Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red - Wikipedia (original) (raw)

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Community focused on overcoming systemic gender bias

Welcome to Women in Red!

Reaching a milestone of 20% in December 2024, Women in Red changes notable women's representation on Wikipedia from red-linked obscurity to an encyclopedic presence.
Find us ...
Here: WP:WOMREDWP:WPWIRWP:WIRED
or at https://w.wiki/347

Welcome to Women in Red (WiR)! We are a group of volunteer (unpaid) editors of all genders who live around the world and belong to many different language and cultural communities. While our project extends over many language versions of Wikipedia, this page is principally devoted to our efforts on the English-language Wikipedia.

We focus on reducing systemic bias regarding gender representation (content gender gap) in the Wikipedia movement. Our goal is to "move the needle" in terms of statistical representation of women and other gender minorities on Wikipedia. We recognized a need for this work in 2014 when we learned that, as of October 2014, only 15.53% of English Wikipedia's biographies were about women.[1] Without a particular percentage in mind, we recognized that with persistence, we could increase it, one article at a time. With only this in mind, Women in Red was established in July 2015, at Wikimania Mexico City, by Roger Bamkin and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight.

Women in Red is a very large, on-wiki-based community thanks to you, the editors who participate in our work. Did you know that it is also the most active topic-based WikiProject by human changes? Join us!

20% milestone reached in mid-December 2024

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See communication at 20% milestone

According to Humaniki, the percentage of women's biographies on the English Wikipedia is now over 20%: specifically reaching 20.003% by 16 December 2024. Using QLever, as of 4 April 2026, it had risen further to 20.34%. That means that of 2,123,558 biographies, only 431,910 are about women.[2] Not impressed? "Content gender gap" is a form of systemic bias, and WiR addresses it in a positive way through shared values.

Can we increase the percentage still further? Yes! But we need you in order to do so. How? There are more than 34,000 general forum comments from over 1,200 different editors on our talkpage.[3] Ask there. You don't have to be a member in order to participate in the conversations; just please be civil.

Do the articles have to be perfect when they are created? No. But establishing them according to Wikipedia's policies is the first step, and that's the focus of Women in Red: new article creation. Over time, other editors will improve these articles; maybe that's you.

Our Wikipedia WikiProject focuses on creating content regarding women's biographies, women's works, and women's issues. Our editors create articles in many different language Wikipedias. The objective is to turn "redlinks" (like this one) into blue ones. That's why we are called "Women in Red".

We take an inclusive view towards subject matter, editors, and language communities:

"Sue"

Every year, our members upload thousands of images to Wikimedia Commons: photographs of women, their signatures, their works, etc. In turn, these images can be added to Wikipedia articles. This is another way people can be involved in improving women's representation on Wikipedia. Over 10,000 new images were added in 2022.

We create and improve Wikidata items related to women, women's works, and women's issues.

Please post recent announcements directly on this page for improved page editing history, watcher alerts and greater visibility

Add new announcements to the top. Sign with ~~~~. Remove old ones after a couple of months.

For a complete list of events, visit Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Events.

WiR works by filling in missing articles based on extensive lists of needed topics. The index to our wide range of topics and nationalities can be found at the Redlist index. Please make these red links blue. Notable women without a Wikipedia biography can be added to any crowd-sourced redlists they match; and added to wikidata such that they're included in wikidata-derived redlists. We also have a guide to adding names to redlists, and to creating new redlists.

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Women for articles about women that are nominated for deletion.

This section is a transcluded subpage, and may contain more information than is shown here. To view or edit, go to /Article alerts (watch this section).

Note: This report is based on the {{WIR}} banners of WikiProject Women in Red. If an article isn't listed here, first verify that it has one of those banners. If it has another women-related banner, like {{WikiProject Women}}, {{WikiProject Women's History}} or {{WikiProject Women scientists}}, look on those projects' article alert pages instead.

Did you know

(5 more...)

Articles for deletion

(67 more...)

Proposed deletions

Files for discussion

Good article nominees

(13 more...)

Peer reviews

Requested moves

Articles for creation

(16 more...)

Thanks firstly to Ronhjones, and now to Galobtter, we have a bot showing declined drafts submitted to AfC. Weekly updates highlight those most recently listed under New Additions. With a little bit of attention, some of them could well be moved to mainspace, encouraging the editors who created them to progress on Wikipedia.

WiR maintains resources to help you contribute, including lists of topical books and external links, information on editing in general, and contacts you can reach out to for specific needs. They can be found at Resources.

Academic research on Wikipedia's content gender gap is also documented at Research.

This section is a transcluded subpage, containing more information than is shown here. To view detailed month-by-month results or to edit, go to Metrics.

The articles created for any month, including the current month, can be displayed by clicking on one of the months in the archive box.

