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In mid-December 2024, women's biographies on the English Wikipedia reached 20% of all biographies. At 18:55 UTC on Thursday 19 December 2024, the Women in Red WikiProject page was updated with the most recent stats from Humaniki. These showed that the English Wikipedia had 2,040,570 biographies, of which 408,183 were about women, a ratio of 20.003%.[1] The 20% milestone was reached between December 9 and December 16; it is not possible to be certain of a more precise date, but it is likely to have happened on or near December 12.

This is huge news for anyone who uses the internet, which is beset by systemic biases against the presence of women. By adding biographies about women, the gender gap is reduced and the contributions of women across every sphere of human achievement have been highlighted and expanded. Following in the footsteps of Emily Temple-Wood, editors Jess Wade and David Eppstein have long been working to address gender bias in science online.[2]

Wikipedia's first biography of a woman, about the American civil rights activist Rosa Parks, was created on 21 January 2001, six days after the site was established, per a list of the first several thousand pages on Wikipedia; only four other biographies were written before that time, so when Rosa Parks' page was created, exactly 20% of Wikipedia's biographies were about women.[note 1] Stats about that article show that it has been edited by 2,627 editors, is listed as of interest to ten WikiProjects, and has been viewed about 135,000 times in the last 30 days.

It is not possible to say exactly which biography broke the recent 20% ceiling, but see below for those created around that time.

WikiProject Women in Red

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Wiki Women in Red Bootcamp and Mentorship program

WikiProject Women in Red was started nearly ten years ago by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight and Roger Bamkin. The grassroots effort welcomed editors of all backgrounds to address the systemic gender gap that showed just 15.5% of all biographies on the English Wikipedia were about women. Numerous editors have contributed to hundreds of on-line editathons that rapidly achieved 16% and 17%, but progress became more difficult. The 20% milestone has eluded our efforts for over three years (better estimate) but the 19.998% clicked over to 20% this week.

Based on figures at http://en.wiki.x.io/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red&oldid=1263980583 and http://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:WikiProject_Women&diff=prev&oldid=254489638

Approximately 200,000 new biographies have been created since the project began in 2015. As a result, about half of today's biographies are less than ten years old. While many articles have been created by project participants, many more have been added by those interested in women in various spheres of activity and quite a number have been inspired by our parallel projects in over thirty languages. In addition to active members from the US, UK and Canada, we also have enthusiastic participants from Australia and New Zealand, continental Europe, and more recently Asia, Africa and Latin America. Some have written thousands of biographies of women, covering every country, time period and occupation. In addition to the biographies on which our statistics are based, we have also created a significant number of articles about women's works, organizations and initiatives, all of which contribute to increasing a wide understanding of women and their achievements.

Earliest women's biographies on Women in Red

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The following biographies were the first to be created by their authors after the establishment of Women in Red (18 July 2015):

Biographies contributing to the 20% milestone

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The following biographies were created on 16 December 2024, contributing to the 20% milestone

The following were created prior to 16 December 2024

Other editing projects

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WikiNkento

Women in Red is one of many projects across the Wikimedia movement that address the gender gap. Since its establishment, 34 other language versions have been created, including those for Arabic, Central Kurdish, Chinese, Lingala, Malay and Tamil.[3] WikiNkento is a cross-language project to increase the representation of women from central Africa.[4]

On the English Wikipedia, a considerable number of wikiprojects related to women have been developed over the years. Those with the highest number of articles are WP Women, WP Women's sport, WP Women writers, WP Women's History, WP Women scientists and WP Women artists. Our sister initiative, WikiProject Women in Green, is focused on improving existing articles to Good Article status and beyond.

Gender equity in other language Wikipedias

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Of course our English Wikipedia is just one of 326 language versions, several of which have already made the 20% mark. For example, versions for Basque, French, Igbo and Welsh all have more than 20% women's biographies. Editors around the world collaborate in ensuring less sexist and more inclusive coverage.

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Notes

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  1. ^ The other four biographical pages created before this time were (in chronological order): Thomas Reid, William Alston, Phil Zimmerman, and Johnny Cash, though in the latter case the relevant history is at JohnnyCash, because edits there have nothing to do with the modern article, and the first edit there was more of a prose poem tribute than a biography. In Wikipedia's early days there were no namespaces, so user pages like ScottMoonan also appear in this list. One of the first Wikipedia users used the pseudonym RoseParks. Regarding the capitalisation, all page titles were in CamelCase back then.

References

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  1. ^ "Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red". Wikipedia. 2024-12-19. Retrieved 2024-12-21.
  2. ^ Wade, Jess; Zaringhalam, Maryam (2018-08-14). "Why we're editing women scientists onto Wikipedia". Nature. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-05947-8.
  3. ^ "WikiProject Women in Red". www.wikidata.org. Retrieved 2024-12-21.
  4. ^ "WikiNkento - Meta". meta.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 2024-12-21.
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