The 2025 Edition of the Planetary Science Wiki Edit-a-thon

Introduction: The Planetary Science Wiki Edit-a-thon is a science outreach project with the goal to highlight diversity within the international planetary science community. It promotes the creation of Wikipedia articles about women planetary scientists, and other under-represented groups with the final aim to reduce the gender bias in Wikipedia. In collaboration with Wikimedia Belgium, we offered a Wikipedia course between February and March 2025 to teach participants how to create and edit biographies of women scientists. This was followed by a Wiki edit-a-thon, which will conclude during EPSC-DPS2025.

Background:  Wikipedia is an open source, web-based encyclopedia, allowing anonymous and registered users to create, edit and improve articles. A survey in 2018 showed that as many as 90% of Wikipedia's editors were male and as many as 81% of contributors were from the Global North [1]. 

In addition, there are fewer contributions about women, especially in STEM fields, and they are usually less developed [2]. In October 2014, only 15.53% of English Wikipedia's biographies were about women [3]. The WikiProject Women in Red was founded in July 2015 with the objective to address this gender bias in Wikipedia content. They succeeded in increasing the above-mentioned percentage to 19.994% as of 2 December 2024 [2].

Today, Wikipedia is within the 20 most popular websites [4] and every month it attracts more than 1 billion unique visitors [5]. Wikipedia therefore has a huge potential to change publics perception of who is doing science and what a scientist ‘looks’ like.

(Women) planetary scientists on Wikipedia?  In June 2020, there were only 189 planetary scientist biographies on the English Wikipedia, including 48 biographies of female planetary scientists. This percentage is in agreement with the percentage of women in the International Astronomical Union from all ESA’s Member States (24%) [6], but planetary scientists are clearly underrepresented on Wikipedia. Many of them either do not have a Wikipedia biography yet, or if they do, they are often misclassified under the category of “astronomers” or “astrophysicists”.

A Planetary Science Wiki Edit-a-thon: This gap inspired the Diversity Committee of the Europlanet Society to organise in collaboration with Women in Red, WikiDonne, WikiMujeres and Wikimedia Belgium, the first Planetary Science Wiki Edit-a-thon during the Congress 2020, held completely by volunteers. After our first edition, we still organised regular meetings as volunteers, but we missed a professional training. The Fond E. Solvay is giving us the possibility to bring our project to the next level by hiring a Wikipedia Trainer.

The 2025 Edition of the Planetary Science Wiki Edit-a-thon: in collaboration with Wikimedia Belgium, we offered a hybrid Wikipedia training course designed to teach participants how to create and edit biographies. The sessions were held online in February and March 2025, with follow-up collaborative meetings from April to July to support continued engagement. Participants of all experience levels were guided through identifying notable scientists, collecting reliable sources, writing and translating articles, and contributing to the global accessibility of planetary science history. These regular sessions created a supportive environment for knowledge sharing, and motivation.

The project will culminate during EPSC-DPS 2025 in Helsinki, showcasing the biographies created and the broader impact of the initiative. By empowering scientists and science enthusiasts to actively shape content on Wikipedia, this project works toward reducing gender bias and promoting a more inclusive representation of the planetary science community — one article at a time.

Acknowledgements: Project carried out with the support of the Ernest Solvay Fund, managed by the King Baudouin Foundation (Grant agreement 2024-F1120700-0022766).

References:

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Insights/2018_Report

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red  

[3] Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Mounia Lalmas, Filippo Menczer, "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia", arXiv, 9 February 2015, p. 3.

[4] "Wikipedia.org Traffic, Demographics and Competitors". www.alexa.com. Retrieved October 1, 2019.

[5] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects

[6] Piccialli A., et al., Participation of women scientists in ESA Solar System missions: a historical trend, Adv. Geosci., 53, 169–182, https://doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-53-169-2020, 2020.

[7] https://www.europlanet-society.org/epsc-2020-planetary-science-wiki-edit-a-thon/