We track the articles we create each month. Reports bot updates these lists automatically, but you can manually add and annotate entries. The bot will remove non-existent pages. More details about the bot. Our metrics talkpage is here: Metrics talkpage

The evolving list for this month (see Archives box) is created by the bot which lists new women's biographies on the basis of their female gender on Wikidata. At present, the bot does not list women's works, associations or related articles but you are encouraged to add these to the list manually.

The graph shows the number of articles created each month. The apparent decrease for the current month reflects the number of articles created up to today's date. Only data on completed months indicate overall progress.

For personal metrics on how many articles you've created about women, see this tool.

A WiR Wikidata page provides information on how you can help ensure WiR metrics are up-to-date.

Year Portion ifapplicable Total Dailyaverage
2015 18 Jul – 31 Dec 11,711 70
2016 28,399 77
2017 28,271 77
2018 27,323 75
2019 27,207 75
2020 30,119 82
2021 26,780 73
2022 18,893 52
2023 17,925 49
2024 20,142 55
2025 18,854 52
Grand total 255,624

Updated: Rosiestep (talk) 23:49, 11 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Date Women Bios Percentage Increase in % for year Increase in women for year Increase in bios for year Percentage for year
30-Sep-2015 205,814 1,299,047 15.84%
1-Jan-2017 240,445 1,432,907 16.78% 0.94% 34,631 133,860 25.87%
1-Jan-2018 262,099 1,509,348 17.37% 0.58% 21,654 76,441 28.33%
31-Dec-2018 279,959 1,573,341 17.79% 0.43% 17,860 63,993 27.91%
30-Dec-2019 305,072 1,678,323 18.18% 0.38% 25,113 104,982 23.92%
11-Jan-2021 332,622 1,778,126 18.71% 0.53% 27,550 99,803 27.60%
3-Jan-2022 356,439 1,865,516 19.11% 0.40% 23,817 87,390 27.25%
2-Jan-2023 373,263 1,921,359 19.43% 0.32% 16,824 55,843 30.13%
1-Jan-2024 390,207 1,978,991 19.72% 0.29% 16,944 57,632 29.40%
30-Dec-2024 408,840 2,042,975 20.01% 0.29% 18,633 63,984 29.12%
31-Dec-2025 427,004 2,107,089 20.27% 0.26% 18,164 64,114 28.33%
Total 4.43% 221,190 808,042 27.37%

Notes:

In October 2014 English Wikipedia had 1,445,021 biographical articles, according to a paper referenced on the project's main page. The number of biographies reported by Humaniki only caught up with this figure in 2017, which suggests that Humaniki information was incomplete until at least then.

The September 2015 figure was reported here.

The figure of 20% (408,183 women out of 2,040,570 biographies) was achieved in the 16 December 2024 update. TSventon (talk) 21:42, 23 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]

As a result of figures presented by Humaniki, we keep posting on the main Women in Red page the percentage of women's biographies on the English version of Wikipedia. Increases are steady but marginal: for example from July 2022 to July 2023, the percentage has risen from around 19.3% to around 19.6%.

Thanks to an analysis presented by Andrew Gray on the WIR talk page, it certainly looks as if the number of men and women involved in sports has a significant influence on the statistics for women. A detailed account of Gray's work is presented in "Gender and BLPs on Wikipedia, redux", which he published on 2 August 2023.

The two lists below show that biographies of living people (BLPs) born in recent years are approximately 50% female if data on all categories of athletes are excluded. By contrast, the equivalent overall figures (including athletes) are only around 25%. As a result, biographies of very large numbers of male sportspeople seem to be responsible for the huge difference. Andrew Gray's detailed lists below document how figures for BLPs by year of birth have evolved over the years:

Overall development of BLPs since the 1920s for all biographies

Development of BLPs since the 1920s for biographies excluding athletes

If we discount all athletes using the infobox method, the results are:

WiR is amazing and has way too much to showcase here.

Recent Did You Know? blurbs

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These are the 20 most recent WP:DYK entries for WiR. Updated approximately weekly by User:JL-Bot.

Transcluding 20 of 3100 total

There has been considerable press coverage of WiR, to the point where the project has its own Wikipedia article. Below are some recent articles. To add articles to the list, visit Press.

In addition to listings under Research, academic papers on gender bias in Wikipedia (as recorded in Wikidata) are listed in Scholia.

To include a paper, create an item about it on Wikidata (check first to avoid duplicates) and give it main subject (P921) = gender bias on Wikipedia (Q17002416).

  1. ^ Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Lalmas, Mounia; Menczer, Filippo (2015). "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia". Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media - HT '15: 165–174. arXiv:1502.02341. doi:10.1145/2700171.2791036. S2CID 1082360.
  2. ^ "Qlever".
  3. ^ "Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red • en.wikipedia.org". XTools.