Women in Red

Women in Red official logo

Women in Red, initialism WiR, is a gender gap-bridging project on Wikipedia, a volunteer-edited online encyclopedia. Women in Red is a WikiProject within that site, focusing effort to create articles about notable women that do not currently exist there. The potential for such missing articles can be determined by looking for red hyperlinks in existing Wikipedia articles or templates.

History

Women in Red was conceived by volunteer Wikipedia editor Roger Bamkin in 2015, and volunteer editor Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight joined forces soon thereafter. Bamkin had initially coined a name for the project, "Project XX", but that was quickly scuttled in favor of WikiProject Women in Red.[1] After the project was up and running, feminist scientist and volunteer editor Emily Temple-Wood, signed on. Her specialty is adding a new Wikipedia article about a female scientist every time somebody harasses her about her volunteer editing efforts.[1]

Methods

WiR Edit-a-thon at Newnham College in 2017
Button to showcase International Women's Day 2017 WiR edit-a-thons

Women in Red conducts Wikipedia edit-a-thons in cities around the world, and continuously hosts a virtual one.[2] 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.[3] Another goal is to increase the number of female editors. Though Wikipedia is "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", as at 2015 only roughly 10 percent of editors were women.[4][5][6][3] Female-focused biographies number about 17 percent versus other genders. Wikipedia is the fifth most visited web site on the Internet, and the English language Wikipedia contains nearly 5.5 million articles, more than 40 million worldwide on 265 separate language sites, resulting in 16 billion page views per month.[7]

The Women in Red participants help to collate 150 worklists of red linked articles to make it easier to find and create the missing articles.[8] As of December 22, 2016, the Women in Red cadre of volunteer editors has added over 45,000 articles, and increased the percentage of tallied articles to about 17 percent versus other genders.[9]

At Wikimania 2016, in Esino Lario, Italy, Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, named Stephenson-Goodknight and Temple-Woods the Wikipedians of the Year, for the prior 12 months, for their joint effort to fill the gender chasm.[1]

References

  1. 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.
  2. ↑ Chemistry, The Royal Society of (August 18, 2017). "Improving gender balance on Wikipedia". www.rsc.org. Archived from the original on October 12, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  3. 1 2 "Wikipedia editing marathons add women's voices to online resource". Houston Chronicle. Archived from the original on November 9, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  4. ↑ Andrew Lih (June 20, 2015). "Can Wikipedia Survive?". www.nytimes.com. 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.
  5. ↑ Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia editor surveys 2011 (Nov. 2010-April 2011) and November 2011 Archived June 5, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. (April – October 2011)
  6. ↑ 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. Archived from the original on December 14, 2014.
  7. ↑ 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.
  8. ↑ Stein, Lucia (December 9, 2016). "Wikipedia edit-a-thon tackles internet gender gap". ABC News. Archived from the original on March 7, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  9. ↑ 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.com. Archived from the original on September 23, 2017. Retrieved November 25, 2017.
  • BBC – Viewpoint: How I tackle Wiki gender gap one article at a time
  • Women in Red WikiProject page
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