2025-08-06 –, KISUMU (🗣️ ar, es, fr, sw)
Language: English
🎥 Session recording: https://youtu.be/ojbuIcX6LVg?list=PLhV3K_DS5YfIr2HbYikIz4XMBXKTGytWY&t=23750 🎥
10 years ago Roger and Rosie made a short presentation at Wikimania in Mexico suggesting that every editor should take an interest in the low number of women on Wikipedia. The idea took off and the resulting wikiproject was called Women in Red. Wikidata had only just started, but it soon told us that there were 15.5% of biographies that were about women. Over thirty sister projects looked at other languages. Over ten years, hundreds of editors, over 400 editathons from Norway to Kenya and New Zealand and a budget of zero, has resulted in an increase in the percentage to 20%. What did we learn?
10 years ago Roger and Rosie made a short hybrid presentation at Wikimania in Mexico. The profile of women on Wikipedia was poor and the problem was conflated with the shortfall on women editors. Women in Red suggested that an editor's gender was irrelevant if we wanted to improve the profile of women on Wikipedia. We suggested that every editor should take an interest in the low number of women featured on Wikipedia. The idea took off and the resulting wikiproject was called Women in Red. Wikidata had only just started but it soon told us that 15.5% of biographies were about women. Over ten years over 400 editathons and a huge pile of "redlists" have resulted in thousands of new women biographies and the percentage is now 20%.
o The two us were joined by hundreds of other editors (including Carol). We will profile a few and table a longer list
o Over 236,000 new biographies. Who are the stand-out discoveries? We will mention a few of them and table a longer list.
o We have been active on thirty wikipedias, twitter (RIP), Piinterest, Instagram, Facebook.
o We spoke at the BBC, the UN and leading Universities. We ran editathons in Kenya (where we met Carol Mwaura), Pakistan, Nigeria, NZ, Australia, England, Scotland, France, Canada and the USA and the best things are ...
Finally, What are the barriers to more progress? Where are we going?
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
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Everyone can participate in this session
- How do you plan to deliver this session? You will be asked to confirm this closer to the date in case of changes to the format.
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Onsite in Nairobi
- What other themes or topics does your session fit into? Please choose from the list of tags below.
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Campaigns, Collaboration, Edit-a-thons
- How does your session relate to the event theme: Wikimania@20: Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?
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Gender = inclusivity
Every country (inc.Kenya) = inclusivity
changing Wikipedia = impact
in ten years we met twice = sustainability
zero budget = sustainability
cc-by-sa = sustainability - Should your session be selected for the program, do you agree to release your session and supporting materials on-wiki and on the eventyay platform under CC BY-SA 4.0?
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I agree
Roger Bamkin is known as Victuallers on-line. He is a long-time admin and editor of the English Wikipedia. He has been a serial co-creator of open volunteer projects including the charity Wikimedia UK, QRpedia, Wikitowns, Jobergpedia, Monmouthpedia, Women in Red and the emerging Motokazi project. Motokazi will be focussed on Malawian Women Role-Models. It intends to clone the Women in Red approach while partnering with leading editors, charities and NGOs. Roger was the third Wikimedian in Residence and he led Wikimedia UK to become a registered charity with its first office, CEO and employees. He is a retired engineer, IT manager, woodcarver, Rotary member and an apprentice Scotsperson. He has given several presentations at Wikimanias - nearly always virtually.
Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight is a prolific Wikipedia editor (since 2007) and admin (since 2009), as well as a fledgling WikiPortraits photographer (2025). She co-founded the annual in-person conference, WikiWomenSummit (est. Wikimania 2023), and the online content gender gap project, Women in Red (est. Wikimania 2015). Rosie serves as the Wikipedia Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University (Boston), where her work focuses on women writers, and as the Community Engagement Manager at the University of Queensland (Australia) on the Wikimedia research project “Measuring the Gender Gap.” Previously, she served on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees (2021-24). In 2016, Rosie was honored as Wikipedian of the Year; two years later, she was knighted partly because of her Wikipedia work. She makes her home in California, US.
My name is Lucy and I learnt to edit Wikipedia in 2019. I routinely edit with Wikiproject Women in Red, and have now written a biography for a woman from every country in the world. I have also worked as a Wikimedian in Residence, both for the National Trust and for LEEDS 2023. From 2021 to 2023 I was on the NW Europe Grants Comittee and in 2024 I joined the Wikimedia UK Community Development Committee.
I started editing Wikipedia in 2006. My experience has been mostly en.wikipedia (100K edits, 2K new en.wp pages) and wikidata (425K edits, 17K new items). On en.wikipedia I've particularly benefitted from support from participants in the fantastic Women In Red wikiproject. Though I’ve helped organize local meetups in Cambridge UK, but never before been to Wikimania!
A former history lecturer, I'm currently working as Chief Scientist for mindmage.ai, an online RPG technology platform. I've been involved in some research into Wikipedia in the past - I was research assistant on a project at the Oxford Internet Institute which examined wikipedia representation of MENA countries, and have coauthored on knowledge graph bias. I regard global inequality, and its relation with technology, as a crucial matter of human and environmental concern.