Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red

Woman of the day: a new one each day from our women's biographies

Simple EN-WP

Does anyone here have experience with it? Besides writing in simpler language, are there policy differences between it and EN-WP? Might there be some articles within the scope of WiR at EN-WP Articles for Creation, that are stuck there but would be okay for Simple EN-WP? -- Rosiestep (talk) 23:05, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

I've only had one major interaction with Simple Wikipedia and it was...not great. It was back during this discussion and this Afd (RfD over there). Apparently it's commonplace over there to delegitimize non-English sources as contributing to notability and also the idea of having to look for sources at all? That was the impression I got, at least. Silverseren^C 23:31, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Simple:Wikipedia:Notability (people) looks similar to Wikipedia:Notability (people). Simple en seems to be a much smaller project, with 75,000 bios rather than 2 million, so adding bios that are not notable on en Wikipedia would not necessarily help their project.

Asilvering seemed knowledgeable when Simple EN-WP was discussed a few weeks ago. TSventon (talk) 14:35, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Rosiestep I spent some time working on Simple English Wikipedia in the Summer of 2023. The criteria for notability are the same as English Wikipedia. The oversight is not quite as robust as on English Wikipedia, but the effect would be to "sneak" pages onto Simple English Wikipedia. BTW - it is hard to write for Simple English Wikipedia! You have to use a different composing part of your brain. I liked working over there, but it was a learning curve to write for that audience. --WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 14:38, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

To add to what others have said, I wouldn't recommend doing this, but I really would not recommend doing this for BLPs in particular. Fewer active patrollers means dodgy changes are more likely to stick, and the smaller editor base will tend to make it less likely that anyone will ever update an article if you don't as the original drafter. -- asilvering (talk) 18:41, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

I'm a bit late, but there are no real differences in notability requirements between the two projects. Also, as an avid simplewiki editor, we could use some extra editors. It's shocking how many obvious topics are either two-sentence stubs or missing entirely. Also, DYK at simplewiki is much less restrictive than at enwiki, because simplewiki doesn't have a newness requirement or a QPQ requirement, making it much easier to nominate a hook. QuicoleJR (talk) 18:41, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Also, this page provides a basic guide to all of the major differences between the two wikis. QuicoleJR (talk) 18:59, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

The European Destubathon

Somebody should count how many women bios are being improved. The output in the first week has been amazing. Could even be a record of most existing women bios improved, not sure. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 07:25, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

I've been adding the ones with pictures to the WiR pinterest board for April. It's a lot! Penny Richards (talk) 14:11, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Rather than going through them all manually, once the contest is over it should be possible to see how many were related to women on the basis of the categories in the articles or perhaps the wikiprojects on the talk pages. Does anyone know how to obtain results along these lines?--Ipigott (talk) 12:29, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

It looks like 331 women's bios destubbed so far, out of 1,002 articles listed. That shows about a third of the articles listed are women's bios and, if the current productivity is maintained, a thousand women's bios could be destubbed in the course of the competition. TSventon (talk) 17:10, 9 April 2025 (UTC)

A bunch of those women bio destubs are mine. I won't have the same productivity for the rest of the month, I don't think. I have a few left to expand from Ladies in the lab III, but have done all the ones in the other sources I had (Dictionary of Women in Science, vols I and II, and International Women in Science: a biographical dictionary to 1950). So now I am reduced to Googling for sources for bios I find through stub categories, which is a lot slower. Very happy to be pointed at any good resources if anyone has a bunch of stubs they'd like expanded with a source I can get hold of! DrThneed (talk) 00:08, 10 April 2025 (UTC)

@DrThneed:, if you want another encyclopedia, you could try the Biographical Dictionary of Swedish Women. Is there an easy way to find stubs related to an encyclopedia? TSventon (talk) 23:18, 16 April 2025 (UTC)

That's a good question @TSventon! I was really lucky that @Rosiestep had made this redlist for one half of the Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science that isn't Wikidata generated, ie it includes all the blue links as well as the red. It is so useful, and made me wish we had more lists that include the created articles as well as the red ones. So I was able to click all of those to find the stubs (there's a few left still stubs as I have focused on certain countries, and also cos some entries just aren't long enough to support >1500b of article). I took photos of the contents for the other volume and turned it into an open refine project to find some stubs from the other volume. I don't have it completely matched to Wikidata yet (in order to find those with articles, and then in order to find the length of those articles), but at some point I'll try to finish it and turn that into a list like Rosie's that we can all see.

