Addressing the bias: the Women in Red campaign in Wikipedia

By Lisa Maule, Vice-President of Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand
Originally published in Te Rau Ora Library Life September 2025, Issue 508, pp 20–21

The value of equitable access to information lies at the heart of many of the volunteers who add content to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia. Lisa Maule became one of these volunteers after attending an event called an edit-a-thon in 2019.

The Dowse Art Museum in Te Awakairangi Lower Hutt held the event to profile and make accessible the information about Māori women artists held in their collections. Curious to learn more about Wikipedia, and with time after finishing my master’s, I was keen to amplify the amazing work of women artists — well aware of the lack of accessible information in this area from my undergraduate art history and design degrees, and as a woman working in the arts.

The experience of adding to Wikipedia articles, researching information, and finding citations was very rewarding, helped by the small group of friendly and enthusiastic people I met who called themselves ‘Wikipedians’. With plenty of gaping holes in Wikipedia content about arts and events in Aotearoa, there were plenty of opportunities for me to contribute specialist knowledge in this area from my work as a theatre designer, educator and organiser. 

To answer some of my questions about editing, I went to a local meetup, where Wikipedian and citizen scientist Siobhan Leachman took time to show me some tips about how to create new articles on notable people. Without support, newly created articles on living people can often lead to a disappointing deletion. Here, Siobhan introduced me to the Women in Red Wikipedia project. 

Women in Red is a supportive international community founded by Roger Bamkin and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight to focus on reducing systemic bias regarding gender representation in the Wikipedia movement.” In Wikipedia articles, a blue link takes you to the relevant article, while a red link represents a notable subject for which an article is not yet created — this is where the name ‘Women in Red’ comes from.

When the project started in 2014, only 15% of biographies in English Wikipedia were about women. Ten years later the ‘needle’ has moved to 20%, representing a massive effort that the community is rightly proud of. Women in Red runs monthly themed campaigns, sharing lists of notable women to inspire research and article creation, with a year-long focus on music for 2025. There are related campaigns that also promote and support content about women in Wikipedia, including WikiProject Women.

Some of the first biographies of women I created were artist Julie Paama-Pengally, artist group the Mataaho Collective, individual articles for the Topp Twins, dance practitioner and early Pākehā Tiriti educator Rona Bailey, and the amazing Rose Pere, who many people will know from her holistic framing of health Te Wheke. Once new articles are created, editors in this community review the content and structure, adding to the quality, and contributing to discussions about notability. I’ve met like-minded people online through their usernames, through chatter in channels for getting help, and in-person at meetups and conferences.

Since that first edit-a-thon, I have been involved in several projects linked with Women in Red. These have included the Ada Lovelace Day 24-Hour Global Edit-a-thon, and projects focused on Performing Arts Aotearoa and Pasifika Arts Aotearoa, where the targets always included at least 50% of newly created articles to be about women or non-binary subjects. When myself and some other New Zealand editors picked up the book Making Space: A History of New Zealand Women in Architecture by historian Elizabeth Cox, we knew it would be an excellent secondary reference for creating and expanding Wikipedia articles available on historically overlooked notable women. The Architecture + Women New Zealand project has now run Wikipedia editing and photography events three years in a row, supported by Wikimedia Aotearoa New Zealand.  

 In the Women in Red space, I have found a supportive environment where people are continuously learning, and take part in a global community working together to address a need. From my area of the arts, I love staying connected to changes and trends over time through the research I do whilst creating Wikipedia content. There are many notable people and events in Aotearoa that feed into our cultural heritage, but are not represented in Wikipedia, so there is a lot of opportunity to make a real difference.

The strong gender bias in Wikipedia content is present in both the coverage of biography articles, and in the ‘Wikipedians’ who are writing the content. Wikipedia is one of most-visited websites in the world, and information from this encyclopaedia finds itself amplified across many spaces. The September focus for Women in Red is on women writers and their works — an excellent opportunity for librarians and information professionals to contribute. Simply adding a citation to an existing article can be an easy first task to help make information more accessible. The Women in Red project provides resources and guidance to get you started, and the wikimedia.nz website has information on events and support.