The #VisibleWikiWomen Feminist Data Soiree, held on August 5, 2025, in Nairobi, Kenya, brought together twenty-five diverse and intergenerational participants from across the Global Majority with representation from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. These included feminist activists, community organizers, tech-builders, researchers, and Wikimedians.
We’re excited to make available online the Data Soiree Report—a comprehensive summary of our event, which captures insightful discussions, key takeaways, and inspiring ideas shared by our wonderful participants.
Ready to dive in? Access the report using the link below:
Feel free to share it with friends, colleagues, or anyone else who might find it valuable.
Why and how we held a Feminist Data Soiree in Nairobi
The Feminist Data Soiree was conceived as a joyful, relational, and hands-on gathering aimed at challenging and reimagining structured data practices through a feminist and decolonial lens. Participants at the Soiree were invited to engage deeply with this reality and co-create data narratives rooted in community care, consent, justice, and epistemic diversity. In this context, feminist data practices mean not just adding missing information but also interrogating how and why certain knowledges are excluded or devalued.
As part of grounding ourselves in the context, we invited Lena Grace Anyuolo, a Kenyan poet, activist, and context strategist, to lead a powerful reflection on Nairobi as both a site of innovation and a locus of digital labor exploitation. While Nairobi is globally marketed as «Silicon Savannah» – Africa’s thriving tech hub akin to San Francisco’s Silicon Valley, Lena unpacked how this image masks the exploitative conditions of digital labor for many Kenyan workers. She concluded with provocative feminist questions that shaped the conversations that followed: How do we hold Big Tech accountable? Can we disentangle ourselves from exploitative tech systems while using their tools? What would it mean to build feminist, sovereign technologies from the Global Majority?
Facilitated by co-leads Sunshine Komusana and Mariana Fossatti, session 1 focused on the power and politics of structured data within Wikimedia platforms. The facilitators encouraged participants to interrogate the systems of validation and representation within Wikimedia.
Following this moment, a panel discussion featuring feminist Wikimedians from Uganda, Tanzania, and Botswana took place. Sandra Aceng from Uganda emphasized that Wikipedia is a feminist tool and invited newcomers to the movement. Pellagia Njau from Tanzania described how women initially felt alienated from editing Wikimedia projects, but through mentorship, many now contribute confidently. Candy Khohliwe from Botswana focused on the importance of preserving native languages on Wikimedia. She noted, “Sustaining our native languages is not just about content; it’s about preserving who we are as a people.”
The group transitioned to session 2 where theory was moved to action. Participants engaged in structured data editing using #VisibleWikiWomen image collections. Three main activities were facilitated:
- Participants created new Wikidata items for individuals not previously documented.
- Participants enriched existing images from the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign on Wikimedia Commons.
- Participants translated data fields into their native languages.
The final session provided space to reflect on challenges, questions, radical imaginations and emerging themes. The event called for a continued commitment to:
- Resist knowledge gatekeeping by challenging exclusionary citation standards and notability criteria.
- Uphold contextual consent, relational accountability, and safety in all data practices.
- Foster multilingual and locally grounded data work that affirms epistemic diversity.
- Build collaborative frameworks with journalists, technologists, and community archivists.
- Rethink data methodologies through feminist and decolonial lenses.
Learn more about what structured data is, and why does it matter
Structured data, which is designed to be machine-readable and is used widely in online platforms, from Wikidata to Google, often encodes the biases and inequities of those who create it. It reflects dominant epistemologies that are frequently Eurocentric, patriarchal, and extractive.
We are concerned about how massive processes of colonial-capitalist datafication are reinforcing structures of power and privilege. While data is at the core of how the internet (and Wikimedia projects) work, we must to acknowledge that skewed structured data contributes to inaccurate and even oppressive image representation of women and LGBTǪIAP+ people. To understand this problem, you can explore these resources:
Wikidata: why we contribute to the robot epistemology by Maari Maitreyi | Blog post
Whose Voices? Decolonizing Structured Data | Podcast season (5 episodes)
Structured data and online (in)visibility: a continued work
This isn’t our first event on this topic. We have been discussing and engaging in activities related to structured data since 2021. You can read our previous reports, which are sweet, short, and multimodal.
Decolonizing the Internet’s Structured Data – Summary Report
Deep diving into Decolonizing Structured Data – Summary report
The #VisibleWikiWomen campaign, spanning its eight editions, has featured thousands of women’s images on Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia library of Wikipedia. This huge archival body will be our playground for the Data Soiree. We will edit descriptions, labels, categories, and data items related to it, to make these openly available images more visible, accessible, and discoverable.
To understand what #VisibleWikiWomen is about, you can check:
#VisibleWikiWomen campaign kit
We reiterate our invitation to download our new report, which will be especially interesting for the feminist data community, offering valuable insights and fostering further conversations and upcoming activities. If you have comments and ideas, please reach out to visiblewikiwomen[at]whoseknowledge.org
DownloadReport Structured Data, VisibleWikiWomen Campaign, Wikipedia