Fall 2025 update on the Women in Biomechanics Wikibomb Initiative
11/19/2025 10:32 am
In the summer of 2025, biomechanists from around the world gathered for the 30th Congress of the International Society of Biomechanics (ISB) in Stockholm, Sweden. Two weeks later, more gathered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA for the annual meeting of the American Society of Biomechanics (ASB). Both conferences kicked off with a pre-meeting day of workshops featuring a Women in Biomechanics Wikithon event where participants learned new Wikipedia editing skills and made a tangible impact to increase representation of women in biomechanics.
There is a gender bias on Wikipedia
A Wikithon is a workshop dedicated to teaching participants how to create and edit pages on Wikipedia. Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 as an online encyclopedia open to everyone to edit or create new articles on, and by December 2001, it contained 19,000 articles. After 24 years, Wikipedia has grown to over 6.8 million articles in English alone. It is accessible in over 330 languages, consistently ranks among the top search results, and is the 5th most popular website in the world. Because it is free, open, and accessible, Wikipedia attracts an enormous volume of content and traffic. It is also deeply integrated into many search engines and smart technologies, meaning that responses from virtual assistants, such as Siri, Google, or Alexa, often draw directly from Wikipedia.
Despite its openness, Wikipedia reflects social biases, including gender bias. On English-language Wikipedia, only ~20% of biographies are about women. Biographical articles about women also are more often marked for deletion, partially due to a lack of available references. As we’ll discuss later, every statement made on Wikipedia must be supported by a reliable citation. Unfortunately, individuals who have received less media coverage or documentation are harder to reference, meaning societal inequities are mirrored and reinforced on the platform. To address this imbalance, there are projects on Wikipedia that aim to amend these biases. One prominent example is called Women in Red, which promotes the creation of new articles about women. Dr. Jess Wade, an Assistant Professor at Imperial College London, UK, is an advocate for gender and racial equality in STEM and noticed in 2017 how few notable women in STEM had Wikipedia biographies. She launched the Women in STEM Wikibomb, and by February 2024, she had contributed 2,100 biographies of women and other minority groups. Dr. Wade’s efforts inspired the Women in Biomechanics Wikibomb.
Beginning the Women in Biomechanics Wikibomb Initiative
In 2023, a search for ‘Women in Biomechanics’ by Dr. Julie Steele, Emeritus Professor at University of Wollongong, Australia, on Wikipedia returned no results. This discovery led her to issue a call to action in the biomechanics community through her 2023 ISB Wartenweiler Memorial Lecture alongside a paper published in the Journal of Biomechanics in 2023. In both her keynote address and paper, Dr. Steele spoke about the important contributions of women throughout the history of ISB and the field more broadly. She also addressed the gender disparities in the ISB – where women have often served as secretary or treasurer, but rarely as president – and what can be done to support women and under-represented genders in biomechanics. Thus began the Women in Biomechanics Wikibomb, an ISB initiative to increase the visibility of women biomechanists on Wikipedia, with the goal to inspire to younger female scientists to envision futures in biomechanics!
Leading up to the summer of 2025, a team of volunteers from the ISB, in collaboration with the International Women in Biomechanics (IWB), led and coordinated by Dr. Celeste Coltman and Dr. Fraje Watson, have been working to create and update Wikipedia biographies of notable women in biomechanics. Through asynchronous online efforts, the team created 13 new biographies for women in biomechanics. To keep moving this initiative forward, the first in-person Wiki Edit-a-thon event took place at the Australian and New Zealand Society of Biomechanics (ANZSB) meeting in November 2024. Following its success, two more Wikithons were organized for the summer 2025 meetings of the ISB and ASB.
Women in Biomechanics Wikithons at ISB 2025 and ASB 2025
Before the official start of the ISB Congress, over 30 attendees gathered to learn how to create an account on Wikipedia and then create and edit pages for women in biomechanics. Event organizers, Dr. Tamara Grant and Dr. Katie Knaus, shared information with workshop participants about the Women in Biomechanics Wikibomb initiative and the impact they could have through their work at the event. Following the introduction, Alice Woods from WikiMedia Australia instructed the participants on how to create and edit biographies in Wikipedia. For the next three hours, participants worked on their Wikipedia pages with ongoing technical support from Alice and the organizers. The ISB wiki dashboard tracked the event’s impact, reporting that 114 articles were edited, resulting in 542 total edits, 36.2K words added, 546 citations contributed, resulting in 180K views.
