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Women in Red

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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 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.

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 discovered 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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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] 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

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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

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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.[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

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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

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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

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  • 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]

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. 1 2 3 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. ↑ Page, Sydney (October 17, 2022). "She's made 1,750 Wikipedia bios for female scientists who haven't gotten their due". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved July 4, 2026.
  5. ↑ Salam, Maya (July 19, 2019). "Most Wikipedia Profiles Are of Men. This Scientist Is Changing That". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved July 4, 2026.
  6. ↑ Mohamed, Muna. "Researcher writes 270 Wikipedia pages in a year for underrepresented female scientists". ABC News. Retrieved July 4, 2026.
  7. ↑ Editorial (March 8, 2024). "The Guardian view on Wikipedia's female volunteers: a hive heroism that changes history". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved July 4, 2026.
  8. ↑ Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Lalmas, Mounia; Menczer, Filippo (August 24, 2015). "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media. HT '15. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 165–174. doi:10.1145/2700171.2791036. ISBN 978-1-4503-3395-5.
  9. ↑ Joo, Ian (October 9, 2024). "Exploring (and building) the depths of Wikipedia". The Michigan Daily. Retrieved July 4, 2026.
  10. ↑ "Social Scientists Can't Ignore the Power of Wikipedia—or Its Systemic Biases - LSE Impact". LSE Impact - Understanding impact and practice in academic research. April 6, 2023. Retrieved July 5, 2026.
  11. 1 2 Cecco, Leyland (October 3, 2018). "Female Nobel prize winner deemed not important enough for Wikipedia entry". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved July 4, 2026.
  12. 1 2 3 Odach, Laurel (March 8, 2022). "What's with Wikipedia and women?". www.asbmb.org. Retrieved July 4, 2026.
  13. ↑ Krämer, Katrina. "Female scientists' pages keep disappearing from Wikipedia – what's going on?". Chemistry World. Retrieved July 5, 2026.
  14. ↑ "Improving gender balance on Wikipedia". Royal Society of Chemistry. August 18, 2017. Archived from the original on October 12, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  15. 1 2 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.
  16. ↑ 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.
  17. ↑ 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)
  18. ↑ 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.
  19. ↑ 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.
  20. ↑ 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.
  21. ↑ John-Leighton, Mariah; Pearson, Hannah (April 6, 2023). "Social Scientists Can't Ignore the Power of Wikipedia—or Its Systemic Biases". Retrieved June 7, 2026.
  22. ↑ Darafsh (June 10, 2025). ""Woman, Life, Freedom"—and Knowledge: Documenting Women on Persian Wikipedia". wikimedia. Retrieved June 7, 2026.
  23. ↑ Shah, Angilee (March 2, 2021). "Most women journalists in history haven't been 'notable' enough for Wikipedia. We're changing that". Poynter. Retrieved June 7, 2026.
  24. 1 2 Alvarez-Ponce, David; Iyengar, Niveda (May 27, 2026). "Monitoring the gender gap in the coverage of biology professors on Wikipedia". Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 293 (2071): 20252566. doi:10.1098/rspb.2025.2566. ISSN 0962-8452.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: article number as page number (link)
  25. 1 2 3 Thaler, Perri (May 26, 2026). "Wikipedia's gender gap has flipped for one group of scientists". www.science.org. Retrieved July 4, 2026.
  26. ↑ "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.
  27. ↑ 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.
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