Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Metrics/20% milestone

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Women's biographies on English Wikipedia reach 20%

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 on English Wikipedia were about women. Numerous editors have contributed to hundreds of on-line editathons that rapidly achieved 16% and 17%, but 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, the UK, the 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 ...

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?

• Men and women and non-binary people who work towards this goal

Happy to write a short thing on my perspective at least, if wanted. Kingsif (talk) 03:16, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

• Is there a way to work out which article might have been bang on 20%?

0.003% of 2,040,570 is just over 61, so if my high school maths is correct, the first women's biography in the 61 most recent articles created before 18:55 UTC on Thursday 19 December 2024 (or whenever Oronsay ran the script to check) would be the one? Kingsif (talk) 03:16, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately that calculation doesn't make sense for two reasons. First, because it should be 61 biographies, not articles in general. And second, it would only be accurate if those last 61 biographies were all women, so that it was the first of these to take us over the line. More likely, the needle has been moving at a slow but steady rate and one would have to look proportionally quite a bit farther back for the point where it crossed over.

Here are my calculations: as of 9 Dec 2024 the number was .002% short, and as of 16 Dec 2024 it was .003% long. So assuming a steady rate of increase over that week, the crossover would have happened 40% of the way through the week, sometime around 12 Dec 2024, maybe five hours before the time Oronsay's script would customarily run. —David Eppstein (talk) 06:09, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

• 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

Wikipedia's first biography of a woman, about Rosa Parks, was created on 21 January 2001, per a list of the first several thousand pages on Wikipedia; a Wikipedia editor from around that time used the username RoseParks. 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

• Bárbara Jacobs, 25 July 2015 --Rosiestep (talk) 19:48, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
• Mercury Stardust, 10 April 2023 ForsythiaJo (talk) 20:31, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
• Hoàng Xuân Sính, 19 July 2015 —David Eppstein (talk) 21:40, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
• Grace Eldering, 23 August 2015 - Silverseren^C 00:30, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
• Sarah Howe, 12 January 2016 -- Espresso Addict (talk) 01:12, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

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

• Carmen Camacho (writer), 15 Dec 2024 --Rosiestep (talk) 19:48, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
• Adrienne Lash Jones, 15 Dec 2024 ForsythiaJo (talk) 20:31, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
• Tina Ng, 16 Dec 2024 —David Eppstein (talk) 21:40, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
• Linda Trueb, 14 Dec 2024 - Silverseren^C 00:30, 21 December 2024 (UTC)
• Emma Peachey, 15 Dec 2024 -- Espresso Addict (talk) 01:14, 21 December 2024 (UTC)