How academic institutions can help to close Wikipedia’s gender gap
peter.suber's bookmarks 2022-05-23
Summary:
"The world’s largest online encyclopedia mirrors society’s bias towards male achievements. Employers in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine can help to change that....
Since 2018, 500 Women Scientists, a grass-roots advocacy organization of which we are all members, has run more than 30 Wikipedia edit-a-thon sessions — workshops in which Wikipedia experts and novices come together for a guided crash course on the website and a few hours of focused editing. Over biscuits and coffee, we’ve built a community of contributors who are committed to tackling inequalities in the online encyclopedia. We have sponsored in-depth editor training with Wiki Education — a non-profit organization that builds partnerships between academia and the Wikimedia Foundation, which funds Wikipedia and its sibling projects — to address this under-representation....
In the past four years, we’ve created and edited more than 3,000 pages, which have been viewed more than 80 million times: 80 million opportunities to share diverse stories of those working in STEMM, and to slowly change the face of science....
A 2021 ethnographic study3 demonstrated that biographies of women and members of the LGBTQ+ community who meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria are more frequently nominated for deletion than are men’s biographies. Take Nobel laureate Donna Strickland, a physicist at the University of Waterloo in Canada: pre-Nobel, her Wikipedia entry had been tagged for ‘speedy deletion’, and was subsequently deleted, within six minutes of going live. ...
In 2018, only 17.7% of Wikipedia biographies written in English were about women — four years later, the number has increased to 19.2%. This is essential progress, but incremental. We need more editors to collectively chip away at Wikipedia’s gender, racial, geographical and societal bases...."