Bringing more women out of the shadows and into the Wiki world | Letters
We need to work together to build a more inclusive history, writes Mags L Halliday. Plus a letter from Shane RitchieSandi Toksvig is right to highlight the systemic bias in...
By Guardian Staff · The Guardian Opinion
We need to work together to build a more inclusive history, writes Mags L Halliday . Plus a letter from Shane Ritchie Sandi Toksvig is right to highlight the systemic bias in information about women’s lives in history ( Pass notes: Is Wikipedia ‘deeply biased’? Sandi Toksvig says it is – so she’s backing a rival, 12 October ). Her comment about Wikipedia, however, implies that no one is working to correct this bias on the site itself. I belong to several projects whose goals are to reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia. One, Women in Red, started in October 2014. At that point, only 15.53% of biographies on the encyclopedia were of women. As of October 2026, that has risen to 20.42%, in part thanks to the many volunteers who spend their spare time searching for reliable sources to draw on. The Women in Red project currently publishes an average of 1,500 new biographies every month. Continue reading...