Welcome Kelly, my Community Compadre

In the last few weeks I have been feeling excited as I settle in to working alongside mySociety’s newest member of staff — and my fellow community compadre — Kelly Doyle. As the ‘Wikimedia Community Manager ’, Kelly’s work will largely focus on how mySociety collaborate with Wikimedia communities to strengthen and grow data held in Wikidata on elected Politicians.

Kelly comes with an exciting wealth of experience as a former Wikimedian- in-residence and is — in my opinion — super cool: In the past 3 years, her focus has been on expanding contributions to Wikipedia from people who identify as women and minority groups. This is important work when you consider that nearly 90 percent of Wikipedias volunteer editors are male… and that as a result, there is generally more content about men and male-related topics on Wikipedia. I hadn’t fully considered when thinking about who is documenting the worlds knowledge! Already, Kelly has already introduced me to rad organisations like Whose Knowledge and Art+feminism events and helped me to understand the excitement around the potential that Wikidata has for populating Wikipedias in languages where there are currently fewer contributors — making free knowledge more widely available.

So welcome Kelly, I can’t wait to work alongside you!