Look Closely. Feminist Editathon by Women Creators

The Museo Reina Sofía has been working in tandem with Fundación Wikimedia España since the middle part of 2022 with the aim of incorporating Wikipedia’s philosophy of shared knowledge into different ways of making and rethinking the museum. Inside this collaborative framework, the Wikipedia publishing workshop Look Closely. Feminist Editathon By Women Creators is held to address the substantial gender gap that exists on the platform in Spanish, both in terms of publishing and the nature of its content, as it looks to contribute to the creation of new entries by women creators. 

The activity gets under way with the presentation of the pioneering project Data Speak, which displays data developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre, in collaboration with the Social Sciences Department from the University of Salamanca, and is centred on granting visibility to data on women artists. The proposal’s starting point is a still of different women artists, art critics, curators, writers and other creators who make up the Library’s catalogue with a view to compiling information on them in other databases and to grant access to the results. To attain these objectives, the project’s work group has drawn from data mining, statistics, artificial intelligence and information from different open sources such as those provided by Biblioteca Nacional de España (Spain’s National Library), Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), Wikidata and Wikipedia.

The presentation will be followed by an encounter with the Cuarto Propio collective in Wikipedia, an open, collaborative and independent group set up in 2015 to reduce the male-centred approach and gender inequality in Wikipedia.