Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight

Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, known on Wikipedia as Rosiestep, is an American healthcare administrator, noted for her work as a Wikipedia editor who has created thousands of new articles and for her attempts to address gender disparity on the website, running a project to increase the quantity and quality of women's biographies. She was named co-Wikipedian of the Year in 2016.

Background

Stephenson-Goodknight, of Serbian descent, is the granddaughter of Paulina Lebl-Albala, an active feminist who was the president of the University Women of Yugoslavia. David Albala, her grandfather, was a physician and Zionist leader, who served for a period as president of Belgrade's Sephardi community. At a young age she displayed a keen interest in world culture, but was discouraged by her father from pursuit of a career in anthropology; instead she completed a Master of Business Administration degree.

Stephenson-Goodnight works in Las Vegas, Nevada as a business administrator for a healthcare company, and has homes in that city and in Nevada City, California.

Wikipedia editing

Stephenson-Goodknight began editing Wikipedia in 2007. Her son had edited an article about a town in Ukraine where he was working with the Peace Corps, and told his mother that Wikipedia can be edited by anybody. She began editing later that year when she looked for books published by the Book League of America and found a gap in the site's knowledge resources. She found the encyclopedia to be a suitable outlet for anthropology, citing Margaret Mead as an influence:

Some of you know that I am a cultural anthropologist at heart. I wanted to follow in the footsteps of Margaret Mead and study cultural anthropology at Barnard (my mom’s alma mater), like Margaret did. I wanted to travel to Papua New Guinea and do research on its people, like Margaret did. But my dad said ‘no’ to majoring in anthropology—he wanted something more practical for my university studies. So now, years later, I get to live the life of an armchair cultural anthropologist, writing articles about Goaribari Island and its cannibals. To all the girls out there with impractical dreams, this article is dedicated to you.

Stephenson-Goodknight worked at creating articles on geography, architecture and various biographies for several years, but has more recently concentrated on women's biographies.

By 2013, Stephenson-Goodknight was featured in the UK Huffington Post for having written over 3,000 new articles for Wikipedia, and at that time, over 1000 articles had appeared at the "Did you know?" feature on Wikipedia's main page. As of 2016 she has created over 4,000 new articles, and has made over 100,000 edits. She was the emcee for a San Francisco event celebrating Wikipedia's 15th birthday, and also presented there about Wikipedia's "content gender gap."

The 2016 Wikipedian of the Year awards, granted by Wikipedia trustee Jimmy Wales in recognition of outstanding achievement, named Stephenson-Goodknight as a winner, sharing the award jointly with fellow editor Emily Temple-Wood. At the time of the award, it was noted that she now has over 1,300 articles to have appeared at "Did you know?". She also co-founded WikiProjects Women writers, Women and Women in Red. These projects have increased Wikipedia's percentage of articles on women from 15.5% to 16.35%. She has taken part in related projects such as the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon in April 2016.

Stephenson-Goodknight has drawn attention to systemic bias in traditional encyclopedias, noting that a typical biography of a man is five times longer than one of a woman in the same field. She believes there is information to write stronger biographies, provided people are prepared to search for it. She also suggests it is possible for women to contribute greatly to Wikipedia, explaining, "What Wikipedia needs is you, the female editor, with your unique aptitudes and interests and talkpage tone. Without you, gender imbalance and systemic bias continue on Wikipedia."