Help Close the Discoverability Gap: Join the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon for Women in Science

On February 11, 2026—the International Day of Women and Girls in Science—the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum’s Discoverability Lab and Lost Women of Science are hosting a virtual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Addressing the Discoverability Gap for Women in Science . This free, online event invites participants of all experience levels to help make women scientists more visible online by editing and improving their Wikipedia pages.

Wikipedia is one of the most widely used reference platforms in the world. Yet women scientists remain significantly underrepresented, not only in terms of who has a page, but also in the quality and visibility of those entries. In advance of the event, Lily Whear and Ann Sacher from Lost Women of Science answered some questions for us about how the project came together, what participants can expect on the day, and why Wikipedia has become such an important tool in the broader work of surfacing overlooked contributions to science.

Trevor Owens: To begin, could you tell us a bit about the edit-a-thon and how it fits into Lost Women of Science’s broader work?

Lily Whear: At Lost Women of Science, our mission is to encourage women and girls to pursue careers in STEM and to highlight the incredible, but often forgotten work of female scientists. Thanks to a very generous grant from Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, our Wikipedia Project was born. With this edit-a-thon, our focus is to bring more of our women to the forefront on one of the internet’s biggest information platforms, Wikipedia.

TO: The upcoming edit-a-thon focuses on addressing the “discoverability gap” for women in science. How do you define that gap, and why is Wikipedia such an important place to engage with it?

Ann Sacher: The edit-a-thon is part of our collaboration with the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum and their Discoverability Lab. Twenty percent of Wikipedia’s entries for people are women. That’s one woman for every four men covered on Wikipedia. So, on the platform that is such an important tool for getting information, women are grossly underrepresented and therefore much less discoverable.

TO: For someone who’s curious but never participated in an edit-a-thon before, what would you say to encourage them to give it a try?

LW: One of the things we considered very carefully going into the event planning, was making sure that the edit-a-thon would be accessible to participants of all experiences and abilities — one of the core ethoses of Lost Women of Science. To that end, we would encourage seasoned Wikipedia editors to completely rewrite existing pages; for those newer to the process, we will help guide them through everything from adding sources to linking, to other related pages, to writing actual page sections. Whatever your interest, there is something for everyone.

TO: You and your team have surfaced remarkable stories of women scientists through the Lost Women of Science podcast . For the edit-a-thon, how do you decide which stories to focus on, and are there any you’re especially excited to see come to life on Wikipedia?

AS: Given this is the first event of hopefully many, we chose just thirty women previously highlighted in other ways by Lost Women of Science, all with rich and fascinating histories for a range of participants. For the physics fans, we’ll be focusing on a lost woman of the Manhattan Project, Carolyn Parker, along with Maria Telkes (focused on uses for solar energy), Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (helped develop radioimmunoassays) and Caroline Herzenberg (studied applications of physics in engineering).

TO: The event schedule balances an introduction to Lost Women of Science, a Wikipedia editing workshop, and a live editing session. How are you designing the experience to be welcoming for first-time editors while also generating meaningful edits?

LW: The modus operandi of Lost Women of Science is to make discovering women in science exciting and accessible for all levels - participants will be carefully guided through all stages of the event and will hear from Wikipedia rockstars such as Jess Wade and Lost Women of Science and AIP’s own Katie Hafner .

TO: You’re collaborating with Wikimedia DC, the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, and a number of researchers and archivists. What does this kind of cross-institutional partnership make possible that might not happen otherwise?

AS: Interestingly, we got connected with the Smithsonian via Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the incredibly successful book and screen adaptation, Hidden Figures. The event is completely remote, which has been instrumental in the cross-collaborative process — it’s a fantastic opportunity for us to all learn from each other. Though we share a mission, our perspectives are unique — by working together, we are cross-fertilizing our expertise both inter-institutionally and internationally.

TO: As a storyteller and editor, how do you think archival sources, like letters, photographs, and oral histories, can help deepen or complicate how we write about scientists on Wikipedia?

LW: The more empiric evidence we have, the fuller and more powerful a story and individual we are able to reconstruct. A great example of this would be Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the English Lit major who cracked Nazi codes. The headline itself was impressive enough, but we really embedded ourselves in her story and found how a woman with no scientific background became one of the US military’s most important cryptographers. (Being a new mother with serious work for the U.S. military, her story became even more exciting.)

TO: Do you see this as a one-time event or part of a larger initiative? What’s next for your efforts to bring more visibility to women in science?

AS: We are incredibly excited to be collaborating with the Smithsonian and hope this partnership will lead to many new projects in the years ahead. We’re starting off 2026 strong with Layers of Brilliance , a five-part season that brings to life the story of Katharine Burr Blodgett whose discoveries in materials science quietly shape our everyday world.

We are currently developing The Lost Women of Science book series for middle grade readers, published by the Bright Matter imprint of Penguin Random House. We are also working on a new play, Fission, commissioned in partnership with a renowned playwright and a major regional theater company, based on our podcast season featuring atomic physicist Lise Meitner.

In 2025, we published bilingual episodes, making many of our stories available in both English and Spanish to reach a broader audience. Building on this momentum, we are exploring the creation of a Lost Women of Science Resource Center, in partnership with an institution of higher education, to house and make freely accessible the materials and archives uncovered through our research.