Wikipedia, Women and Notability

“So despite women making up 51 percent of the global population only about 19 percent of the biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women. And that’s not just women scientists. That’s women in all professional areas. That’s anyone that the internet has deemed notable. Only one in five of them are women.” Dr. Jess Wade,  Physicist and Wikipedia Maven1

As volunteers for multiple groups that support women and girls, we are a bit intrigued by the comment by Dr. Jess Wade.  Women in STEM are few and far between in many countries. Is this the reason for the lack of Wikipedia pages about women?  Is their work really not notable, or is their work just not accepted by Wikipedia, and why even after acceptance are the pages being rejected? Or is this a snowball phenomenon driven by the Matilda Effect?

ACM W Europe would like to see an increase in Wikipedia pages that highlight women in STEM; however, what we discovered is that even when written and accepted,  the pages are deleted because ‘the work of the woman is not notable.’2 We would like to define a formula for writing a page in a way that the page is accepted and deemed notable. Following this effort, we plan to write pages of computer scientists in Europe to test the formula.

Therefore, ACM W Europe is excited to announce that it has formed a workgroup to focus on the following. 

  1. We want to understand the current status of computer science women pages in Wikipedia in Europe and worldwide.
  2. How do we quantify notability for a Wikipedia page?
  3. Write pages to test our notability formula? 
  4. Submit and get accepted Wikipedia pages about notable women in Europe and worldwide.
  5. Hold a workshop presenting our work at womENcourage 2025 in Brasov, Romania (womencourage.acm.org)  

The workgroup has taken up a mission for sustainable submissions, including the formula for notability, develop a ‘notable women’ list, and submissions of many Wikipedia pages and present our work at womENcourage 2025. The workgroup welcomes all who would like to help us in this mission and invites anyone interested in gaining new visibility for women in STEM to send an email to acm_w_europe_wikipedia@acm.org.

References:

  1. Wikipedia’s Gender Imbalance 
  2. Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia 
  3. Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia 
  4. It’s a Man’s Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia 


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