Otherwise I've made my worklists by getting hold of a decent source (eg Norton/Grove women composers) and working through the stub category for those articles in a certain country. It's a bit tedious! And then Petscan is good for finding articles that are shorter than a certain size but not tagged as stubs.

Thanks for the tip for the Swedish women's biographical dictionary - I'm on Romania at the moment, and will turn my attention to Sweden when I can! DrThneed (talk) 00:04, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

@DrThneed:, I tried going to Wikidata and getting a list of items linked to the BDSW item and then copying the list back into en Wikipedia, so I suppose that is similar to Rosie's list. There are 2,000 articles in the encyclopedia, so the list is quite long. TSventon (talk) 00:37, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

@Dr. Blofeld: up to now (according to my list as of 11:59 today) 501 women's bios have been destubbed. TSventon (talk) 12:20, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

That's awesome TSventon, appreciate you counting! 501 articles in 13 days has got to be a record for women article improvements. Sorry Ipigott and co that they're not new articles!♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:50, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

But some of them are practically new, even if they aren't turning up as new in stats; some of those destubbed biographical articles were formerly one-sentence microstubs. Penny Richards (talk) 14:27, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

Agreed! its annoying to look up a French scientist and to find that the article says she was a scientist and she was French! Victuallers (talk) 15:28, 15 April 2025 (UTC)

@Dr. Blofeld: according to my list as of 23:59 yesterday, 859 women's bios have been destubbed so far (with a week to go). TSventon (talk) 00:09, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

That's amazing TSventon, appreciate it. Penny Richards and Victuallers True, though many such "articles" are often mere placeholders to identify what articles are missing and just have tags saying they need to be transwikied. My point was that these full expansions of micro stubs won't register as new articles on your system, which is a shame.♦ Dr. Blofeld 04:21, 24 April 2025 (UTC)

Thank you all, 1,222 women's bios have been destubbed and I have made a list here

Monthly newsletter template

I wanted to bring up the white background of the newsletter template not working with dark mode on Wikipedia. What can be done about that? Thanks. I just went and removed the white background for another template and it works fine without it being set like that. —DIYeditor (talk) 05:08, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi DIYeditor. Thanks for noticing the problem and fixing it! --Rosiestep (talk) 05:30, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

Before I go poking around I wanted to make sure it is ok with everyone that I remove the forced white background. Does anyone know the location of that template offhand? —DIYeditor (talk) 22:59, 20 April 2025 (UTC)

Hi DIYeditor. Can you provide a link to an example of the "newsletter" you refer to? Thanks. --WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 16:54, 21 April 2025 (UTC)

It's all over your talk page. —DIYeditor (talk) 00:02, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

DIYeditor, I think WomenArtistUpdates means can you provide a link to "another template" that you removed the white background from?

I haven't tried producing the WiR news letter, but the instructions are at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Ideas#Basic overview of tasks using March 2024 as a guide. TSventon (talk) 00:35, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

@TSventon: I don't see the newsletter mentioned specifically there. It's a about real world meetups and events as far as I can tell. Maybe these end up in the newsletter.

Basically this is being put on every WIR member's talk pages every month, and it is presumably being subst: from a template somewhere. I just need to find that template:

== Women in Red January 2024 ==

{| style="border: 5px solid #ABCDEF ; background-color: #FFFFFF;"

...

It may be as simple as removing background-color: #FFFFFF; from the template. This is as far as I understand a basic part of implementing "dark mode" on Wikipedia. If it's a bot doing it from off Wikipedia, the bot needs to stop putting that white background. It's a significant accessibility issue. —DIYeditor (talk) 05:15, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

Ok I see that the newsletter is called "Outreach". It is genereated by the Wikipedia MassMessage facility. What you linked does relate to that. I'm not clear if there is a template or if the newsletter is simply being copied by hand on e.g. Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Outreach/2024#March 2024 —DIYeditor (talk) 05:36, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

I've removed the background from the May 2025 version. —DIYeditor (talk) 05:42, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

• oh, the invitation! Thanks for removing the hard-coded background-color: #FFFFFF;. As you figured out, we create this month's invitation from last month's invitation, not a template (no subst:). If you've got May 2025 ADA compliant, it should be considered updated for invitations going forward. For those following at home - Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Outreach/2025 and historical invitations are filed under the appropriate year. Thank you DIYeditor and TSventon. I don't have a way to test dark mode, so I am assuming it looks ok. There is no change on my screen. It look fine--WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 14:37, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

