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A Wikipedia edit-a-thon was held this week at Miller Nichols Library, as part of a collaboration between University Libraries, the Center for Digital and Public Humanities, and the Kansas City Monuments Coalition. Open to UMKC students, staff, and faculty, the event was focused on bolstering Wikipedia with more stories about notable Kansas City women.

Edit-a-thons are gatherings devoted to the improvement of a specific topic or type of content on Wikipedia, a free and widely used online encyclopedia. Women are significantly underrepresented on Wikipedia, with only 400,000 biographic entries about women and roughly four times that amount for men (as of June 2024). This week’s event aimed to help close that gap, and to specifically shine a brighter light on notable Kansas City women in the process.

Over the course of a single day, the 25 participants together made 72 edits, added 166 references, and added a total of 9,540 words to articles on Kansas City women, as well as created one entirely new article. Articles expanded included those on Clarina I. H. Nichols, Mamie Currie Hughes, and Annie Chambers.

Katie Antrainer, a Digital Scholarship Library Fellow with Digital Scholarship Services and a core organizer for the event, was surprised to discover how many Kansas City women did not already have Wikipedia articles. “It was great to have so many people working to improve articles to bring the stories of Kansas City women to greater prominence,” Antrainer said. “I hope that this becomes a campus tradition, and I’d love to see more edit-a-thons on other topics.”