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Only 17.7 percent of the biographical pages on Wikipedia are women. This group wants to change that.

Megan Moriarty begins every edit-a-thon with a statistic. Only 17.7% of biographical pages on Wikipedia are women. She's working to change that.

BOULDER COUNTY, Colo. — A revolution to revise history takes a powerful group of women with fingers fueled by frustration. 

"I learned a lot in this last year about Wikipedia," said Megan Moriarty, the woman who gathered a group to the second floor of the Museum of Boulder on a recent Saturday morning. 

She created the group, Inclusipedia because of a depressing statistic. 

"Only 17.7 percent of biographical pages are for women, and that’s actually that number has risen in the last few years because of a concerted effort to add women," Moriarty said. 

In the last year, Inclusipedia has created pages for notable local women in Boulder County. 

The research is tedious because only secondary sources are allowed, and women often received less coverage in the first place. 

So far, the group has added women like Clela Rorex, a Boulder County Clerk who issued the nation's first same sex marriage license, and Lucille Buchanan, the first black woman to graduate from CU Boulder. 

“I think like all of the events we do we’re like wait this person did what? How did we not know that?” said Kassondra Cloos, the co-founder of Adventures in Wikipedia, a group that adds women in the outdoor industry to the site. 

The work of adding women to Wikipedia is spreading, and edit-a-thons are becoming more common across the country. 

Megan took her presentation to the CU Boulder College of Music where students were performing music by black female composers. 

“I have never played a clarinet piece by a female," said clarinetist Anoushka Divekar. "So crazy because I’ve been playing for 10 years." 

Never, until her performance on March 9. 

Her piece is by Regina Harris Baiocchi, a woman who is on Wikipedia, but her list of works is short. 

Moriarty helped the CU Music Buffs add their research from the Helen Walker-Hill collection

The students want more people to know about female composers so more people will play their music. 

“I think this is a process of reminding our society that they’re out there and helping make them more accessible," said flutist Indigo Fisher. 

After the students learned how to add to the women's Wikipedia pages, they played pieces from six female composers. 

“I think we have a misconception in our society that there aren’t a lot of women composers," said Fisher. "But that’s totally not true, we totally have them out there,  they just haven’t been performed as much, their voices haven’t been heard.”

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