New Scientist - 02.18.2020

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 – TH

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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 more

prevalent 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.