The Wikimedia Foundation and the United Nations’ Human Rights Office (OHCHR) are partnering to support the creation of human rights-related content on Wikimedia sites.

We believe that free access to knowledge is a fundamental human right—that anyone, anywhere should have the ability to learn more about the world around them. We are proud to be part of a wider Wikimedia movement that is committed to cultivating a diverse, enduring, and thriving movement of leaders, contributors, advocates, and partners.

This partnership came about because of the work of Wikimedia Argentina, an independent affiliate organization. Their WikiDerechosHumanos project has been expanding Wikimedia’s human rights-related holdings for several years now, and they piloted this new initiative at a Buenos Aires edit-a-thon with volunteer editors and UN officials in July. Wikimedia Argentina will be taking a lead role in promoting and facilitating this wider partnership to take it to a global scale.

Katherine Maher, Wikimedia Foundation. and Laurent Sauveur, UN Human Rights Office.

By partnering with the UN’s Human Rights Office, we hope to empower Wikimedians from around the world to create, improve, and expand content about human rights in all Wikimedia projects, across all of the more than 300 languages Wikipedia is available, and adapted it to local contexts. In doing this, we will be giving people around the world freely accessible tools to learn about their basic human rights and how to uphold them.

The announcement of the partnership was made at the 2019 Wikimania, an annual conference for Wikipedia, the Wikimedia projects, and the hundreds of thousands of people who curate all of them, and was celebrated with the signature of an MOU by Katherine Maher and Laurent Sauveur, Chief of External Relations at the UN’s Human Rights Office. A global campaign will be launched in December.

Jorge Vargas, Senior Manager, Partnerships, Wikimedia Foundation

Anna Torres, Executive Director, Wikimedia Argentina

Luisina Ferrante, Education and Human Rights Manager, Wikimedia Argentina

If you want to be part of this initiative or would like to learn more about this collaboration, please send an email to jvargas@wikimedia.org and de@wikimedia.org.ar, or reach out to Wikimedia Argentina on Twitter at @wikimedia_ar.