Abbreviation | WiR |
---|---|
Formation | July 18, 2015 |
Founder |
|
Founded at | Hilton Mexico City Reforma during Wikimania 2016 |
Headquarters | Virtual |
Methods | Edit-a-thons |
Budget | US$0 |
Staff | None |
Award(s) | 2016, shortlisted, ITU/UN Women's GEM-TECH Award |
Website | WikiProject Women in Red |
Women in Red is a WikiProject addressing 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 hyperlinks 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, Wikipedia edit-a-thons have been popular activities. [1] Research at these events often discovered notable women in STEM who did not have Wikipedia pages, therefore a red link could be created for that person.
Women in Red was conceived by volunteer Wikipedia editor Roger Bamkin in 2015, who subsequently joined forces with volunteer editor Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. [2] 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. [2]
At Wikimania 2016, in Esino Lario, Italy, Jimmy Wales, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, named Stephenson-Goodknight and Temple-Wood the Wikipedians of the Year, for the prior 12 months, for their effort to fill the gender information gap. [2]
Women in Red conducts Wikipedia edit-a-thons in cities around the world, and continuously hosts a virtual one. [3] 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. [4] 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. [5] [6] [7] [4]
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. [8]
As of December 22,2016 [update] , 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). [9]
The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. This community directly builds and administers these projects with the commitment of achieving this using open standards and software.
Wikimedia UK (WMUK), also known as Wikimedia United Kingdom, is a registered charity established to support volunteers in the United Kingdom who work on Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. As such, it is a Wikimedia chapter approved by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which owns and hosts those projects.
The Wikipedia community, collectively and individually known as Wikipedians, is an online community of volunteers who create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an Oxford Dictionary entry. Wikipedians may or may not consider themselves part of the Wikimedia movement, a global network of volunteer contributors to Wikipedia and other related projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.
Gibraltarpedia is a project by the Government of Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory in the south of the Iberian Peninsula, to improve coverage of Gibraltar-related topics on Wikipedia. It builds on Monmouthpedia, an earlier project along similar lines linking Wikipedia and the town of Monmouth in South Wales. The Gibraltarpedia project was announced in July 2012 by the Government of Gibraltar.
A Wikipedian in residence or Wikimedian in residence (WiR) is a Wikipedia editor, a Wikipedian, who accepts a placement with an institution, typically an art gallery, library, archive, museum, cultural institution, learned society, or institute of higher education to facilitate Wikipedia entries related to that institution's mission, encourage and assist it to release material under open licenses, and to develop the relationship between the host institution and the Wikimedia community. A Wikipedian in residence generally helps to coordinate Wikipedia-related outreach events between the GLAM and the general public such as editathons.
An edit-a-thon is an event where some editors of online communities such as Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and LocalWiki edit and improve a specific topic or type of content. The events typically include basic editing training for new editors and may be combined with a more general social meetup. The word is a portmanteau of "edit" and "marathon". An edit-a-thon can either be "in-person" or online or a blended version of both. If it is not in-person, it is usually called a "virtual edit-a-thon" or "online edit-a-thon".
Adrianne Wadewitz was an American feminist scholar of 18th-century British literature, and a Wikipedian and commenter upon Wikipedia, particularly focusing on gender issues. In April 2014, Wadewitz died from head injuries from a fall while rock climbing.
Gender bias on Wikipedia is a term used to describe various gender-related disparities on Wikipedia, particularly the overrepresentation of men among both volunteer contributors and article subjects, as well as lesser coverage of and topics primarily of interest to women.
Maia Weinstock is an American science writer and Lego enthusiast who resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She graduated from Brown University in 1999, and is the Deputy Editor of MIT News.
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Art and 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 in Wikipedia, which is disproportionately written by and about men".
Emily Temple-Wood is an American physician and Wikipedia editor who goes by the name of Keilana on the site. She is known for her efforts to counter the effects and causes of gender bias on Wikipedia, particularly through the creation of articles about women in science. She was declared a joint recipient of the 2016 Wikipedian of the Year award, by Jimmy Wales, at Wikimania on June 24, 2016. Temple-Wood graduated from Loyola University Chicago and Midwestern University. She practices medicine in Minnesota.
The Wikimedian of the Year is an annual award that honors Wikipedia editors and other contributors to Wikimedia projects to highlight major achievements within the Wikimedia movement, established in August 2011 by Wikipedia's co-founder Jimmy Wales. Wales selects the recipients and honors them at Wikimania, an annual conference of the Wikimedia Foundation—except in 2020, 2021, and 2022 when the recipients were announced at online meetings as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2011 to 2016, the award was named Wikipedian of the Year.
Dame Rosie Gojich Stephenson-Goodknight, known on Wikipedia as Rosiestep, is an American Wikipedia editor who is noted for her attempts to address gender bias in the encyclopedia by running a project to increase the quantity and quality of women's biographies. She has contributed thousands of new articles.
WikiConference North America, formerly WikiConference USA, is an annual conference organized by the Wikipedia community in North America.
Steven Pruitt is an American Wikipedia editor and administrator with the largest number of edits made to English Wikipedia, at over 5 million, having made at least one edit to one-third of all English Wikipedia articles. Pruitt first began editing Wikipedia in 2004. He has also created more than 33,000 Wikipedia articles. Pruitt was named as one of the 25 most important influencers on the Internet by Time magazine in 2017.
Wiki Loves Pride is a campaign to improve LGBT-related content on Wikipedia and other projects in the Wikimedia movement.
There are various intersections of the LGBT community and Wikipedia. LGBT people who edit the online encyclopedia often face cyberbullying and other types of harassment. Wikipedia content about LGBT individuals is often vandalized, but various Wikipedia user groups, WikiProjects, and the Wikimedia Foundation endorse campaigns to promote inclusion on Wikipedia. Availability of Wikipedia's LGBT content, in countries that otherwise suppress information about LGBT issues, has been praised.
Jason Moore is an American Wikipedia editor among the English Wikipedia's most active contributors by edit count. Editing since 2007 as "Another Believer", he has specialized in current events, with coverage including the COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd protests, and the culture of Portland, Oregon, where he is based. On Wikipedia, Moore has created and developed editor affinity groups for joint work on these topics. As an organizer in the Wikimedia movement, Moore has hosted meet-ups and edit-a-thons to train new editors.
...the considerable and often-noted gender gap among Wikipedia editors; in 2011, less than 15 percent were women.