Lesbian Herstory Archives

On June 8th and June 29th, I hosted Lez Wiki, a series of Wikipedia edit-a-thons focused on improving and creating Wikipedia pages about Lesbians and Lesbian organizations. 

I was inspired by my own experience editing Wikipedia, and used that to pull together resources on how to edit and some existing Wikipedia pages that needed improvements. I’ve attended a few edit-a-thons previously and wanted to keep things simple for beginners, so I put together a tutorial that focused on the principles and rules of editing Wikipedia, some basic ways to make small but important edits, and research strategies for finding information to add to pages; all this information was compiled on the Wiki Meetup page here. The page includes a “task list” of suggested pages to edit (both for people at the sessions and for those who couldn’t attend in person), along with some resources about each subject to help people get started; not knowing where/how to start is a consistent barrier that comes up when I talk to people about editing Wikipedia. The task list primarily consisted of biographical pages, but represented Lesbians of varying races, ethnicities, professions, abilities, and gender identities – most participants worked on pages from this list, but some also suggested or requested page ideas for Lesbians with identities that weren’t represented. 

We had a full house on June 8th – almost everyone who registered showed up and worked on a huge range of articles. Their contributions included adding Palestinian representation to the “Queering the Map” page; linking to publicly available editions of Lesbian Tide; and improving the biographies of Ma-Nee Chacaby, Honey Lee Cottrell, and Urvashi Vaid. One experienced Wikipedia editor also created new pages for the Disabled Lesbian Alliance and Albatross Magazine! Our group on June 29th was a little smaller (post Dyke March exhaustion) but still enthusiastic. They came with a lot of personal interests and made some fun contributions, which including adding stats from Breanna Stewart‘s 2025 season with the New York Liberty; cleaning up Reverend Darlene Garner‘s page; adding the Boston and Portland, Maine Dyke Marches, and expanding the biographies of Beth Elliott and Lenn Keller. 

The feedback I received at the end of each session was resoundingly positive! Many people thanked me – one specifically said that the session helped de-mystify Wikipedia, and I’ve noticed that a couple participants have continued to make edits on Wikipedia after the event, so I’m happy to have helped create some new Wikipedia editors who will hopefully continue improving pages about Lesbians! I was also asked several times if we’ll be doing this again – both by participants at the event, and by people who weren’t able to attend, so I’ll be thinking about how to improve and expand this series in the future.