Read the New Wikipedia Articles on Women With “women in Red”
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of everything, is mostly about men. According to Wikipedia’s internal project Women in Red , less than 18 percent of the site’s 1.5 million biography pages are devoted to women. And that figure actually represents an improvement: at the end of 2014, that figure was 15 percent. Much of this progress is due to the Women in Red organization itself, which was founded in 2015 to increase and improve the site’s reach of women.
Of course, most of the written history concerns men, as most of the people in recorded history have lived in a patriarchal society. So there is more source material about them. But that doesn’t fully explain the bias on Wikipedia. According to the New Statesman , the major articles do not mention famous women. The History of Chemistry, for example, names 200 men and four women, ignoring such important figures as Nobel Metabolic Laureate Gertie Corey and CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna, who, according to her own Wikipedia page, “made fundamental contributions to biochemistry and science. genetics “. It’s not that there are no more women worthy of attention; the point is that they are ignored.
The Women in Red (named after the red text denoting a link to a nonexistent Wikipedia entry) is struggling with this. The project brings together people working on Wikipedia articles about women. When a Wikipedia contributor creates or significantly improves a post, he can add it to the project list. The January list includes 182 entries, most of which are new, about women of the present and past. Most are still short. But if you look at the history of their pages, you will see something encouraging.
Once someone creates at least a stub of a post, it is often possible to see someone come in and add additional content, or fit the post into existing Wikipedia categories, or clear up some formatting. These new entries are not simply discarded and ignored; they are part of an ecosystem where Wikipedia editors can improve them. Which is important, since the vast majority – up to 90 percent – of Wikipedia editors are men .
Women in Red encourages editors to post their contributions by flagging on the project page if they have shared a new contribution on social media. The project home page lists articles nominated for special features, such as the Wikipedia “Did You Know” section, as well as articles nominated for deletion. In this way, project participants can protect, promote and improve each other in order to secure a real and permanent place on the site.
As a reader, you can bookmark “Women in Red” to find interesting new entries. You will notice what amazing omissions the world’s largest encyclopedia made until recently. And when you’re ready, you can add your input. The Woman in Red has a categorized list of thousands of women who do not yet have a Wikipedia entry, despite being mentioned elsewhere on the site.
Women in red | Wikipedia (via Meanwhile … )