Finding knowledge gaps: Case studies from Women in Red and WikiProject: Women’s Health

This blog post examines how two volunteer-driven initiatives on Wikipedia, Women in Red and WikiProject: Women’s Health, identify and prioritize their knowledge gaps. Both projects share a common mission of making underrepresented knowledge related to women visible. However, they approach this challenge in distinct ways, including differences in the nature of the knowledge they address. 

You’ve jumped into the fifth post in our series; check out our previous posts:

• Post 1: An Overview of Wikipedia’s Structural Framework 
• Post 2: Navigating Wikipedia’s Knowledge Discrepancies  
• Post 3: Prioritizing Wikipedia’s Knowledge Gaps
• Post 4: Tools and Workflows for Mapping Wikipedia’s Knowledge Gaps
• Post 5: Finding Knowledge Gaps for your Education Program

Women in Red: Turning Red Links into Blue

Women in Red (WiR) is one of the most prominent volunteer-driven projects addressing Wikipedia’s gender gap in content. Its name comes from the red links on Wikipedia, hyperlinks to articles that do not yet exist about missing biographies of notable women. The project’s mission is straightforward: to transform those red links into blue by creating new articles, thereby making more women’s lives and contributions visible on Wikipedia.

Identifying Knowledge Gaps

To identify gaps, Women in Red relies on a combination of crowdsourced efforts, technological tools, and external reference works. Members of the project compile lists of missing biographies in specific domains, such as music, architecture, or medicine, including a wide range of occupations, geographies, and historical periods. Similar lists powered by automated queries from Wikidata are also present, where self-updating lists are maintained about women that Wikidata knows of, but not Wikipedia in a specific language (example). The project also draws on authoritative sources, including the BBC’s 100 Women, national biographical dictionaries (e.g., example), and authority files like BNF, ORCID, and VIAF, to compile comprehensive lists of missing women (also known as redlists).

All of these resources are consolidated into the Redlist Index, which organizes missing articles by occupation, geography, and time period. This system makes the process of finding gaps systematic and accessible, providing clear entry points for both new and experienced editors. A newcomer can, for example, navigate directly to a curated list of, say, scientists from Kenya, and immediately identify potential biographies to write. This structured approach allows WiR to continuously generate concrete writing targets, particularly during thematic campaigns such as “Music Initiative 2025,” where one dedicates the year to writing about women in music. 

Factors Behind Success

The project’s success is due to several technological, community, and strategy-related factors. 

Biographies, as a genre, are comparatively straightforward to write and do not demand advanced subject expertise, making them easily accessible for new contributors. Guidance and support are readily available in the form of toolkits (example), essays (example), and instructional materials (example), while librarians and topic specialists often assist at edit-a-thons by providing onboarding and ensuring access to reliable sources.

A second factor is the visibility of progress. Tools like Humaniki allow editors to monitor the proportion of women’s biographies across Wikipedia, providing a measurable outcome. These metrics (example) motivate editors because they can see the cumulative impact of their efforts. By late 2024, Women in Red celebrated a major milestone: 20% of all English Wikipedia biographies were about women, up from roughly 15% when the project was founded in 2015.

Another important factor is the rewarding nature of contributions. Many editors, particularly those new to Wikipedia, find the creation of entirely new articles deeply satisfying. The tangible act of turning a red link into a blue one provides a clear sense of accomplishment, in contrast to making small changes on an existing article. The project also sustains engagement through monthly thematic campaigns, for instance, highlighting women from Microstates or women writers, which provide structure and focus for editors who want to participate in coordinated efforts. Larger allied efforts, such as edit-a-thons during Women’s History Month (such as Celebrate Women) or global writing campaigns (such as Feminism and Folklore), also bring in several women’s biographies to Wikipedia.

Moreover, women in Red is a decentralized, non-hierarchical community with no formal leadership. It is a zero-budget, zero-overhead project with no funding needs, eliminating the administrative burden of fundraising and external reporting. All project discussions are open, searchable, and fully accessible, ensuring transparency and trust.

