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Women in Red

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"WikiProject Women in Red" redirects here. For the Wikipedia project page, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red.

Women in Red
FormationJuly 18, 2015; 10 years ago (2015-07-18)
Founder
Founded atHilton Mexico City Reforma during Wikimania 2016
TypeWikiProject
PurposeElimination of gender bias on Wikipedia
HeadquartersVirtual
MethodsEdit-a-thons
BudgetUS$0
StaffNone
Awards2016, shortlisted, ITU/UN Women's GEM-TECH Award
Websitew.wiki/347

Women in Red is a WikiProject intended to address 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. Since the inception of Ada Lovelace Day, Wikipedia edit-a-thons have been popular activities.[1] Research at these events often discovered notable women in STEM who did not have Wikipedia pages, revealing red links that represented nonexistent articles awaiting creation.

History

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Stephenson-Goodknight and Bamkin (appearing via Skype) announcing the formation of Women in Red during Wikimania 2015 in Mexico City

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]

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]

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.[4][2]

Methods

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Women in Red presentation by Roger Bamkin, Wikimania 2017

Women in Red conducts Wikipedia edit-a-thons in cities around the world, and continuously hosts a virtual one.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7][8][9][6]

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.[10]

As of December 22, 2016, Women in Red volunteer editors added over 45,000 articles, and the percentage of tallied articles increased marginally to 16.8 percent of English-language biographies (from 15 percent in July 2015).[11]

Awards and honours

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  • 2016, shortlisted, ITU/UN Women's GEM-TECH Award (category: Apply Technology for Women's Empowerment and Digital Inclusion)[12]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "UK Women in Science Wikipedia edit-a-thon – Mill Hill, London". Royal Society. Archived from the original on November 3, 2022. Retrieved November 3, 2022.
  2. ^ a b c Redden, Molly (March 19, 2016). "Women in science on Wikipedia: will we ever fill the information gap?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on November 8, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  3. ^ "Female scientist fights harassment with Wikipedia". BBC News. March 14, 2016. Archived from the original on July 11, 2019. Retrieved February 1, 2026.
  4. ^ Erhart, Ed (June 24, 2016). "Jimmy Wales names Emily Temple-Wood and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight as Wikipedians of the Year". Diff. Archived from the original on July 3, 2016. Retrieved January 2, 2026.
  5. ^ "Improving gender balance on Wikipedia". Royal Society of Chemistry. August 18, 2017. Archived from the original on October 12, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  6. ^ a b Gordon, Maggie (November 9, 2017). "Wikipedia editing marathons add women's voices to online resource". Houston Chronicle. Archived from the original on November 9, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  7. ^ Lih, Andrew (June 20, 2015). "Can Wikipedia Survive?". The New York Times. Washington. Archived from the original on June 21, 2015. Retrieved June 21, 2015. ...the considerable and often-noted gender gap among Wikipedia editors; in 2011, less than 15 percent were women.
  8. ^ Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia editor surveys 2011 Archived July 2, 2017, at the Wayback Machine (Nov. 2010 – April 2011) and November 2011 Archived June 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine (April – October 2011)
  9. ^ Hill, Benjamin Mako; Shaw, Aaron; Sánchez, Angel (June 26, 2013). "The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation". PLOS ONE. 8 (6) e65782. Bibcode:2013PLoSO...865782H. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065782. PMC 3694126. PMID 23840366.
  10. ^ Stein, Lucia (December 9, 2016). "Wikipedia edit-a-thon tackles internet gender gap". ABC News (Australia). Archived from the original on March 7, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  11. ^ Kessenides, Dimitra; Chafkin, Max (December 22, 2016). "Is Wikipedia Woke? The ubiquitous reference site tries to expand its editor ranks beyond the Comic Con set". Bloomberg News. Archived from the original on September 23, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  12. ^ "Finalists announced for the 2016 GEM-TECH Awards". UN Women. October 17, 2016. Archived from the original on January 17, 2026. Retrieved December 18, 2025.
[edit]
  • Wikimedia Commons logo Media related to WikiProject Women in Red at Wikimedia Commons
  • BBC – Viewpoint: How I tackle Wiki gender gap one article at a time — By Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight – Wikipedian of the Year 2016 — 7 December 2016
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