On a cold January afternoon, nine musical theatre bookwriters, two Wikimedia trainers and 15 doughnuts gathered at MMD’s offices with one aim: to make women and non-binary musical theatre creatives more visible online.
Across 4 intensive hours of listening, learning and doing, we discovered that “Wiki” means “quick” in Hawaiian, and – despite efforts from volunteer editors – only one in five English Wikipedia articles are about women. (Welsh Wikipedia has achieved more than 50% – Cymru am byth!)
Our group of “newbie” editors added:
- 132 edits to 48 articles.
- 8 brand-new biographies for writers including Lauryn Redding and Chinonyerem Odimba.
- 6,000 words and 70 solid references.
- And our changes were viewed 59,000 times the following week.
We also learnt a stark truth: if our sector isn’t properly represented on Wikipedia, it’s not just Wikipedia users who get a distorted view. Other websites and search engines, plus AI platforms like ChatGPT, draw their information from the online encyclopedia too.
Which brings me to our biggest hurdle of the day: finding decent references online. We couldn’t create new pages without high quality, independent sources to cite, but journalists often overlook the very creatives we were trying to highlight, while academic papers are stuck behind paywalls that make them almost invisible. Unlike our usual bookwriting assignments, Wikipedia won’t let us create something out of nothing…
So we have a call to action:
We need more high-quality journalistic or academic coverage of under-represented musical theatre creatives, and it needs to be easily accessible online.
If you can help make this happen, please get in touch!
As writers, we live from deadline to deadline, and I confess to being disappointed that we only created 8 biographies instead of the 94 we had planned. But editing Wikipedia forced us all to learn a new mantra: There is no deadline. We can make things better, one citation at a time.
For a longer version of this blog, head over here:
Want to join a future Musical Theatre Wikipedia Edit-a-thon? Or organise one wherever you are in the world? Email me at hello@helenarney.com to start a conversation!
Huge thanks to the other musical theatre creatives who co-organised the event: Meg McGrady, Kate Marlais and Sarah Middleton, our Wikimedia trainers Kelly Foster and Liam Wyatt, and our five brave first-time editors Rosa, Emily Rose, Ellen, Rachel and Nikki. We’re extremely grateful to Mercury Musical Developments for loaning us their office to create The Room Where It Happened!
All photos by Lexi Clare, with kind permission and our thanks.