To kick off the annual ASB meeting, over 20 conference attendees gathered for another Wikithon - some returning after participating at ISB and some brand new! Following an introduction by workshop organizers, Dr. Caitlin Banks and Dr. Katie Knaus, participants received training in Wikipedia editing from Rebekah Miller and Kelsey Cowles of the Health Sciences Library System at the University of Pittsburgh. Additionally, Andres Vera presented on using Wikipedia as an education tool, with tips on creating assignments that engage students as Wikipedia editors. The rest of the four-hour workshop was spent working on pages with the support of the Pitt Wiki representatives and workshop organizers. Stats were tracked on the ASB wiki dashboard, which reported 11 articles edited with 51 total edits, 3.95K words added, and 31 citations contributed, resulting in 1.08K views.
These workshops both produced tangible impact on increasing the representation of women in biomechanics on Wikipedia while also equipping participants with new technical and editorial skills. During these workshops, participants learned how to navigate and edit Wikipedia pages and were provided with a list of suggested women in biomechanics who met Wikipedia’s required notability requirement. As emphasized during the sessions, every Wikipedia article must be supported by reliable secondary sources, with a basic article containing a minimum of 3 citations, although more citations make a better case for notability and reliability. Reliable secondary sources include books, academic or professional peer reviewed journals, news, archives, which have undergone quality control and checking by an editor or publisher for, or have peer review processes. In contrast, sources lacking editorial oversight, such as personal websites, Facebook, YouTube, Blogs pages, sponsored or paid for promotion content, are not considered reputable sources on Wikipedia. As a result, a focus of these workshops was not only on learning the mechanics of working on pages but also the standards of the Wikipedia editing community.
Wikipedia rules are decided and monitored by the global community of volunteer editors, who have defined five guiding “pillars”
1) Wikipedia is an encyclopedia - it’s not a marketing brochure, it’s not a place for personal reports or opinions, it’s not an essay, it’s not a newspaper… it’s an encyclopedia.
2) Wikipedia has a neutral point of view - all articles must be verifiable through citations and references that demonstrate accuracy, neutrality, and notability.
3) Wikipedia is free content – everything on Wikipedia can be freely used and referenced, but contributors do not own or have any copyright over their contribution. All contributions become part of an open repository, which anyone can edit or modify. So be prepared for anything! Importantly, materials cannot be copied directly from copyrighted sources. Editors must write in their own words to avoid plagiarism, and automated Wikipedia bots continuously scan edited pages for plagiarism. Content identified as copied or plagiarized is typically flagged and deleted within hours.
4) Wikipedians should be respectful and courteous - if you disagree with things written on a Wikipedia page, you can use Talk pages to discuss and resolve disagreements collaboratively and constructively.
5) Wikipedia does not have firm rules! While guides, policies, and templates provide structure, flexibility is essential to community decision-making. Nonetheless, the editing community is very strict that one cannot write or edit pages about themselves, their employers, family members, or close associates
Interested in contributing to the Women in Biomechanics Wikibomb Initiative?
While exciting progress has been made in representing women in biomechanics on Wikipedia, there is more work to be done! The growing list of Wikipedia profiles of notable biomechanists can be found here. You can contribute to this growing effort by creating new pages – an excellent starting point is to use this template. When creating pages, it is best to select individuals you do not know personally to ensure objectivity and maintain Wikipedia’s standards for neutrality. For inspiration, you can check this growing list of notable women in biomechanics. The list includes initial references to help you get started, and you can also see where other Wiki editors have already started or made progress on existing pages. Another valuable way to contribute is by editing existing pages to add missing sections, expand short sections, update outdated or incomplete information, rearrange information that is out of order, update information lacking citations by adding in references, or correct formatting or links to other pages. If you are interested in contributing but are new to editing Wikipedia, you can use the handout from the workshops to get started.
We hope you will join us at a future Women in Biomechanics Wikithon - maybe we’ll see you at the World Congress of Biomechanics meeting in Vancouver CA in July 2026!
Author
Katie Knaus, Ph.D. (she/her) (Colorado School of Mines)
