Article written by Vanessa Ayotte, Documentation Technician in Research Support – Library Services, École de technologie supérieure.

On March 18, 2026, the very first Wikipedia edit-a-thon at the École de technologie supérieure library took place as part of International Women’s Rights Day and the 2025–2026 Art+Feminism campaign: “What would a truly feminist internet look like?”

The edit-a-thon was preceded by two training sessions held on February 18 and 25 (Wikipedia 101 and 102). These sessions attracted around ten participants, most of whom were beginners when it came to editing Wikipedia.

Over the two and a half hours allocated to the event, the 9 contributors made a total of 35 edits, including the addition of 30 references. As a result, 15 articles about women in science and technology were improved through this collective effort. Over the full monitoring period (March 18–22), this amounts to 21 articles edited, 57 references added, and 57 total edits. We were thus able to meet our initial goal of editing 20 articles as part of the event. The activity allowed us to introduce around ten people to contributing on Wikipedia (16 participants in total across the training sessions, plus 9 at the edit-a-thon) and to raise their awareness of the biases present in and the work still to be done on the online encyclopedia. Participants appeared highly motivated to continue editing on their own following the event.

Although the number of registrations fell below our expectations, holding the event in the space in front of the library’s lending desk gave it great visibility and drew the attention of several curious passersby, who were very enthusiastic about our initiative. This sparked wonderful conversations and considerable interest in a future edition of the event.