Women in Red
Wikipedia collaboration to address gender bias
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Women in Red is a WikiProject which started in 2015 with the aim of addressing the gender bias in Wikipedia content. The project focuses on creating content regarding women's biographies, women's works, and women's issues. The project is named after the hyperlinks in existing Wikipedia articles that display in red to indicate that the linked article has yet to be created.
- Roger Bamkin
- Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight
Logo (with Kamma Rahbek's silhouette) | |
| Formation | July 18, 2015 |
|---|---|
| Founder |
|
| Founded at | Hilton Mexico City Reforma during Wikimania 2016 |
| Type | WikiProject |
| Headquarters | Virtual |
| Methods | Edit-a-thons |
| Staff | None |
| Awards | 2016, shortlisted, ITU/UN Women's GEM-TECH Award |
| Website | w |
Since the inception of Ada Lovelace Day, an annual event held to celebrate and raise awareness of the contributions of women to STEM fields, Wikipedia edit-a-thons have been popular activities.[1] Research at these events often discovers notable women in STEM who did not have Wikipedia pages, revealing red links that represented nonexistent articles awaiting creation.
Background and history
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Women in Red was conceived by volunteer Wikipedia editor Roger Bamkin in 2015, who subsequently joined forces with volunteer editor Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight.[2] Bamkin had initially coined a name for the project, "Project XX", but the name was soon changed to WikiProject Women in Red.[citation needed][original research?] After the project was up and running, volunteer editor Emily Temple-Wood signed on. Her specialty is adding a new Wikipedia article about a female scientist each time somebody harasses her about her volunteer editing efforts.[3][2] Jess Wade has written thousands of articles about women and minorities to address the gender gap in the sciences and engineering on wikipedia.[4][5][6]
The project was influenced by academic studies that presented gender bias within wikipedia.[7] One paper about the issue is entitled "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia" and was published in 2015.[8] One example of the gender gap was that physicist Donna Strickland did not have a biography on wikipedia until she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018.[9][10] Before she won the award, Strickland's page had been rejected by editor who wrote: "This submission's references do not show that the subject qualifies for a Wikipedia article."[11] However, the men with whom she shared the Nobel Prize both had biography articles.[11]
Article deletion
According to some researchers and observers, articles about women are disproportionately nominated for deletion on Wikipedia.[12] Others have noticed articles about women being flagged for deletion on wikipedia.[13] Francesca Tripodi, a sociologist, monitored deletion discussions for years. She noted: "[articles about women] met the criteria for inclusion at a point where they shouldn't have been (on the Articles for Deletion list) to begin with. If there weren't networks like Women in Red devoted to saving these articles, these articles would have been deleted."[12]
Methods
Women in Red conducts Wikipedia edit-a-thons in cities around the world, and continuously hosts a virtual one.[14] The all-day in-person edit-a-thons are focused events conducted to train new contributors so that the Wikipedia gender gap can become narrower and include more content on notable women.[15]
Another goal is to increase the number of female editors. Though Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", as of 2015 about only 10 percent of editors were women.[16][17][18][15]
The Women in Red participants help to collate 150 work lists of red linked articles to make it easier to find and create the missing articles.[19]
Impact
By December 2016, Women in Red volunteer editors had added over 45,000 articles, and the percentage of tallied articles had increased marginally to 16.8 percent of English-language biographies (from 15 percent in July 2015).[20] The project created approximately 175,000 articles in five years.[12]
In addition to the direct impact of the WikiProject, Women in Red has also inspired other initiatives aimed at increasing the representation of women on Wikipedia. For example, this has included stand-alone edit-a-thons[21], annual Women in Red edit-a-thons as part of other WikiProjects[22] and whole new WikiProjects.[23]
Studies
By December 2024 the proportion of biographies for women on English Wikipedia had reached 20% in part due to the Women in Red project.[24] A study suggested that, among biology faculty at top U.S. research universities, women are more likely than men to have biographies on wikipedia.[25][24] In 2018, men biologists were more likely to have a dedicated wikipedia page, and that trend reversed in 2022.[25] This shift could likely be attributed to Women in Red with nearly half of biographies about women biologists written by volunteers affiliated with the project.[25]
Awards and honours
- 2016, shortlisted, ITU/UN Women's GEM-TECH Award (category: Apply Technology for Women's Empowerment and Digital Inclusion)[26]
- At Wikimania 2016, in Esino Lario, Italy, Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, named Stephenson-Goodknight and Temple-Wood the Wikipedians of the Year, for the prior 12 months, for their effort to fill the gender information gap.[27][2]
- At Wikimania 2026, in Paris, France, WiR was voted as the "The Coolest Project" of the last 25 years.[28]
