Effort begins to get more Yale women Wikipedia pages

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — An effort is underway to develop Wikipedia pages for more renowned Yale University women.

Organizers of Tuesday’s “editathon” also hope in the process to encourage more women to edit articles on the popular online encyclopedia, which relies on user-generated, crowd-sourced information.

Wikipedia Foundation, the California-based nonprofit that oversees the technological side of Wikipedia, is welcoming such efforts to make the site more inclusive. Spokeswoman Samantha Lien says about 18% of the 1.6 million biographies posted on the English version of Wikipedia are about women, or roughly 300,000.

That includes about 86,000 new articles about women posted over the past few years.

Lien says the vast majority of Wikipedia editors tend to be men.