Talk:Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff

Inspiring

48toInfinity session at Segal 2026 - schematic of Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff

This article inspired a movement. This article was written by a founding member of Women in Red who worked from 2015 to 2025 to raise the percentage of women on Wikipedia from 15 to 20%. This article was started in June 2025 and it was included in a new initiative called Motokazi.org. Motokazi aimed to clone Women in Red's success in Malawi when it was formed with Dr Catherine Chavula of Strathclyde University. This article was not written in collaboration with Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff, so when she saw it, she was surprised and inspired. She realised that she was one of a minority of women who have a Wikipedia article, and a member of the smaller minority of women from Malawi who had a Wikipedia article. She realised that the 48 articles about Malawian women should be increased; from 48 to 49 and from 49 to 50 and from 50 .... to infinity. The idea of 48 to infinity became #48toInfinity.org.

Meanwhile Motokazi.org was following a parallel path. It had teamed up with the Scotland Malawi Partnership and their twin organisation the Malawi Scotland Partnership to increase the number of Malawian women on Wikipedia. The partner organisation changed their licensing policy to Creative Commons cc-by-sa and this released 100s of images that could be used to inspire new articles. Motokazi's team was joined by David Palfry and he focused his attention on finding Malawian women who lacked an article. As part of a larger project David identified over 500 Malawian women and their basic details were included in Wikidata. Together the team created 150 new articles about Malawi and over 100 of these were women. This made a significant change to the number of Malawian women on Wikipedia, but there was much more to do.

There were multiple reasons for wanting to do create more articles about Malawian women, and the first is just equity. Why should one gender feature more than the other? One reason is the inheritance of a gender biased history. The result today reads as absence when it is actually erasure. The second reason is that the erasure is compounding. Wikipedia is not only the largest educational resource in the world, it is also the basis of other important projects including the growth of AI. Those AI systems learn what exists from what has been recorded. A Malawian woman who is missing from Wikipedia is not merely a gap in one website. The record is a living system, and what has been cleared out of it alters everything that comes afterwards. Search results, citations, curricula and now AI systems all grow out of that thinned ground. The third reason is Malawian girls. Secondary education is from 2026 nominally free, and as phone and broadband coverage spreads,a generation of girls will meet the internet for the first time. Many will search and find that their village isn't there, their school isn't important enough to be included and there are very few successful women who look like them. We can fix that.

In May 2026 the 48toInfinity and the Motokazi teams realised that they were not alone, together they could achieve more ... Victuallers (talk) 16:41, 14 July 2026 (UTC) (and @Nathingani: )