Hi Women Do News community,
We can’t believe it’s already May! One of our goals for 2026 is to be more consistent about sharing updates from our Women Do News community. I’m Ada Tseng, a board member working on community engagement for WDN, and I’ll be bringing you this newsletter.
New leadership!
At the start of 2025, we welcomed a new board chair, Emily J. Gertz. Many of you know Emily as part of the powerhouse reporting team at DeSmog and from her past two decades of environmental reporting. She is a founding member of Women Do News, and helped lead our first edit-a-thon in 2020.
Here’s a photo of Emily, on the left, leading a conversation about “Reliable Sources” — trust in digital spaces, particularly the world of Wikipedia citations — during Wikimedia NYC’s Wikipedia Day celebration in 2025. , a The featured guests were tech journalist and author Stephen Harrison (center), whose novel The Editors is based on his reporting about Wikipedia, and Clay Shirkey (right), the influential thinker and writer on emerging technologies and internet culture, economics, collaboration and networks. They’re being introduced by current Wikimedia NYC and former Women Do News board member Molly Stark Dean (far right).
After leading Women Do News for its first five years, our founding board chair, Angilee Shah, continues on as a board member, focusing on edit-a-thons and assignments. She looks forward to having more time to work on biographies
We’ll be sharing more Q&As about our board members in our upcoming newsletters, so you can get to know us better – starting with Emily!
What inspired you to become a journalist?
My belief in truth and justice was overdeveloped from an early age. I’ve also been a lifelong politics nerd. After attempting a career in environmental activism, environmental journalism turned out to be a better fit.
Who was a woman journalist you admired early in your career?
Around the time my journalism career began, The New Yorker published Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series on climate change, which eventually became her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe. The depth and scope of her reporting, combined with her great writing, gave me a lot to look and live up to.
For the past six years I’ve worked primarily as an editor with publications including DeSmog.com, the climate investigations site, so now I know enough to admire Kolbert’s editor on that series as well.
Can you tell us about a meaningful Women Do News Wikipedia entry you worked on?
One that’s made a big impression is Mary Perot Nichols, which I worked on last year. Nichols was a longtime staffer at The Village Voice and a key figure in the history of WNYC, the public radio station, but I’d never heard of her until was nominated to the Wikimedia NYC 400 list of significant New York City people, places and events to add to Wikipedia.
Why is Women Do News important to you?
Building the visibility of women journalists on Wikipedia helps set the record straight on how much we’ve contributed to the news industry. I hope finding these bios inspires other girls and women to be journalists, and spurs more opportunities for us.
It feels good to be helping right Wikimedia’s extreme gender imbalance: It’s hands-on feminism! And I love collaborating with our team.
New on Wikipedia: Diana Fuentes
Diana R. “DeeDee” Fuentes (September 27, 1958 – March 20, 2026) was an American journalist, editor, and press freedom advocate with more than 35 years of experience in journalism, reporting on stories across Mexico and the United States.[1] In 2021, she became the first person of color to serve as executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE), a nonprofit organization dedicated to training journalists in investigative techniques.[2]
Take an assignment
The WDN nominations list is up to 488 names. Take an assignment big or small — from finding images and improving citations on existing pages, to creating new biographies —and share what you’re working on at the WDN WikiProject talk page.
83
The number of biographies we’ve added
243
The number of articles we’ve improved
488
The number of nominees who need articles
Upcoming events
WikiConference North America proposal deadline extended
There is still time to squeak in a proposal for a session at WikiConference North […]
AI-Bridges Symposium offers wikidata training
The AI-Bridges Symposium, taking place in London on May 28-29, 2026, is convening in response […]
Tell us about your event
Send your event listing to womendonews@gmail.com and we’ll do our best to include it in future newsletters.