Title:Coming together to address Wikipedia gender gap

Dolores Kendrick grew up in Washington, DC, became a teacher, earned a master’s degree from Georgetown, and was named as DC’s Poet Laureate in 1999. Her best-known work, The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women, was adapted for the theater and won multiple awards.

Despite Kendrick’s accomplishments, there was very little information available about her on Wikipedia until Carole Sargent, director of Georgetown’s Office of Scholarly Publications, took up the cause. She joined forces with Beth Marhanka, head of outreach and engagement at Georgetown University Library, to feature Kendrick during Women’s History Month—and then they decided to host an edit-a-thon to improve Kendrick’s Wikipedia page.

“We discovered that 80% of Wikipedia biographies are of men, and fewer than 15% of editors are women,” Sargent says. “It seemed like a feminist crisis to me. Wikipedia is the largest reference work in history. We formed a group dedicated to improving and editing existing pages and creating new pages for women who are not there at all.”

Since the first event in 2022, their effort has grown to include edit-a-thons involving multiple members of the Georgetown community and external partners who come together to transform Wikipedia content for a wide range of women. Anjelika Deogirikar Grossman, associate director of the Massive Data Institute, has played a leading role, bringing in Wikimedia DC as a co-sponsor. WikiProject Women in Religion and WikiProject Women in Red have been supportive, and over a dozen Georgetown organizations and academic departments are active participants.

“Our projects have included [Georgetown Magazine features editor] Jane Varner Malhotra’s (S’21) research on the first known women to attend Georgetown, in the Medical School in the 19th century, as well as adding biographies of notable Catholic sisters,” says Sargent. “This work is so important. What we write is published instantly and affects knowledge and perception about these women not only now, but also for ages to come.”

The edit-a-thon team hosted an in-person session in March 2026 and plans to host an online session in July 2026. The events are open to faculty, students, staff, and alumni. New participants start with a training session and then engage in editing pages, choosing from a long list of women the organizers identify in advance. Participants are also welcome to bring their own related projects. “We will support any notable woman that you care about and think is underrepresented,” says Sargent.

“The wonderful thing about being a Wikipedia editor,” says Marhanka, “is that you can contribute anytime, from anywhere. The training is important because Wikipedia is very strict about what they post, but once you complete that, you don’t have to wait for a formal event to be an editor.”