“We are making progress, but there is still a long way to go”: for eight years, a French-speaking collective has been working, not without difficulty, to give women their rightful place on Wikipedia by adding biographies of female figures who had previously remained in the shadows to the participatory encyclopedia.
“In 2016, the share of women in French-language biographies was only 14%,” Natacha Rault, founder of the “Les sans pagEs” project, told AFP. “A month ago, we passed the 20% mark, with 142,979 biographies of women in total.”
Launched on the model of the “Women in Red” initiative focused on the English Wikipedia, the collective was created in Switzerland in June 2016 with one objective: to correct the gender bias observed on the pages, this time in French, of the online encyclopedia, where the absence of women is particularly glaring.
Some 300 people responded and contributed in one way or another to the project.
In eight years, more than 68,000 biographies have been created, including those of Alix Payen, a French communard ambulance driver, Gracia Alonso de Armiño Riaño, a Spanish basketball player who won a silver medal at the Paris Olympics, and the French writer Charlotte Delbo.
Other biographies, already existing, are “improved”, like the one devoted to Madame de Warens, a famous Swiss spy, but for a long time presented only as the muse and mistress of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
With this 20% milestone reached in July, the French-speaking Wikipedia is getting closer to its Spanish-speaking counterpart, on which 23.4% of biographies are dedicated to women, and is slightly ahead of the English-speaking Wikipedia (19.8%), notes Natacha Rault.
“There has been progress, but there is still a long way to go,” says the Franco-British woman, who points out, among other things, the still minority share of female contributors to Wikipedia, whose community “remains 90% male,” fueling “a gender bias.”
Post mortem
Another obstacle the association faces is the persistent lack of sources.
“For an article to be eligible, the subject must have been covered in two national or international media outlets within a two-year period,” explains Natacha Rault. “A simple mention in The World or an interview in The Figaro is not enough, only secondary sources, such as articles, are accepted.
And without secondary sources, no article is possible. As a result, it is not uncommon to see articles published only post mortem. The pioneering French computer scientist Marion Créhange, who died in March 2022, was only given her Wikipedia page after her death.
Faced with this observation, the association, financed in particular by the Wikimedia Foundation, urges French-speaking writers and journalists to write more about women, “especially news that we don’t yet know about.”
“If we keep going back to Ada Lovelace,” the first female coder in history, and Marie Curie, we’re not going to get out of this and the proportion of women will always be stagnant. What we need to do is look for those who are less well-known,” says Natacha Rault. “There is real work to be done for writers and journalists, we need to avoid rehashing as much as possible.”
“It raises the broader question of how the press and writers treat women and their achievements,” she adds.