Women in Red is a
WikiProject
A WikiProject, or Wikiproject, is an affinity group for contributors with shared goals within the Wikimedia movement. WikiProjects are prevalent within the largest wiki, Wikipedia, and exist to varying degrees within Wikimedia project, sibling pr ...
intended to address 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 providing direct access to Data (computing), data by a user (computing), user's point and click, clicking or touchscreen, tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to ...
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
Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event held on the second Tuesday of October to celebrate and raise awareness of the contributions of women to STEM fields. It is named after mathematician and computer science pioneer Ada Lovelace. It started in 200 ...
, 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 self-balancing binary search tree data ...
could be created for that person.
History
Women in Red was conceived by volunteer Wikipedia editor Roger Bamkin in 2015, who subsequently joined forces with volunteer editor
Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight
Dame Rosie Gojich Stephenson-Goodknight (born December 5, 1953) is an American Wikipedia editor, known on the site under the pseudonym Rosiestep, who is noted for her actions addressing gender bias on Wikipedia, gender bias in the encyclopedia b ...
.
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 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 Wikimedian, volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source ...
2016, in
Esino Lario
Esino Lario (; Lecchese: ; locally ) is a municipality () 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 around Esino Lario ...
, Italy,
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...
, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, named Stephenson-Goodknight and Temple-Wood the
Wikipedians of the Year
The Wikimedian of the Year is an annual award that honors Wikipedia community, Wikipedia editors and other contributors to Wikimedia projects to highlight major achievements within the Wikimedia movement, established in August 2011 by Wikipedia ...
, for the prior 12 months, for their effort to fill the gender information gap.
Methods
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 known as a " mapathon"), and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typ ...
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 can become narrower and include more content on
notable 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)
See also
*
Art+Feminism
Art and Feminism (stylized as Art+Feminism) is an annual worldwide edit-a-thon to add content to Wikipedia about women artists, which started in 2014. The project has been described as "a massive multinational effort to correct a persistent bias ...
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