The Women in Red project, a volunteer initiative, has contributed to an increase in the proportion of women's biographies on Wikipedia. When the project began in October 2014, women accounted for 15.53% of biographies on the online encyclopedia. By October 2026, this figure had risen to 20.42%.
Mags L Halliday, a participant in projects aimed at reducing Wikipedia's gender gap, noted that volunteers publish an average of 1,500 new biographies each month through the Women in Red project. Halliday also highlighted broader systemic biases, such as the historical under-recording of women's lives by earlier historians and archivists, which makes it challenging to find secondary sources for Wikipedia entries.
Shane Ritchie commented that Wikipedia's reliance on existing published material means that if women have been historically ignored by newspapers and historians, there is less information for editors to work with.