Since 2017, the Women’s Classical Committee have organised regular sessions where they collaborate to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of female classicists. The WCCwiki initiative began because the English Wikipedia’s coverage of women in the field of classics was, frankly, abysmal. Their work has transformed the English Wikipedia’s coverage. Over the course of five years, the number of biographies of female classicists had multiplied by a factor of 13. As a result of their considerable efforts, the initiative was named Partnership of the Year at the 2022 UK Wikimedian of the Year Awards.
Wikipedia’s policies can sometimes replicate biases in source material, but because it is an open platform active participation can redress the balance. WCCwiki write about notable subjects – those with coverage in independent, reliable sources and therefore should have Wikipedia pages. This applies to people working in the field currently and in the past, as well as figures from classical history. WCCwiki is an example of how a group of people can support each other, learn new, skills, and contribute to one of the world’s most widely used digital resources.
The people involved in WCCwiki have gone out of their way to welcome new people to their group, and share their experiences of working on Wikipedia with colleagues in academia. Being able to demystify Wikipedia and how it works is enormously useful.
In this post I will explore the numbers behind WCCwiki since July 2021, drawing on information from Wikidata which helps work out what is in Wikipedia. Numbers help tell the broad picture of the work volunteers put into WCCwiki, but it is only part of the story. Before 2020, WCCwiki had trialled online events. As a network of researchers across the UK, and across countries, meeting in-person wasn’t particularly easy to coordinate so monthly online meetings were the way to go. Initially these took place over IRC – an old school chat website – but in 2020 as the world got to grips with remote working they made greater use of tools like Zoom to connect and work together. The way WCCwiki have adapted and continued their work since 2020 has shown resilience and commitment to share information.
This post comes shortly after the English Wikipedia reached the landmark of 500 biographies about women classicists. I would like to pretend that was intentional, but I’ve been thinking about this blog post since July, which would have been one year on from when I last posted about the stats. Before I published the stats in December, so maybe this will be the resumption of regular programming.
The work in context
It’s fun to see how many articles WCCwiki have created because it’s a huge number. Creating new articles is an important part of WCCwiki’s work, but it isn’t the limit of what they do. On Wikipedia they update existing pages on Wikipedia, share images, curate what already exists, and add women’s scholarship to relevant articles. What this means is I am going to have to start finding new ways of showing the impact of their work. Collectively, WCCwiki have improved more than 600 pages on the English Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is enormous: English is the largest edition with more than 6 million entries, but there are a lots of other language editions with more than a million articles. It’s not a matter of quantity over quality though, as you can tell from a look at Wikipedia’s guidelines about what to include and how to write pages. There are also internal review processes which recognise Wikipedia’s best content. On the English Wikipedia anyone can submit an article to the good Article process, though it’s best if you have been involved in writing it so that you can respond to feedback. This process involves an uninvolved Wikipedian coming along and assessing the article against a set of criteria including judging whether an article is well written and has no significant gaps in coverage.
Depending on how complex a topic it, it can take weeks or months to prepare a page to Good Article standard, and the process itself can take a similar length of time. So it is especially impressive that since July last year, the WCCwiki have seen seven article they have worked on promoted Good Article status:
- Jacquetta Hawkes
- Anna Apostolaki
- Alice Kober
- Kathleen Freeman (classicist)
- Elizabeth Pierce Blegen
- CIL 4.5296
- Mary Renault
At the other end of the scale, stub articles are the shortest entries on Wikipedia and generally in need of more detail. They can be just a couple of sentences long with a reference or two. Typically, that’s how a Wikipedia article starts off and it grows over time. Of the 642 articles under the auspices of WCCwiki as of December 2022, 46 (7.2%) are recognised as stub entries. In July 2021, the proportion was slightly higher at 7.9%, so while the number of articles the project looks after grew over the last seventeen months the overall quality improved.
WCCwiki are closing the gap between coverage of women in classics and coverage of women in general on the English Wikipedia.
| Female | % female | Male | Other genders | Total | |
| Classical scholars | 503 | 18.1% | 2,277 | 0 | 2,780 |
| All of English Wikipedia | 372,444 | 19.4% | 1,544,001 | 1,855 | 1,918,300 |
Last year I checked how Wikipedia’s coverage in English compared to German, French, Italian, Russian, Swedish, and Arabic in terms of numbers of biographies. Since July last year 214 biographies of classicists were created on the English Wikipedia; the proportion of 22% was the highest of any of the compared language editions of Wikipedia. Some languages, notably French, found that the coverage worsened as a proportion. Without WCCwiki’s intervention, it is very likely that English Wikipedia would be counted amongst these.
| Female bios (Jul ’21) | Female bios (Dec ’22) | Total bios of classicists (Dec ‘22) | Change | As a proportion of bios in that period | |
| English | 454 (17.69%) | 503 (18.09%) | 2780 | 49 | 21.88% |
| German | 376 (10.40%) | 416 (10.54%) | 3947 | 40 | 12.01% |
| French | 106 (9.64%) | 114 (8.96%) | 1273 | 8 | 4.62% |
| Arabic | 74 (13.88%) | 77 (13.53%) | 569 | 3 | 8.33% |
| Russian | 54 (6.84%) | 66 (7.15%) | 923 | 12 | 8.96% |
| Italian | 53 (5.95%) | 63 (6.22%) | 1013 | 10 | 9.43% |
| Swedish | 14 (2.43%) | 18 (2.93%) | 615 | 4 | 10.00% |
Archaeology
Archaeology
Classics has lots of different specialisms, but I’ve kept an eye on archaeology over the years since that is my own interest. As with the overall work on classics biographies, the work here is continuing in the right direction and a nice little landmark to pass: the ratio of biographies about women and men is now 1:2. Over the last 17 months, more biographies of women classical archaeologists were created in English than of men.
| Language Wikipedia | Female | % female | Male | Total |
| English, 14 Dec 2018 | 37 | 19.2% | 156 | 193 |
| English, 6 Dec 2019 | 85 | 29.1% | 207 | 292 |
| English, 28 Jul 2021 | 109 | 32.3% | 228 | 337 |
| English, 20 Dec 2022 | 119 | 33.7% | 234 | 353 |
As with previous years I’ve also kept an eye on medieval archaeologists as that is my area of specialism. The overall numbers remain small compared to classics, but 13 biographies on men and 16 on women is a good state of affairs.
Last time I looked at data like this there were questions about the fields of industrial archaeology, post-medieval archaeology, and industrial archaeology. The issue back then is that the underlying data was incomplete. In the intervening period, that hasn’t changed much. Of these three the one meaningful area to look at is industrial archaeology but the English Wikipedia only has 11 biographies for this specialism, and just two are of women (Marilyn Palmer and Kate Clark).
Making an impact
Groups such as the Women’s Classical Committee have enormous potential to positively effect Wikipedia, and the online knowledge ecosystem it ties into. By documenting the work of women in classics – writing biographies of notable figures, citing their work – #WCCwiki is helping preserve their legacy and spotlighting the work of contemporary scholars. If you want to help the Women’s Classical Committee, you can find out more including details of upcoming online events on their project page.
Header image: Votive figurines from the Temple of Hera at Vibo Valentia, Calabria by Katherine McDonald, licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0.
Richard the Castellan 
