On Friday 19 June, Wikimedia Community Ireland brought Wiki Loves Pride to the National Library of Ireland for the first time. Twenty-five people gathered in the Joly Theatre (historians, archivists, first-time and long-time Wikipedia editors, students, activists, and community members) to spend a day working on something that will outlast all of us.
By the time we packed up at four o’clock, the room had created 3 new Wikipedia articles, edited 64 more, made 206 total edits, added 4,260 words to the public record, uploaded 37 files to Wikimedia Commons, and generated 7,450 article views. Many of the people who did that had never edited Wikipedia before that afternoon.
Why this event, why now
Wiki Loves Pride is a global Wikimedia campaign running every June, dedicated to improving how LGBTQ+ history, culture, and community is represented on Wikipedia and its sister projects. In Ireland, that history is extraordinary. It is also, on Wikipedia, still largely missing.
The event, OUT of the Archive + Into the Record, was built around that gap. Working in partnership with the National Library of Ireland and thor LGBT+ collections, we wanted to do something more than a standard edit-a-thon. We wanted to put people in direct contact with the archive materials that Wikipedia articles should be drawing from, and give them the tools to build the bridge themselves.
The morning: opening the archive
The day opened with a welcome from Dr Audrey Whitty, Director of the National Library of Ireland, who spoke about the scale and significance of NLI’s collections, the resources and expertise required to maintain them, and how those collections continue to grow. The NLI is not a static institution. Its commitment to preserving Ireland’s cultural record is ongoing, and the Irish Queer Archive, now housed within its walls, is part of that commitment.
Bisi Alimi, Executive Director of Wikimedia LGBT+, joined us from London to speak about the global Wiki Loves Pride campaign and the Wikimedia LGBT+ project. Bisi spoke about his own experience growing up as a gay young man in Lagos, and the role Wikipedia played in allowing him to see representation of queer Black lives and histories. Knowing he was not alone. That is what representation on Wikipedia makes possible: not just information, but recognition.
Dr Audrey Whitty, Director of the National Library of Ireland, welcomes attendees to OUT of the Archive + Into the Record at the Joly Theatre, NLI, 19 June 2026.
Crónán Ó Doibhlin, Head of Special Collections at the NLI, spoke about the importance of knowledge and access to good quality information, and what it means to see your own history and heritage reflected in the record. For communities that have lived under oppression and suppression, that visibility is not incidental. It is part of how history is contested and reclaimed.
Maebh, from the NLI collections team, walked participants through the LGBT+ collections held at the NLI, where to find them in the digitised collections online, and how to access them through a Reader’s Ticket. For many in the room, this was the first time they had seen the full scope of what the archive holds.
Maebh from the NLI collections team explains how to access the Library’s collections — including the Irish Queer Archive — at OUT of the Archive + Into the Record, 19 June 2026.
Elliot Gallogly, PhD researcher at University of Galway and the person behind alt_irish_historian on TikTok, gave a talk on the state of Irish queer history and the gaps that still exist in how it is recorded and accessed. Elliot’s own research focuses on rural LGBT+ existence in Ireland from 1970 to 2000, and the talk brought that specificity to bear on the broader question of why so much of this history remains absent from the public record.
I spoke about WCI’s own work – our monthly campaigns, our 2024 Aiteachas a Chur ar an Vicipéid writing competition, the annual workshops in Waterford and our Campa Vicipéide in 2025 all organised to improve LGBTQ+ representation on the Irish-language Wikipedia, the growth of our community of editors, and where we want to go next.
The afternoon: the meitheal
Meitheal is an Irish tradition of neighbours working together on a task too large for one person alone. That was the frame for the afternoon.
After a group lunch at Buswell’s Hotel, just across the road from the NLI, participants returned for a hands-on Wikipedia editing workshop, followed by an open community editing session with a live Outreach Dashboard on screen tracking every article, every word, every edit in real time.
The articles created and improved on the day tell their own story.
The community meitheal in full swing — participants editing Wikipedia in the Dr Richard Hayes Room at the National Library of Ireland during OUT of the Archive + Into the Record, 19 June 2026.
One participant created a new article for The Outing Festival – the world’s only LGBT+ matchmaking festival, held annually in County Clare since 2013. It now has a Wikipedia page.
