page_title: Sue Gardner
section_title: Wikimedia
hierarchical_section_title: Sue Gardner / Career / Wikimedia
caption_attribution_description: English: Sue Gardner during her presentation at Wikimania 2013. Hong Kong, August 11th, 2013.
context_page_description: Sue Gardner is a Canadian journalist, not-for-profit executive and business executive. She was the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation from December 2007 until May 2014, and before that was the director of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's website and online news outlets.
  In 2012, she was ranked as the 70th-most powerful woman in the world by Forbes magazine. In 2013, she joined the board of Global Voices. In May 2015, the Tor Project announced that Gardner would be assisting the project with the development of their long-term organizational strategy. In 2018, she was announced as executive director of The Markup. Gardner left this position in May 2019.
context_section_description: In May 2007, Gardner resigned from CBC, and shortly thereafter began consulting for the Wikimedia Foundation as a special advisor on operations and governance. In December 2007, she was hired as the foundation's executive director. Over the next two years, she oversaw growth of the staff including the addition of a fundraising team, and a move of the headquarters from St. Petersburg, Florida, to San Francisco, California.
  In October 2009, Gardner was named by The Huffington Post as one of ten "media game changers of the year" for the impact on new media of her work for Wikimedia.
  One of the issues that Gardner addressed while she was a Wikimedia Foundation executive director was gender bias on Wikipedia. She listed nine reasons why women don't edit Wikipedia, culled from comments by female Wikipedia editors:
  A lack of user-friendliness in the editing interface
  Not having enough free time
  A lack of self-confidence
  Aversion to conflict and an unwillingness to participate in lengthy edit wars
  Belief that their contributions are too likely to be reverted or deleted
  Some find its overall atmosphere misogynistic
  Wikipedia culture is sexual in ways they find off-putting
  Being addressed as male is off-putting to women whose primary language has grammatical gender
  Fewer opportunities than other sites for social relationships and a welcoming tone
  On March 27, 2013, Gardner announced she would be leaving her position at the Wikimedia Foundation. She stated that the Wikimedia Foundation is doing well now but that the Internet is not, and that she planned to help in that area going forward. Gardner identified the "turning point" for her decision to move on as her involvement in the 2012 Wikipedia blackout protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, protests that "started me thinking about the shape the Internet was taking and what role I could play in that."
  In 2013, Gardner received an honorary doctorate from Ryerson University, her alma mater.
  It was announced on May 1, 2014 that Lila Tretikov would be replacing Gardner, and would take over as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation on June 1, 2014.
caption: Gardner in 2013 at Wikimania
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