  Super, thanks! Yeah, it should make no difference for those who already have a white background. —DIYeditor (talk) 17:23, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

May looks great. Thanks, all! Much easier on my eyes. —DIYeditor (talk) 13:14, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

Lilli – Ein Mädchen Aus Der Großstadt

The lost German film Lilli – ein Mädchen aus der Großstadt, starring Ann Smyrner and featuring the character Bild Lilli, has recently been found and uploaded to YouTube in its entirety. The article about the film is available in German and Welsh, and now also in Spanish. Hopefully, someone will be encouraged to translate the article into English as well.--Peridotito (talk) 08:09, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

@Peridotito: unfortunately translating the de article into an article suitable for en Wikipedia will not be straightforward, as most of the de article does not have inline citations. The main author has died, so they can't assist. If you could add some citations to the es version, that would be a great help. TSventon (talk) 20:22, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Women in Green's May 2025 edit-a-thon

Hello WikiProject Women in Red: WikiProject Women in Green is holding a month-long Good Article Editathon event in May 2025!

Running from May 1 to 31, 2025, WikiProject Women in Green (WiG) is hosting a Good Article (GA) editathon event – Wildcard Edition! Participants are invited to work on nominating and/or reviewing GA submissions related to any and all women and women's works during the event period. Want to improve an article about a women's rights activist? Go for it. An Olympian gold medallist? Absolutely. A famous painting by a woman? Yes! GA resources and one-on-one support will be provided by experienced GA editors, and participants will have the opportunity to receive a special WiG barnstar for their efforts. We hope to see you there!

Grnrchst (talk) 16:34, 26 April 2025 (UTC)

Listeriabot

Apologies if this is not the place to ask, but any idea why Listeriabot hasn't updated Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by occupation/Writers - UK since October? I've tried manually summoning the bot, which hasn't worked. Starklinson (talk) 05:27, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

@Starklinson:, unfortunately Listeriabot not updating redlists is a longstanding problem, see a 2021 discussion. @MarioGom: do you have any ideas? TSventon (talk) 13:54, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

I proposed it to the Community Wishlist a couple of times iirc, unsuccessfully. There's really no good solution until someone fixes the bot or rewrites it from scratch. Removing any column referencing places like place of birth of death might help with some queries. It is ok to use them as filters in queries, but not as columns in tables. MarioGom (talk) 19:02, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

It's been going on for a while; I made a template for the problem back in 2022: Template:Listeria fail. The only thing that can be done is to reduce the amount of processing it takes to create the list. Try making the list more specific or limiting the amount of data it pulls by removing columns. Shorter lists generally work just fine. Gamaliel (talk) 19:33, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

I have split out the UK to 1927 and Listeria was able to run. TSventon (talk) 21:04, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

I expect part of the problem is that the size of Wikidata and Wikipedia has increased since 2018, so the bot has to work a lot harder to produce the same reports. TSventon (talk) 01:27, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Last time I checked, it was a design issue in the bot. For each column, it would fetch every full entity into memory. Some entities like countries are huge. A column with many big entities will exhaust memory. MarioGom (talk) 21:41, 30 April 2025 (UTC)

Presumably the design of the bot hasn't changed, but wikidata keeps getting bigger, meaning reports that could run 8 years ago are now more likely to fail. TSventon (talk) 05:32, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Sub-referencing: User testing

Apologies for crossposting

Hi I'm Johannes from Wikimedia Deutschland's Technical Wishes team. We are making great strides with the new sub-referencing feature and we’d love to invite you to take part in two activities to help us move this work further:

1. Try it out and share your feedback

   Please try the updated wikitext feature on the beta wiki and let us know what you think, either on our talk page or by booking a call with our UX researcher.

2. Get a sneak peak and help shape the Visual Editor user designs

   Help us test the new design prototypes by participating in user sessions – sign up here to receive an invite. We're especially hoping to speak with people from underrepresented and diverse groups to get different perspectives. If that's you, please consider signing up! No prior or extensive editing experience is required. User sessions will start May 14th.

We plan to bring this feature to Wikimedia wikis later this year. We’ll reach out to wikis for piloting in time for deployments. Creators and maintainers of reference-related tools and templates will be contacted beforehand as well.

