46 | New Scientist | 8 February 2020
Making history
The most widely used encyclopedia on the planet has huge gaps
when it comes to influential women or people of colour in science.
Physicist Jess Wade is trying to fill them, she tells Joshua Howgego
W
HEN Jess Wade isn’t working in
the physics laboratories of Imperial
College London, she is fighting to
make science more accessible for all. Her
flagship project is to create and edit articles
on Wikipedia, humanity’s largest ever
encyclopedia, to ensure that the scientific
contributions made by women and other
under-represented communities aren’t lost
to posterity. It is thanks to her that the website
has pages on Magdalena Skipper, the first
woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the
journal Nature, Jo Dunkley, the astrophysicist
and science communicator at Princeton
University, and almost 900 other pioneering
women in science.
Anybody with an internet connection
can edit Wikipedia, but most of its tens of
thousands of editors remain in the shadows.
Wade has made headlines, however, winning
the Wikimedia Foundation’s 2019 award for
UK Wikimedian of the year. But not all the
attention has been positive. Late last year, a
string of her articles were flagged for deletion
by fellow editors, ostensibly because their
subjects were insufficiently noteworthy for
a global audience. She publicly called those
editors out for systematic bias and the
controversy made it into the UK press,
highlighting the shadowy power plays that
dictate what information ends up on Wikipedia.
We spoke to her about what drove her to
undertake this project and why it sometimes
isn’t so well received.Joshua Howgego: What makes Wikipedia
worth your time?
Jess Wade: Wikipedia is visited millions of
times a day – that’s just the English version – THOMAS ANGUS/IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDONFeatures Interview
by people all over the world, in all walks of
life, which makes it a super, super important
platform. But only about 18 per cent of the
English-language biographies are about
women and, while it’s harder to get data on
other under-represented groups, there is no
doubt that scientists with disabilities and from
the LGBTQ community, for example, are less
likely to have a Wikipedia page. So since the
beginning of 2018, I’ve been trying to improve
the representation of women scientists and
people of colour on it, and particularly people
from the global south.Have you faced any challenges getting these
profiles on Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has strict eligibility criteria for
notability. Fair enough – not every single
person you meet should be on there. The
problem is that the criteria are written in a way
that ensures white male academics are moreprevalent on the site than other scientists:
achievements like holding named chairs at
an institution, having contributed widely to
scientific literature and holding prestigious
awards and fellowships. Things we know are
biased towards white men from Western
countries. The hardest one is finding some
independent, reputable source that has already
written about these scientists. As a result, my
biographies sometimes get flagged as being
not notable enough for inclusion. One
weekend in late 2019 I tweeted about this issue,
and it got a lot of attention because people
thought that it was Wikipedia that was
responsible rather than other editors.Why do you think those editors flag your
pages in this way?
It really surprises me that this happens.
Wikipedia really is a global project, and we’re
all working together on this free knowledge.
Why then, when some other editor reads a
page that they think could do with an extra
citation, do they not look for one themselves?
I think there are some weird power dynamics
going on, with a few individual editors at the
top of Wikipedia’s hierarchy who think that
they can control what information is valued
by the site.What was it that got you started as a campaigner
outside your day job?
It was when I read Angela Saini’s book Inferior.
I think Angela is the most important writer
and broadcaster that we have in the UK right
now. Inferior looks at the way women have
been misinterpreted in and misreported by
science. When I read that book, it completely
transformed the way I think about inequality.