Finally, Women in Red has benefited from strong alignment with Wikimedia’s broader strategic and organizational commitments. The Wikimedia Foundation has dedicated staff, funding, and campaign support to gender equity initiatives and to the Wikimedia 2030 Strategy, which reinforces equity as a central principle for the movement. This alignment provides the project with resources and visibility. In addition, affiliated groups such as WikiWomen’s User Group, Art+Feminism have played a vital role in expanding women’s biographies on Wikipedia through organized outreach and community-driven initiatives. Similarly, connections with feminist networks and allied groups ensure ongoing support and outreach. 

Therefore, the distinctive model: a decentralized, consensus-driven, and independent community, the clarity of mission, accessible entry points, institutional support, strong community, and the ability to see visible impact are among the factors that made WiR one of the most successful content creation initiatives in Wikipedia’s history. 

WikiProject: Women’s Health: Mapping a Topic Area

While Women in Red focuses on biographies, WikiProject: Women’s Health takes on a more complex challenge: strengthening Wikipedia’s coverage of women’s health across topics ranging from menstruation and pregnancy to gynecological cancers, reproductive rights, and gendered health disparities. The project’s scope is wide, spanning medical, social, and cultural dimensions of health, which makes the task both vital and demanding.

Identifying Gaps

To identify gaps, the project employs multiple strategies. The project uses internal mapping tools such as categories, navboxes, and API-based searches to survey existing coverage and detect missing or underdeveloped articles. The project also compares Wikipedia’s content against women’s health glossaries, academic textbooks, and scholarly frameworks using manual and automated methods (link). This allows editors to easily visualise topics where Wikipedia falls short of the content present in medical and public health literature.

The project highlights topic-specific gaps, where articles on subjects such as abortion, gynecological surgeries, and pregnancy that do not exist on Wikipedia. The project also maps country-specific gaps, such as Abortion in Jamaica, Domestic violence in Italy, or Teenage Pregnancy in India, which demonstrate the need for geographically contextualized knowledge. Another priority is addressing misinformation, especially in sensitive areas like reproductive health and sexuality, where the absence of balanced, reliable information creates space for myths and disinformation to spread (link). 

Like Women in Red, the project makes extensive use of Wikidata powered lists. A tool named Liseteria generates live, automatically updated lists of women’s health-related topics, including female anatomy, medical conditions, organizations, journals, and genetics (link). These lists offer editors a continuously refreshed directory of topics on which articles do not exist yet.

WikiProject: Women’s Health is also involved in prioritizing articles (link). Articles within the project’s scope is given both a quality rating (ranging from Stub and Start to B-class and beyond) and an importance level (from Low to Top). This framework allows editors to identify which high-importance articles remain at low quality, signaling areas that require urgent attention. 

Challenges in Practice

Despite its importance, WikiProject: Women’s Health faces several challenges. The complexity of the subject matter is a primary barrier. Articles often require expertise in medicine and adherence to strict sourcing standards, which can be intimidating for newcomers and time-consuming for experienced editors. Due to this, the project also suffers from lower participation, attracting fewer active contributors than broader campaigns like Women in Red. As a result, much of the work is being done by a small core of dedicated editors.Therefore, the progress of this project remains slower and more uneven compared to Women in Red.

Finally, the nature of contributions can make the project feel less immediately rewarding. Expanding an existing stub or adding a few references to an existing article is important, but it does not offer the same visible sense of achievement as creating a brand-new article, the kind of task that often attracts first-time editors elsewhere on Wikipedia. At the same time, creating a new article usually requires substantial research and a deeper understanding of the subject, which many newcomers without specialized expertise may not yet have. 

Within the Wikimedia movement, women’s content is often equated with women’s biographies, but equally important areas include women’s health, women’s education, women’s rights and women’s cultural contributions. To bridge the gaps more effectively, we need to expand our perspective and recognize that women’s content goes far beyond biographies.Biographies may be the most visible way to measure progress and an easy way for newcomes to get started on Wikipedia, but we need to also tackle the harder, less immediately rewarding areas too. 

A truly balanced encyclopedia highlights not only who women are, but also the worlds they need, build, shape, and transform.