The five missing women from Time 100 (2024)

[Kraken]

Apparently Wikipedia didn't have biographies for five women on the Time 100 (T-H-L) list for 2024.

The most egregious failure is surely Rena Lee (T-H-L), the Singaporean diplomat who spent five years herding cats at the UN to produce the High Seas Treaty (T-H-L). Her reward from Wikipedia is literally one line in that article. Since she has also been Chief Executive of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (T-H-L) since 2020, with Wikipedia routinely giving biographies to academics with far less influence or achievement, it seems absurd to have never give her a primary sourced Wikipedia index card, assuming the secondary coverage isn't there.

Being the mother of the subject of the Kidnapping of Hersh Goldberg-Polin (T-H-L), a Hamas hostage, Rachel Goldberg-Polin (T-H-L) would most likely currently be a hard fail for a standalone biography as a WP:BLP1E case. She is covered in Wikipedia though, but it's worth noting that neither that kidnapping article or the parent Israel–Hamas war hostage crisis (T-H-L) quite do her justice. Indeed they don't even really come close to reflecting Time's claim that she is "one of the most visible advocates for the hostages and their families."

Lauren Blauvelt (T-H-L) is probably also a BLP1E, since it is implied she is an ordinary citizen as Time relays how she co-founded the Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights campaign organization that raised nearly $40 miion to successfully pass the citizen ballot November 2023 Ohio Issue 1 (T-H-L). In contrast to Time claiming Blauvelt "represents all the people who worked day and night to get out the vote", Wikipedia not only doesn't mention her name, it only mentions her organization once. Indeed Wikipedia seem to want to claim the victory was due to another organization or physicians. Curious.

Kelly Sawyer Patricof (T-H-L) and Norah Weinstein (T-H-L) are perhaps the biggest challenge. It is said they took the charity Baby2Baby (T-H-L) from a grassroots organization to a national enterprise in 12 years. Big numbers are offered. Impact is asserted, but Time is incredibly vague. Even though this is not the first time that Time has highlighted this organization, naming them in the 100 Companies list in 2023, using the same photo of these two women in both. But as can probably be seen from the size and sourcing of the Wikipedia article, it does rather feel like all the coverage is coming from the celebrity-media-charity-government virtuous circle of mutual back slapping, and there might not be too much encyclopedic substance here at all. Or alternatively, Wikipedia is making it clear it doesn't care about women or babies.

But perhaps the real story here is that despite these five women's names having come to the attention of the Women In Red project almost two days ago, and despite it being quite easy to find target articles for all of them, all five are still red links. Completely unknown to Wikipedia, and thus all those those use it, human and machine.

Are they taking their project title a little too literally? Have they not heard of redirects?

They take seconds to create, and they're real cheap.

[Midsize Jake]

Good post; we could even make it a blog entry with minimal alterations (we'd just need to expand on a few terms and conceptual references that might not be immediately apparent to non-insider/savvy readers). Of course, you might not want us to use it in such a fashion, since that level of participation might make it look like you were "selling out."

I'm a little iffy on the title, though — would it be OK to change it to, say, "Five Missing WP Articles About Women From the 2024 Time 100," or just "Women In the Time 100, Not In Wikipedia"? (It's probably not essential that people know how many there are up-front, and some people might even accuse us of being "clickbaity" just for including any number at all in the title. Also, "five missing women" might be misinterpreted as a suggestion that nobody knows where the women themselves actually are at the moment.)

[orangepi]

"Wikipedia: not writing articles about people before the secondary sources do"?

[Midsize Jake]

"Wikipedia: not writing articles about people before the secondary sources do"?

I don't think Mr. Kraken is suggesting that Wikipedia should have proper articles on these folks (yet), nor am I suggesting it, though he does make a good point about the (lack of) redirects. Then again, I guess you could argue that in a situation like this, a redirect is just a cheap way for Wikipedia to snatch the Google-juice on someone's name from other sites that might have better coverage (in this case, time.com).

Also, I'm not saying he shouldn't have started this thread, or started it after only two days... but assuming any of them read Wikipediocracy forum threads even occasionally, it might have been interesting to see how long it would have taken the Women in Red folks to create articles/redirects for these women if he hadn't.

[Kraken]

There are far better blog posts out there than this really rather dry and involved piece of academia.

Not two wiki sections away from it even....

Was National Banana Day the reason Wikipedia thought Feminism was "gay" for 22 minutes?

Go for the clicks. You know you want to.

And if you really must bore people with dry technical details that make you think, I guess you could go on to pose the question, why is it that the last editor to edit the page before this vandalism, Balance person (T-C-L), is apparently confident enough with Wikipedia to have added this to the article......

Domestic feminism argues that home-making is an important occupation and a choice that should be open to all genders.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Beauman |first=Nicola |date=2024 |title=Domestic Feminism |url=https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0278/ ... 1712849574 |journal=[[The Persephone Biannually]] |volume=34 |pages=7-13}}</ref>

.....but apparently didn't have the "right skills" to deal with that vandalism, so had to go ask the nice people at WikiProject Women In Red (posting their request for help at 07.58) if there was anyone who could "deal with that"? Which there wasn't, the first reply not coming until 08.33.

And why that specific project and not any of the other more logical places you might think a user would post such a request? It would seem to open up a lot of very interesting questions about the nature of the community and whether the many different ways Wikipedia is coming up with to engage Wikipedians isn't coming at the cost of a loss of a certain basic skill set. Or at least a mismatch of skills. How does one even get to nearly 1,000 edits on Wikipedia, over 500 to articles, creating 28 articles, over a 2 year period, and apparently not develop any kind of awareness of the edit history tab?

Or something like that.

[Kraken]

Still red.