The dictionary definition of heroism does not usually extend to people who work away anonymously, and for no money, for the reputational benefit of others. But this is what growing numbers of largely female researchers have been doing, in an attempt to rebalance the historical record on Wikipedia in favour of women. In a relatively rare instance of one breaking cover, the British archaeologist and curator Lucy Moore, who has just finished a project to add a woman from every country in the world, has called for more volunteers to roll up their sleeves and contribute.
The challenge is a large one. As of this month, according to the site itself, just under 20% of nearly 2m biographies on Wikipedia are of women, though this is a marked improvement on the 15.5% reported in an academic paper 10 years ago. That paper led to the creation of Women in Red, which now involves hundreds of volunteers around the world. Their project is to turn “red links” – marking a mention of someone for whom a page does not exist – into blue ones that lead to entries documenting their lives.
This means nothing less than transforming women from the objects to the subjects of history. Women in Red’s work has created a fascinating database in its own right of more than 200,000 people, each of whose lives are like small starbursts of light into neglected corners of history, from Dinah Whipple, an emancipated slave who created New England’s first school for black children, to Deolinda Rodrigues, an Angolan revolutionary leader, writer and broadcaster, who corresponded with Martin Luther King and was executed in 1967.
The 2014 paper that inspired Women in Red also pointed out that only 16% of contributors at that time were female, leading to an inevitable skew towards the interests of the 84%, who were largely western and male. Hence the preponderance of great men of American and European history. The biography most overloaded with scholarly references remains that of Joseph Stalin.
Women have long played a part in the creation of dictionaries, though usually in poorly paid clerical roles. One exception was Elizabeth Lee, a biographer and translator, who contributed 100 entries to the Dictionary of National Biography between 1885 and 1900, some of which were waspishly lacking in the enthusiasm that drives today’s Wikipedians. None of the female staff who worked on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary were invited to attend the dinner celebrating its completion at London’s Goldsmiths’ Hall in 1928, though a select few were allowed to observe from the minstrels’ gallery. Unsurprisingly, in such a culture, Walter Scott was quoted about 15,000 times, while Jane Austen’s wit made a mere 700 appearances.
The great strength of today’s crowdsourcing is that each contributor brings their own perspective, with an impact not just on gender but on cultural and geographical spread. Though this can lead to some eccentric entries (Louis XIV’s elephant is among Women in Red’s additions), it also creates deep pools of knowledge. In science, for instance, the mathematician Gladys West, the viral immunologist Kizzy Corbett and the physicist Prineha Narang are among 2,100 entries added since 2017 by the British academic Jess Wade. What better phenomenon to honour, in the week of International Women’s Day, than the hive heroism that is filling so many blanks in world history.