Thank you very much for your support and encouragement so far in helping bring this feature to life Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 15:25, 28 April 2025 (UTC)

Women in Red May 2025

Women in Red | May 2025, Vol 11, Issue 5, Nos. 326, 327, 337, 338 Online events: New: Revolutionary women | Alphabet run I & J Continuing, year-long initiatives: #1day1woman | Music Announcements (events facilitated by others): WikiProject Women in Green - a Good Article editathon from 1-31 May 2025 Progress ("moving the needle"): Statistics available via Humaniki tool. Thank you if you contributed one or more of the 1,269 articles during this period! 21 Apr 2025: 20.090% of EN-WP biographies are about women (2,061,363; 414,126 women) 24 Mar 2025: 20.070% (2,057,083 bios; 412,857 women) Tip of the month: Those of you who experience harassment while trying to create or improve articles about women are welcome to bring your problems to our attention on the Women in Red talk page. Other ways to participate: Become a member. You can always opt-out of notifications. Join the conversations on our talkpage. Help us plan future events and add any general ideas on developing the project. Follow us on social media: Instagram | Pinterest

--Lajmmoore (talk 09:18, 29 April 2025 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Women in Red May 2025

Hey just created my first article for this month Mitela Sumi Will appreciate help to expand this article :) Flyingphoenixchips (talk) 16:36, 29 April 2025 (UTC)

Reminder: Submit Your Local Results for Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 by 15 May

Dear WikiProject Women in Red,

Thank you for your valuable contributions to Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 in your communities!

This is a kind reminder that the deadline to submit your local results is 15 May 2025.

Please make sure to submit the complete and detailed results of your local contest on the following Meta-Wiki page: m:Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025/Results

Additionally, feel free to add a brief summary of your local event under the Results section in your country/region’s row on the participants page: m:Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025/Participants

If you need any assistance during this process, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thank you for your continued dedication and support!

For, Wiki Loves Ramadan International Team 11:51, 2 May 2025 (UTC)

Some enlarged redlink lists for the under-represented half of the world

I've been doing very little on wikipedia this year, as I've been concentrating on wikidata, adding women from 30 under-represented countries which together constitute 50% of world population. There were 35,500 women from these countries when I started, and now there are 10,000 more! I started working on this when I was vaguely appalled to find that women from this half of the world contituted only 0.83% of wikidata bios with country and gender assigned. I'm proud to announce that this is now 1.01%, so I've hit the 1% target I set myself :)

This means that I've expanded the following WiR redlinks pages: Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Chad, China, DRC, Ethiopia, India, Laos, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Mosambique, Myanmar, Niger, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Turkmenistan, Vietnam, and Yemen. I'd love it if these countries got some special WiR love. (Basically there are three equally sized population blocs here: China, India, and the rest.)

One of the countries I've worked on is Malawi. So one unexpected & lovely side-effect was learning of User:Victuallers's efforts to improve wikipedia representation of women there. He's looking to engage off-wiki partners in this. A '50-50 campaign' across Africa (setting explicit 50:50 targets for public decision-makers as part of various protocol agreements) initially arose from Malawian grassroots campaigners. The timescale for that has been pushed back, but it's had visible effects. Maybe Malawi can be similarly exemplary when it comes to wikipedia representation!

This has been a bit of an obsessive slog, but I'm very pleased it's been possible to make a visible difference. Hope others here find it encouraging! Dsp13 (talk) 08:24, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

Dsp13, are there WP:RS to establish the notability of the women you are adding to Wikidata? If there are not, it won't be possible to write en Wikipedia articles on them. And if the RS are offline or paywalled it will be difficult. If there are resources for writing women's biographies in your target countries, they could be added to Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Resources. TSventon (talk) 10:42, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

Not all will meet en.WP notability standards, but many will. For example, plenty of national MPs and even government ministers weren't already in Wikidata (and aren't yet in en.WP). They usually have newspaper coverage in the country they're in. I'll have a think as to whether there are specific resources I could add. Thanks for the suggestion, Dsp13 (talk) 11:14, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

