IIIF-C supporting VisibleWikiWomen 2021 campaign

  Josh Hadro, IIIF-C Managing Director    |      March 30, 2021

The IIIF Consortium is excited to be supporting the #VisibleWikiWomen 2020 campaign hosted by Whose Knowledge?, running through May 8, 2021.

The campaign is an effort to improve the representation of influential women – especially black, brown and indigenous women – on Wikipedia by adding openly licensed images to Wikimedia Commons.

We’re hopeful that institutions among our membership base will consider making valuable reuse of the curation, digitization, and rights review efforts they’ve already undertaken to identify openly licensed images that fit the criteria for this campaign. The team at Whose Knowledge? has helpfully created a resource titled “Guide for Cultural and Memory Institutions to make women visible on Wikipedia.”

More details about participating in the program are included below.

Please reach out to staff@iiif.io if you have any questions about how you can participate in this campaign, and thanks as always for all your support!


Dear partners and friends:

We hope you and your loved ones are well and healthy.

We would like to invite you to join us for a new edition of the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign running through 8 May. We are so grateful for the supportive responses and excitement from existing and new partners to join us this year.

As a reflection of our collective experiences in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, we have been inspired by our friends and partners at Association for Women’s Right and Development (AWID), to choose the theme Feminist Realities: living our resistance and liberation for this year’s campaign. With you, we want to highlight and celebrate the women/trans/non-binary people that have been embodying the feminist values to resist and dismantle patriarchy, capitalism, racism and many other systems of power and privilege throughout history!

This will be our fourth year working together to make women, trans and non-binary folks visible on Wikipedia and the broader internet. Your efforts in these past editions have brought over 15,000 new images to Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia and there is more to be done, especially when we think about the visibility of black, brown, indigenous and trans women online.

Here are a few ways you can support the campaign:

  • Uploading freely licensed images to Wikimedia Commons using our campaign page

  • Amplifying our social media messages on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using the hashtag #VisibleWikiWomen2021 and #WomenofColors

  • Organizing a photothon event in your community

  • Partnering with a local Wikipedia organization to bring #VisibleWikiWomen to their March/April edit-a-thons

  • Writing joint blog posts with WK? team or being interviewed for our podcast to raise awareness about women’s invisibility online

We are looking forward to welcoming you to the campaign and celebrating the women, trans and non-binary folks who have been creating feminist realities in your communities.

In gratitude and solidarity,

Mariana, Pamela and the WhoseKnowledge? team