New College students and staff challenge the gender bias on Wikipedia by staging an afternoon edit-a-thon where they added and edited pages for prominent women associated with religion through history. Only 15% of biographies on Wikipedia are of notable women and only 15% of the site’s editors are female perhaps going some way to explain the bias. On 2nd November staff and students of New College locked themselves in a room (with biscuits and coffee of course) to play their part in addressing this gender bias. The afternoon began with a rousing keynote speech from Rodger Bamkin from the movement Women in Red who explained the importance of what was about to happen, followed by Dr Lesley Orr, a prominent historian who talked of her experiences when researching and writing about these prominent women in the history of religion. After a bit of training, our twelve new editors set to their task of an afternoon creating and updating 16 pages in total and committing to continue to update or create new pages on Wikipedia as one of the community of editors they have now joined. You can see photos and tweets from the day on the twitter hashtag #womenreligion2016. Image This article was published on 2024-03-19
