Women in Red is a

WikiProject A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is a Wikimedia movement affinity group for contributors with shared goals. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within sister projects such as Wiktionary, Wikiqu ...

addressing the current 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

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wit ...

s 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. Research at these events often discovered notable women in STEM who did not have Wikipedia pages, therefore a

Red link Red link may refer to: * Red Link Communications, an ISP in Myanmar * Red Sex Link, a cross-breed of chicken * A link to a red node in the red–black tree In computer science, a red–black tree is a kind of self-balancing binary search tre ...

could be created for that person.

History

Women in Red was conceived by volunteer Wikipedia editor Roger Bamkin in 2015, and volunteer editor

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight Dame Rosie Gojich Stephenson-Goodknight (born December 5, 1953), known on Wikipedia as Rosiestep, is an American Wikipedia editor who is noted for her attempts to address gender bias in the encyclopedia by running a project to increase the quant ...

joined forces soon thereafter. Bamkin had initially coined a name for the project, "Project XX", but that was quickly scrapped in favor of ''WikiProject Women in Red''. After the project was up and running, volunteer editor

Emily Temple-Wood Emily Temple-Wood (born May 24, 1994) is an American Wikipedia editor who goes by the name of Keilana on the site. She is known for her efforts to counter the effects and causes of gender bias on Wikipedia, particularly through the creation of ...

signed on. Her specialty is adding a new Wikipedia article about a female scientist each time somebody harasses her about her volunteer editing efforts. At

Wikimania Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source software, f ...

2016, in

Esino Lario Esino Lario (; Lecchese: ; locally ) is a municipality (''comune'') of the Province of Lecco in the Italian region of Lombardy. It is about north of Milan, northwest of Lecco, and about from the eastern shore of Lake Como. The area aroun ...

, Italy,

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedi ...

, 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 chasm.

Methods

Roger Bamkin y Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight en Wikimania 2015 09

Women in Red conducts Wikipedia

edit-a-thon An edit-a-thon (sometimes written editathon) is an event where some editors of online communities such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap (also as a "mapathon"), and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typically ...

s in cities around the world, and continuously hosts a virtual one. The all-day in-person edit-a-thons are focused events conducted to train new contributors so that the

Wikipedia gender gap Gender bias on Wikipedia, also known as the Wikipedia gender gap, refers to the fact that Wikipedia contributors are mostly male, that relatively few biographies on Wikipedia are about women, and that topics of interest to women are less well-cov ...

can become narrower and include more content on

notable Notability is the property of being worthy of notice, having fame, or being considered to be of a high degree of interest, significance, or distinction. It also refers to the capacity to be such. Persons who are notable due to public responsibi ...

women. 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.Statistics based on Wikimedia Foundation Wikipedia editor survey
2011
(Nov. 2010-April 2011) an
November 2011
(April – October 2011) 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. , 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).

Awards and honours

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

References

External links

*
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'' {{authority control Internet properties established in 2015 Wiki communities Wikipedia Women's empowerment Women's history Women's studies

History

Methods

Awards and honours

See also

References

External links