This week the Mayor of London joins forces with Wikipedia and Bloomberg to tackle the significant problem of gender inequality online.
As part of his gender equality campaign, #BehindEveryGreatCity, Sadiq has brought together secondary school girls from across London, women from the tech industry and Wikipedia’s experts to create a burst of new Wikipedia pages about women, and to call on the tech industry to help more women and girls to get involved.
It comes after Wikipedia revealed that 83 per cent of its biographies are about men and that 85 per cent of page editors are male.
A series of dedicated edit-a-thons has been organised to tackle the gender imbalance in Wikipedia pages and to encourage more women to edit entries. These events are supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, which provides mentors and technology to help guide newer editors through the process.
Today, the Mayor, in partnership with Wikimedia, organised an edit-a-thon at Bloomberg’s central London office, where pupils worked in pairs with support from women who work in the tech industry to upload a raft of new pages about London women, and to make existing pages about women more robust.
Among the pages created were Rosalee Mason, a London basketball player, and the leading publisher, and Farrah Storr, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. Previous edit-a-thons run by the Wikimedia foundation have resulted in an increase in the number of biographies online about women, including Australian female neuroscientists and women in Jewish history. Programmes such as Women in Red, Wikipedia’s project which aims to bridge the gender-gap, have led to the creation of 17,000 new biographies of women in the past three years.
