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Women's biographies on English Wikipedia reach 20%

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At 18:55 UTC on Thursday 19 December 2024, user Oronsay updated the Women in Red Wikiproject page with new stats from Humaniki. These showed that English Wikipedia now has 2,040,570 biographies, of which 408,183 were about women, a ratio of 20.003%.

This is huge news for anyone who uses the internet, which is beset by systemic biases. WHICH ONES? 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.

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

Approximately 200,000 new biographies have been created since this project started in 2015, although by no means did we create all the articles to "move the needle". That means that about half of today's biographies are less than ten years old. There are parallel projects in over thirty languages and they too are on-line. The two founders of the project have only met in person twice and our regular contributors are in Australia, New Zealand, UK, US and many countries including Kenya, Nigeria and Luxembourg. Some of our editors have written thousands of biographies of women and the coverage includes those who achieved from every time and every country. Long forgotten novelists, over shadowed wives and sisters and women, both cis-and-transgender have been amplified by the work of ourselves and an array of other projects that also focus on addressing gender gaps

Paragraphs about these projects ...

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Of course English Wikipedia is just one of 326 language Wikipedias, and other languages such as Welsh, French, Basque and Igbo all exceeded 20% of biographies for women some time ago. This is a huge effort by editors everywhere to ensure that the internet is less sexist and more inclusive.

What else should we cover?

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  • Men and women and non-binary people who work towards this goal
  • Is there a way to work out which article might have been bang on 20%?
  • Mention spin-off or affiliated projects, like WikiDonne?

It's not possible to say exactly which biography broke the 20% ceiling, but those created around that time include... LIST, SAY, TEN

It appears that Wikipedia's first biography of a woman, about Anna Kournikova, was created some time between 2 and 12 February 2001, per [1], but the oldest edits do not survive (the version from 28 August 2001 looked like this). The one with the oldest surviving creation-edit in the page history seems to have been the one on Penélope Cruz, created on 13 March that year. Here is what it looked like after its first edit. Stats about these articles include...

First woman's biography you created on EN-WP after the establishment of Women in Red (18 July 2015) and the date

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Last woman's biography you created on EN-WP dated 16 Dec 2024 or earlier

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