Derived from an image by Francesca Tripodi — Tripodi F. Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia. New Media & Society. June 2021. doi:10 1177/14614448211023772, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107324002

Strengthening women’s health information on Wikipedia

“Wikipedia is the mirror of the world’s gender biases.”

MisinfoCon Guest Contributor
MisinfoCon
Published in
4 min readMar 16, 2023

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By Netha Hussain

“Wikipedia is the mirror of the world’s gender biases.”

Katherine Maher, Former CEO, Wikimedia Foundation.

This new WikiCred project is aimed at strengthening the information related to women’s health on Wikipedia.

Since Wikipedia is written by humans, it is also vulnerable to human biases. Wikipedia’s gender bias has already been the subject of research and discussion. Research shows that only 19% of the biographies on the English Wikipedia are about women. Similarly, there is a dearth of knowledge about women’s health information on Wikipedia. While women’s biographies have received the attention of Wikipedia editors and academics, women’s health has not been addressed so extensively and systematically on the platform.

In order to help address this issue, WikiProject: Women’s Health began in 2015 with the goal of assessing existing articles, identifying knowledge gaps, and improving articles about women’s health on English Wikipedia. Although the project succeeded in identifying and classifying more than 2,500 articles related to women’s health, there was no sustained interest in continuing with the project. As of 2023, the project is largely inactive, and many of its founding editors are also inactive.

It was in this context that the ‘Knowledge gap in women’s health’ project was launched. Supported by a WikiCred grant, the goal of the project is to strengthen the information related to women’s health on Wikipedia. This project is aimed at mapping the knowledge gaps related to women’s health and curating reliable resources for bridging these gaps. The existing knowledge related to women’s health on English Wikipedia will be mapped using navboxes (page), API searches (example), categories (example) and lists (example). From these maps and by referencing scholarly literature in women’s health, knowledge gaps pertaining to women’s health will be identified. A glossary of several women’s health-related books will be scraped to find topics and terminology related to women’s health. The resulting list of topics will be compared with Wikipedia’s existing content to find knowledge gaps (list in progress here).

Some themes relevant to women’s health were identified in the previous phase of WikiProject: Women’s Health, and reliable resources for strengthening the knowledge related to these themes were collected. Existing and missing articles related to sex and gender differences pertaining to different health conditions are shown here. Knowledge gaps in country-specific articles, such as “Abortion in Jamaica,” “Domestic Violence in Sweden,” or “Teenage Pregnancy in India,” are identified here. Some topic areas, such as menstruation, pregnancy, abortion, and gynecological cancers, were considered to be of high importance, and knowledge gaps specific to these topic areas are listed here. Some disease conditions affect predominantly women or have different manifestations in women than men. Information regarding such diseases is collected here. Wikipedia contains “lists” of items related to many topics. Some of the existing and missing lists relevant to women’s health are given here.

One of the most alarming problems concerning women’s health is misinformation. Misinformation related to abortion, birth control, and sexuality is abundant on the internet. Wikipedia should therefore contain articles related to gendered health misinformation. Some suggestions for such articles can be found here. Several articles related to aspects of women’s health, such as gynecological surgery and the epidemiology of women’s health issues, were found missing on Wikipedia, so an attempt was made to map them here, along with a list of reliable resources for creating these articles.

Wikidata is the central repository of structured data for all Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. A large number of aspects related to women’s health known to Wikidata are not yet present on Wikipedia. The project uses Listeria, an automated script, to create a list of topics surrounding women’s health, such as female anatomy, diseases and disorders, women’s health organizations, aspects related to birth control, academic journals related to women’s health and biochemistry/genetics related to women’s health. This list is updated every 24 hours, ensuring that all changes made on Wikidata are included. The entries present in this list could be used to create new articles related to women’s health on Wikipedia.

As part of the ongoing WikiProject: Women’s Health project, a month-long edit-a-thon on Malayalam Wikipedia was conducted to write articles about women’s health. As a part of the edit-a-thon, 2,409 articles were created or significantly expanded, the highest number of articles created at an edit-a-thon in the history of Malayalam Wikipedia. As most participants were not experts in healthcare, most of them created articles about notable women healthcare workers. However, a large number of articles related to women’s health conditions were also created from scratch or translated from English by editors with a background in healthcare.

In this new phase of WikiProject: Women’s Health, with support from WikiCred, two in-person Wikipedia editing events are scheduled to happen in March 2023 in New Delhi as a part of this project. These events will be coordinated by Feminism in India, a digital intersectional feminist media platform. These events will provide training to newbies and health experts on how to write their first Wikipedia articles.

Women’s health is a vast topic area, and it is beyond the scope of our resources to map all knowledge related to this subject. However, we aim to map the knowledge gaps related to the most pressing and relevant issues related to women’s health through the project. The resources created as a part of the project will be integrated into WikiProject: Women’s Health for ease of accessibility and collaboration.

How to Participate

We invite you to participate in the project by helping us in identifying or bridging the knowledge gaps related to women’s health on Wikipedia. Please leave your feedback related to the project on the talk page of the project or by sending an email to Netha Hussain (nethahussain [[at]] gmail [[dot]] com).

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