This Scientist Is Updating Wikipedia with Women, POC, & LGBTQ+ History

Despite what your high school teacher may have taught you, most of us — journalists, politicians, and researchers included — still go to Wikipedia to get information. That’s why the site boasts of having over 30 million unique views a day.

Well, despite being supposedly “unbiased” the vast majority of articles on Wikipedia are written by and about straight white men.

Last year, Dr. Jess Wade of Imperial College London made it her mission to help balance out the content on Wikipedia. Every day in 2018, she wrote at least one Wikipedia page dedicated to a woman, person of color, or LGBTQ individual in science in the hopes to combat the lack of diversity seen on the site, which is especially poor in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics).

She tweeted a short video of all the articles she wrote this year, which has racked up over 170,000 views in the past 48 hours.

“I think we can [challenge stereotypes] now, and Wikipedia has a huge amount of power. People visit the website 30 million times a day,” Wade told Daily Mail.

“You don't realize how biased Wikipedia is in itself; 80 to 90 percent of the people editing it are white men in America and just 17 percent of articles on English Wikipedia are about women.”

She continued, “If you're just an average user, the chances are you're not going to come across women or people of color on Wikipedia.”

Jess spent anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half each day to create Wikipedia pages, often leaving social events early to write them.

Wade concluded, “Editing Wikipedia is a small change, but I hope it gets read by young children who want to study sciences, engineering and maths and see that girls, or people from different economic classes, can do STEM subjects.”

“Physics is seen as a very middle-class white boy topic, and we need to stop that. We have all these new challenges such as climate change, and we need the best people possible, whoever that may be, and we're not getting that at the moment.”