Auckland Museum Student Edit-a-thon
13 January 2025
International collaboration for Wikidata education
11 February 2025
New Zealander’s major efforts to address gender bias on Wikipedia
Dunedin resident Tamsin Braisher has achieved a remarkable feat on one of the most-visited websites in the world – creating a new Wikipedia article on a notable woman every single day in 2024.
Braisher undertook this mammoth task as a response to the significant gender imbalance when it comes to Wikipedia articles. In 2014, it was revealed that only 15.53% of biographies on the site were about women. The international Women in Red Wikipedia project was launched as a result, with the aim of reducing this gap.
Creating a unique article every day was the ideal challenge for Braisher, a seasoned Wikipedia editor who first began editing the encyclopedia in 2018.
“My journey began with learning about what is considered notable on the site – what there should and shouldn’t be articles on – and identifying where there were gaps that needed to be filled.
From here, I began creating a list of notable New Zealand women who didn’t have Wikipedia articles. Over time, the list grew so long that I needed to set myself a target if I wanted to get the job done, which led to the challenge of creating one article every day.”
Looking back, highlights for Braisher include creating articles for Lisa Tumahi, the first female kaiwhakahaere (chairperson) of Te Runanga o Ngāi Tahu, Ephra Garrett, the first Māori woman to be faculty at Massey University, Dunedin broadcaster Catherine Saunders, local restaurateur Fleur Sullivan, and RNZ producer Alison Ballance.
Despite the added challenge of 2024 being a leap year, Braisher still took it one step further by creating a total of 367 new articles – the final bonus article was on founder of KidsCan Charitable Trust and Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, Julie Chapman.
The dedicated efforts of editors like Braisher are paying off. In December 2024, the percentage of women's biographies on English Wikipedia reached the milestone of 20%. While ten years of work to increase coverage by 5% may not sound much at first, this changes when you learn there are over 2 million biographies on the site – and that every single one of them was written by volunteers.
Now that the new year is here, Braisher is enjoying tackling some more varied tasks in her volunteer contributions to Wikipedia and its sister projects.
“I’m planning to spend more time improving short, incomplete articles called stubs, which need additional information to meet the standards for Wikipedia.
I’m also hoping to spend more time helping others learn to edit Wikipedia, as growing our editor base in numbers and diversity leads to better coverage for the encyclopedia.”
