This online training session was hosted Wikipedia Women in Red student intern Laura Rose Wood and was held on Monday 20th April 2020.
The 1.5 training session introduced editors the how & why of editing Wikipedia with a view to correcting the systemic bias on Wikipedia where only 18.35% of biographies are about notable women.
Women in Red is the second most active WikiProject on Wikipedia (after WikiProject Military History) and volunteer editors all around the world take part in themed virtual editing events to create new biographies about the lives and contributions of inspiring women. This focused attention has resulted in 1,000-3,000 new biographies being created each month since 2015 and the percentage of biographies has gone up from ~15% to 18.35% in this time. So we are moving in the right direction but there is so much more to do. We need more diverse content on Wikipedia and a more diverse editorship too where ~90% of editors are male.
For w/c 20th April we researched Women of Climate Change and Sustainable Development and invited the participants to create new pages for Earth Day 2020 on Wed 22nd April.