Another expanded the article on the Irish Queer Archive itself, updating it with current information about the collection’s scope; 87 boxes of archival material as of June 2026, and adding new references including a 2026 GCN reflection piece on the archive’s history.
The Gender Recognition Act 2015 article was significantly expanded, with detailed sections on the application process and provisions for minors now properly documented for the first time.
A new article was created for Laura Kay, English queer writer, whose debut novel was longlisted for the Polari Prize and who writes for Diva, The Guardian, and Stylist.
On Vicipéid, the Irish-language Wikipedia, the article for Trasinscneach – transgender in Irish – was significantly expanded, adding 802 words to an article on a language Wikipedia that has fewer than 50 articles on queer topics out of over 60,000+ total.
The work is not always simple, and that’s the point
One of the articles created on the day was for Patrick McCormack, documented as the first recorded Dublin-born transgender man, a labourer who lived in Castleknock and died in 1871. Within days of the article going live, it was nominated for deletion on notability grounds.
In my talk that morning, I had spoken about the sourcing challenge; the reason so much Irish queer history is missing from Wikipedia is not that it didn’t happen, but that the record was never made, or was actively erased. Patrick McCormack’s story illustrates this exactly. He was a working-class man, not a professional whose life would have generated documentary trace like Dr James Barry. He lived during a period when gender nonconformity was criminalised and socially suppressed. The historical record is sparse precisely because of those intersecting factors – class, gender identity, and the systematic erasure of lives that did not conform.
Within days of the article going live, another Wikipedia editor nominated it for deletion on notability grounds. The argument, carefully made, was that the sources – while reliable – are not intellectually independent of each other, tracing back to a single originating podcast and blog post from 2018.
It is a fair point under Wikipedia’s rules. But it is worth sitting with what it means. The reason all sources trace to the same originating research is that the originating research is all there is. The primary records that document Patrick McCormack’s existence are sparse. Not because he wasn’t there. Not because his life didn’t matter. But because he was working-class, gender-nonconforming, living in Ireland during and after An Gorta Mór, in a period when such an identity was criminalised and such a life left few traces. Wikipedia’s own guidance on systemic bias acknowledges precisely this: that “cultures that prominently rely on oral history are less likely to have published materials” and that their content “is more likely to be challenged or removed due to verifiability policy.”
The discussion I also drew attention to a significant gap: the article on Transgender history on English Wikipedia has no section for Ireland at all. This is itself an instance of structural bias, which is why engaging in these discussions in good faith and looking for alternative articles that these topics or figures may be better suited to for their inclusion in the encyclopedia. My response is to build that section, to create the Ireland context within which McCormack, Albert Cashier, James Barry, and others can be documented proportionately and accurately, with the sources that exist.
The standalone article may or may not survive. But the work it sparked will.
This is the work. It is not always straightforward. But it is necessary, and highlights how continued scholarship from researchers like Elliot is vital to address these gaps and produce and find secondary source materials that we, as Wikipedians, can add to the online encyclopedia. This is work that Wikipedia editors are doing globally across 100+ languages, with support from Wikimedia LGBT+.
Bisi Alimi, Executive Director of Wikimedia LGBT+, speaks at OUT of the Archive + Into the Record at the National Library of Ireland, 19 June 2026.
What comes next
Several participants on the day expressed interest in continuing to edit Wikipedia together as part of a regular community, something we have also heard from participants of our workshops in Waterford too. Wikimedia Community Ireland is launching an LGBT+ Wikipedia editing group in August – a dedicated, welcoming space to keep building what we started on Friday. If you would like to join this gorup, sign up by clicking here. Just to be clear, you do not have to be a memeber of the LGBTQIA+ community to do this work and you are also welcome.
Wiki Loves Pride 2026 runs until the end of August. You can upload photographs of LGBTQ+ life, history, and culture to Wikimedia Commons to help illustrate Wikipedia articles and enter the Wiki Loves Pride 2026 Photo Competition, with prizes for winning entries.
Details at commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Pride_2026_in_Ireland
Our thanks to the National Library of Ireland – especially to Dr Audrey Whitty, Dr Crónán Ó Doibhlin, Maria O’Shea, Maebh, Bríd, and Tadhg – for opening their doors, their collections, and their institution to this work. To Bisi Alimi and Wikimedia LGBT+. To Elliot Gallogly. To Dublin Pride for their support. And to every person who came on the day, opened a laptop, and added something to the record.
