Why does Wikipedia not represent Women?

Despina Stratigakos highlights how ‘women editors who submit new entries on women’s history routinely find that male editors question their sources and the significance of their topics and are quick to nominate such entries for deletion’ (Stratigakos, Where are the Women Architects? 2016)

Stratigakos goes as far to say that the lack of female entries is ‘particularly worrisome’ (Stratigakos, 2016).

‘each of us can be a part of the effort to unforget a woman architect’ (Stratigakos, 2016) through the editing Wikipedia she states that ‘histories of women are now increasingly available, they have yet to become readily visible.’ (Stratigakos, 2016)

‘The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, agrees with these criticisms and has made an on-going attempt to increase female editorship of Wikipedia’ (Wikipedia.com, 2020)

The issues also arise with race, class, all genders and intersections.

Wikipedia is “inhibited by systemic bias that perpetuates a bias against underrepresented cultures and topics. The systemic bias is created by the shared social and cultural characteristics of most editors, and it results in an imbalanced coverage of topics on Wikipedia.”- Wikipedia

“The stereotype of a Wikipedia editor is a 30-year-old white man, and so most of the articles written are about stuff that interests 30-year-old white men. So a lot of black history is left out. You’d think that, ‘Oh, Wikipedia has articles on everything,’ but for anything having to do with a marginalized community, there’s a lot of gaps,” James Hare, president of Wikimedia D.C (Source: NY Times, 20/02/15)

Only 8.8% of editors are women and we need to edit wikipedia to make sure the women who deserve recognition are featured. Only then will we shift the balance from 17% female identifying biographies to 50%. (All statistics provided by Wikipedia)

Sarah has been editing wikipedia and encourages others to. This is the only way to address this imbalance.

Wikipedia is the first place many members of the public, students, journalists and designers look to access generalist knowledge on many topics. You can’t be what you can’t see – and so it’s important online resources include significant women, as well as men, so as to offer role models, information and learning about the work of female architects