Bringing more women out of the shadows and into the Wiki world | Letters

Sandi Toksvig is right to highlight the systemic bias in information about women’s lives in history (Pass notes: Is Wikipedia ‘deeply biased’? Sandi Toksvig says it is – so she’s backing a rival, 12 October). Her comment about Wikipedia, however, implies that no one is working to correct this bias on the site itself. I belong to several projects whose goals are to reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia.

One, Women in Red, started in October 2014. At that point, only 15.53% of biographies on the encyclopedia were of women. As of October 2026, that has risen to 20.42%, in part thanks to the many volunteers who spend their spare time searching for reliable sources to draw on. The Women in Red project currently publishes an average of 1,500 new biographies every month.

Whenever volunteers are creating a biography, we are hampered by far wider system biases than Wikipedia’s alone. There is the well-established difficulty that earlier historians and archivists did not record the lives of women, making it harder to retrieve them from the shadows.

A quick look in a bookshop shows that this bias towards the Great Man view of history still holds sway, with far more biographies of individual men than of individual women being published. As Wikipedia does not accept primary research by the volunteer editors, there is an urgent need for more secondary sources such as Toksvig’s proposed Mappa Mundi and well-sourced biographies. This is not an either/or situation, but one where people need to work together to build a more inclusive history of the world.
Mags L Halliday
Exeter

Your article repeats Sandi Toksvig’s claim that the site is edited by “mostly white, middle-aged, European men”, as if it were a closed club. It isn’t. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, with or without an account, from a phone, today. If women’s biographies are missing, the remedy is free and open to Toksvig, to Cambridge and to every reader of this paper. A rival project needs fundraising only if the obstacle were access, and it isn’t.

Most of the gap has a simpler cause. Wikipedia only covers people who have already been written about elsewhere. If newspapers and historians ignored women, Wikipedia has little to work with. That is the record’s fault, not the editors’.

Wikipedia is one of the best things that the internet has produced: free, open, sourced, and fixable by anyone. Its gaps deserve a serious debate. Jokes that hint at an argument without making it are not that.
Shane Ritchie
Bangor, County Down