Wikipedia Needs More Women
New campaign from the nonprofit behind Wikipedia invites everyone to contribute to women’s history.
SusunW is on a mission to write women into history with Wikipedia
Today, scientists can tell us with certainty that increased carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet. But who was the first to discover this, and when did that happen? I’ll bet it’s earlier than you think. Meet Eunice Newton Foote: a 19th century American scientist, inventor, and women’s rights activist whose contributions to climate science….
Women Do News: Tackling the Gender Divide in Journalism Through Wikipedia
The gender gap is a pervasive issue that has garnered attention in recent years, particularly in relation to the global pay inequality between men and women. However, this disparity is not limited to pay; it persists across various issues and industries, including the newsroom. For example, despite some progress, just four out of ten US….
Closing the gender gap: Women in Red’s efforts to add more women to Wikipedia
All of the information found on Wikipedia is created and shared by volunteers around the world. However, since 2020, only 15% of these contributors are women. This imbalance has a real impact on how information is covered and presented on the world’s largest online encyclopedia. This problem is often called the “gender gap” and is….
Kelly Doyle Kim and this new Smithsonian museum are writing women into Wikipedia
It’s called the ‘great man theory‘: the idea that large swaths of human history can be explained by the actions of so-called great men. These days, that theory has been resoundingly discredited—but popular history’s long reliance on it has contributed towards an imbalance of stories told about women in the history learned in schools and….
The Smithsonian’s quest to expand the history of Black women in food and drink on Wikipedia
The history of Black Americans has often been lost, overlooked, or credited to others. Unfortunately, that also includes the influence of Black women on the United States’ food and drink history. Meet Lena Richard: the first Black woman to host a cooking television show in the United States. That may sound like a big achievement,….
Project Rewrite: Tell the missing stories of women on Wikipedia and beyond
Think of a historical event, one you learned about in school. Maybe an expedition, a treaty, or a speech. How about a years-long atrocity, or a record-breaking achievement? When you picture this event, who are the central characters? Now, ask yourself if you know the women’s side of the story. For as long as written….
Smithsonian brings images of diverse figures from the history of US women’s suffrage to Wikimedia
The Smithsonian—one of the leading museums and research centers in the United States—has added over 200 images of women involved in the battle for women’s suffrage in the country to Wikimedia Commons, one of the world’s largest collections of freely licensed media. The donation helps advance the Smithsonian’s strategic plan, which calls for reaching one….
How Wikipedia’s women were made more visible on International Women’s Day
The internet has a problem: across much of the world, women’s access, and participation, and representation on the internet are below that of men.* For online communities like Wikipedia, the internet’s missing women help contribute to our gender gap—both in our content, which is biased towards male biographies, and in our contributors, which are overwhelmingly….
Women in Red is changing Wikipedia’s coverage of women, one article at a time
The news that optical physicist Donna Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page before winning the Nobel Prize in Physics brought renewed attention to Women in Red, a long-standing volunteer effort to add more biographies about women to the encyclopedia. After the announcement, the Women in Red WikiProject had one of their best weeks ever,….
Photo credits
Jasmina El Bouamraoui and Karabo Poppy Moletsane
National Photo Company via Library of Congress