Wikipedia:WikiProject Women

Welcome to WikiProject Women!

We're a group of editors who aim to improve Wikipedia's coverage of women's topics. WikiProject Women brings Wikipedia users of all genders, sexual orientations, geographic locations, and personal backgrounds together to discuss and collaborate on coverage of women's content across Wikipedia. Know that we warmly welcome you to participate in the project's scope, whether or not you are a project member.

This project addresses the under-representation of content on Wikipedia about women (both real and fictional) and covering women's perspectives. According to Humaniki only 19.80% of English Wikipedia biographies are about women as of 8 April 2024. WikiProject Women also addresses women's works, such as the paintings they created, books they wrote, scientific discoveries they made or the organizations they created. Think of this as an umbrella group which unites more specific women's projects, one which attempts to look broadly at coverage of women on Wikipedia as part of the bigger picture and how we can improve it. Readers and editors may not know that there's a project for women artists, scientists or writers, but if they reach this page, they can fork away to more specific areas if they wish.

First and foremost, this project is about "content", including creating new articles and adding or improving content in existing articles! Our Featured Articles and Good Articles are the best examples of our work. To counter Wikipedia's systemic bias against covering women's biographies, women's work and women's perspectives, which occurs because the vast majority of editors are male (see the article on Gender bias in Wikipedia for more details), we have a department, Women in Red, that works on missing articles about notable women.

We track lots of areas connected with Women+Wikipedia. Some of these include new articles, articles posted in the Did you know? section of Wikipedia's main page, events, meetups, edit-a-thons, scholarly articles, and newspaper articles.

Women Articles

Shortcuts:
WP:WOMEN
WP:WPWO

Create New Article

Affiliates of WikiProject Women
African women
Architecture & design
Art
Business
Feminism
Health
Hip hop music
History
History Month (March)
Jewish women
Journalism
Music
Religion
Scientists
Sport
Warfare & military
Writers
Missing articles department: Women in Red
Article improvement department: Women in Green
See also: Gender gap task force
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Get involved!

Writing

For those who like to write, you can create, expand or improve articles. For general guidelines for writing biographies, there are several resources, such as the Women in Red's Primer for creating women's biographies, Manual of style for biographies, writing about women (a helpful essay), the biographies of living persons policy, and the notability guideline for biographies.

Creating articles that will survive an Article for Deletion review requires that, at minimum, the new article cite several reliable sources such as published books and major newspapers and magazines, and that the text not be copied directly from another website or another source. If there is already an article about a woman or a woman's work, you can expand the article by adding information. To avoid having your added sentences "reverted" (removed), you should provide a reliable source for any information or claim that is likely to be challenged. You do not have to provide a source for "The capital of France is Paris", but a statement about an award that a woman won or a scientific achievement she made should usually be sourced.

Another task for editors who want to reduce gender bias on Wikipedia is to review articles about women to look for biased writing, such as text that defines women primarily in terms of their relationship to other people. An article about a woman scientist should begin more like this:

Susan Trang (1900–1980) was a Canadian astronomer. She is known for her series of comet discoveries in the 1930s, her books on astrophysics and for winning the Nebula Award in 1975.

Instead of:

Susan Trang (1900–1980) was a Canadian astronomer. She was the daughter of scientist [name of father], the wife of [name of husband], the noted [name of profession] and the mother of [name of adult child], the well-known [child's profession].

The essay "Writing About Women" covers these matters in more detail.

Non-writing tasks

There are a lot of non-writing tasks which need attention too, such as tagging the talk pages of relevant articles with project banners associated with sister and daughter projects, assessing article quality on talk pages, improving biography categorization at Category:Women by occupation, and adding reliable sources to existing articles, particularly for articles about women or their work that are proposed for deletion. (In some cases, a handful of reliable, high-quality sources can save an article from being deleted.) Other non-writing tasks include adding categories to articles (an article about a woman engineer may be categorized under Canadian engineers, but there may be other categories that she could fit into, such as Canadian professors, Canadian authors or Canadian inventors); adding images of women or their works or creations to articles (see adding images essay); and wiki-linking terms and names within the article. (If you link men in a woman's article, it is good practice to go to the men's articles and ensure that the woman is linked in those articles as well.)

Questions?

If you have questions about these tasks or editing in general, leave a note on our talk page or stop by the Teahouse where there are hosts standing by to answer questions from newer editors.