elite on storytelling (we are 567 million Spanish speakers and only 5,000 active editors were registered on the Spanish Wikipedia between 2020 and 2024);
• incorporating more women into the edition of Wikipedia's total editors, less than 13% we are women and this creates a considerable gender gap and an incomplete narrative of history;
• expanding the content related to women's biographies This is also well below the figure for women's contribution to society in all areas (around 25 per cent).%);
• working with a gender perspective to eliminate the androcentric bias in the production of content in defense of neutrality, one of the basic pillars of Wikipedia;
• incorporating free audiovisual content to facilitate the documentation of another type of culture and knowledge that is not based exclusively on academia, the recognition of institutions or the visibility of conventional media.

We achieve these goals by focusing on our Lines of Work.

Since Wikisphere was recognized as an official user group by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2018, it has published the following activity reports:

• Report 2018-2019
• Report 2019-2020
• Report 2020-2021
• Report 2021-2022
• Report 2022-2023
• Report 2023-2024