Celebrating International Women’s Day 2025 in Perth, Scotland

By Gill Ryan, Wikimedia editor and trainer, founder of Perth Women on Wikipedia

On International Women’s Day 2025, Perth Women on Wikipedia celebrated by researching and sharing the stories of remarkable women from Perth’s history. The project started as a six week course run in partnership between Culture Perth and Kinross Libraries and Wikimedia UK in 2023. Since then we have run themed editing workshops and given talks about Perth’s women and for IWD25, we did both!

We gave a talk on Perth Women on Wikipedia at an event in Perth Civic Hall, then headed to AK Bell Library for a PWOW workshop. Running the workshop in partnership with the library’s local history team meant participants could learn about the many physical and digital resources they can access in the library as well as Wikipedia editing skills. We had the amazingly knowledgeable staff on hand to tell us about the resources and help point us in the right direction.

Research

We were able to research and improve Wikipedia biographies of notable women using reliable sources from the library. A reliable source must have a named author and a publisher. If no reliable sources can be found on a topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it. Luckily, the local newspaper catalogue was a trove of articles and obituaries of notable Perth women. Last year, we added nearly 10,000 words to Wikipedia, including 144 new references from sources we found in the library. On IWD we added another 43 references and a fantastic 6000 words!

Jess Smith

One of the articles we improved was that of Jess Smith, a writer and storyteller from a Perthshire Traveller background. Her article was a stub with no photograph, but as it happened Jess was doing a book event in a local bookshop the day before, so I popped in and asked if I could take a photo for her Wikipedia article. She was happy to and it gave me the opportunity to demo uploading images to Wikimedia Commons during the workshop. With this and some additional sources the editors turned up, the article was significantly improved (see below).

The workshop was open to seasoned editors as well as newbies and we had a lovely mix of experience and ages. Everyone had an interest in women’s history and were keen to get stuck into our worklist, which has grown from an initial 37 women to more than 160. Some of them have biographies that need to be improved while others are still waiting for one to be created, despite their many accomplishments. We’re working on it. And we’re happy to share the list, for example with Perth Civic Trust which is aiming to install new heritage plaques in Perth, with at least a third of them being for women.

Wikimedia UK Support

We’re very grateful to Wikimedia UK for providing project funding for the workshop, which enabled us to contribute to venue overheads and provide refreshments for our busy editors as they worked to make Wikipedia less sexist on International Women’s Day. Projects like PWOW have contributed in small and important ways to the growth of women’s biographies on Wikipedia, from 15.5% in 2015 to just over 20% in December 2024.

We have plans this year to provide more regular support for new editors, with a monthly club starting in June. We would also like to engage more with LGBTQ+ and other minoritised communities in Perth and are planning themed workshops later this year.

Images: (Gillaween, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Contact details: 

• perthwomenonwikipedia@gmail.com
• @Perthwomenwiki.bsky.social