Read New Wikipedia Entries About Women With ‘Women in Red’

Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of everything, is mostly about men. According to Women in Red, an in-house Wikipedia improvement project, less than 18 percent of the site’s 1.5 million biography pages are about women. And that figure actually represents an improvement: in late 2014, the number was 15 percent. A lot of that progress is thanks to Women in Red itself, which was founded in 2015 to increase and improve the site’s coverage of women.

Of course, most of written history concerns men, since most humans in recorded history have lived under a patriarchal society. So there’s more source material about them. But that doesn’t fully explain Wikipedia’s skew. As the New Statesman reports, major articles leave out prominent women. “History of Chemistry,” for example, names 200 men and four women, ignoring major figures like Nobel-winning metabolics researcher Gerty Cori and CRISPR researcher Jennifer Doudna, who, according to her own Wikipedia page, “has made fundamental contributions in biochemistry and genetics.” It’s not that there aren’t more women worth covering; it’s that they’re being ignored.

via Read New Wikipedia Entries About Women With ‘Women in Red’