The redlist quality of the additions to Malawi's redlist vary, these are all WIR candidates although some do not have enough notability to survive on en:wiki (there are 2 other languages!). However some of the finds have the kind of notability you might be surprised to find in a missing woman on Wikipedia. One recent addition for Malawi was Ivy Kamanga a supreme court judge which is pretty notable but she was the only woman on a panel who overturned a presidential election!! They wore bullet proof vests to announce their findings. The judges won an international prize and were lauded in the UK parliament. She's one of the "100 WIR Women" list I'm curating and I'm hoping that WIR will give Malawi an extra push to 50:50 parity on en:wiki, Chichewe:wiki and tum:wiki. In preparation we are making some non:notable headlines as we gather partners to assist. When we started there were less than 100 Malawians on the WIR redlist. Since then that number should have gone down as we have increased the number of articles about Malawian women by 10%.... but actually it has ~quadrupled. Dsp13 has pushed the redlist up to c:350 Malawian women in Red. It's probably going to take a while to get this project ready as there are (ambitious?) plans to gather more external partners in addition to WIR, WMUK and the Scotland Malawi Partnership charity. Any more interest here? Victuallers (talk) 14:43, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

CONGRATULATIONS @Dsp13 this is such a fantastic undertaking! I'd defnitely noticed that some WD lists I was looking at regularly were expanding, this is so cool! Even if they're not EN notable, their presence undoubtedly enhances knowledge on the internet more broadly, and significantly connnects these women into the web of knowledge. @Victuallers I'd be happy to help out later in the year with the Malawi project. Lajmmoore (talk) 15:00, 3 May 2025 (UTC)

A "J" possibility

I've just come across Ellen E. Jones - film and tv journalist, much cited in en.wiki, and a nominating guest on Great Lives. Might be interesting for someone to create, but I mustn't fall down that rabbit-hole - have spent much of the morning on a "J" novelist already (as well as spending ages retrieving old work when a non-WiR article I'd invested effort in was deleted, along with its incoming redirects etc, because it had originally been created by a now-blocked sock: annoying!) PamD 13:43, 5 May 2025 (UTC)

Draft:Lizzie May Elwyn

This playwright (real name?) and their work seem interesting. Is there coverage of them and or their works? FloridaArmy (talk) 19:38, 8 May 2025 (UTC)

New Article

Hey, I just created an article on Achumla Jingrü, a Naga singer from Nagaland. Would appreciate help on the article. Flyingphoenixchips (talk) 01:45, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

Draft:Lulu_Odell_Gaiser

Dr. Lulu Gaiser - the first female hired by McMaster University. Any help to preserve this amazing women would be grateful as lots of her history has been buried or hidden.

https://mcrew.ca/resource/celebrating-mcmaster-universitys-forgotten-trailblazer-lulu-gaiser-to-be-honoured-on-international-womens-day/ - her recognized on International Women's Day 163.182.216.241 (talk) 07:13, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Rather ambitious idea...

Hi all, after seeing some NWSL teams organise to improve photos and statistics of their players on Wikipedia through edit-athons a while back, I was thinking of ways we could implement something similar for other women's football teams. Those NWSL teams licensing photos for Commons made that side of it nice and simple, and Commons photos was the main hurdle I was brainstorming ways to overcome. Finding Wikipedia photographers to travel around countries going to different games every week to take photos of players who might not even be there seemed like asking too much, and then I remembered (of course)... tournaments.

It's probably too late in the day to do anything for the Women's Euro in Switzerland in a few months, but if we were to come up with a ranking of which women's national teams most need new photos, and recruited Brazil-based Wikipedia users (i.e. the next Women's World Cup), a request for photography credentials could be made to FIFA for this. I know Wikipedia/Wikimedia has collaborated in the past to send photographers to football teams (for example, Germany will probably not be a priority), but I don't know who organised any of it! Any ideas (even if you think it's too ambitious)? Kingsif (talk) 22:33, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this up, Kingsif, and it's not too ambitious. More and more people (including me) are joining the ranks of WikiPortraits to cover all types of events (sports, literature, film, and more) around the world. For more info, connect with Jenny8lee, WikiPortraits' Editor-in-Chief. --Rosiestep (talk) 09:56, 14 May 2025 (UTC)

Final Reminder – Submit Full Local Results for Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 by 15 May EOD

Dear WikiProject Women in Red,

This is a final reminder that the deadline to submit your full and detailed local results for Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025 is 15 May 2025 EOD.

Please ensure you complete the following as soon as possible:

• Submit your full results on Meta-Wiki here: m:Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025/Results
• Add a brief summary of your local event under the "Results" column on: Wiki Loves Ramadan 2025/Participants

Failure to submit by the deadline may result in exclusion from the international jury consideration.

If you need help or encounter any issues, feel free to contact the international team.

Thank you once again for your dedication and hard work!

Warm regards,
Wiki Loves Ramadan International Team, 02:39, 15 May 2025 (UTC)