Improving gender balance on Wikipedia

Claire Murray, Alice White and Jess Wade, Imperial College London, are concerned about the underrepresentation of women on Wikipedia. They explain how they are working to change this, one ‘wikithon’ at a time.

In a world where we rely on technology to feed facts to our fingertips, we assume that the terabytes of information online is up-to-date, unbiased and accurate.

Only 20 years ago, all of this information would have been deep within encyclopaedias, stored safely on the shelves of libraries, carefully consulted for clarification. In 2017, we instead assume that everyone of importance has, at the very minimum, a biography on Wikipedia.

But wait just a minute right there! Profiling English-language Wikipedia reveals that only 17% of the biography articles pages are for women. And this 17% is a big improvement on the 14% only six years ago. To quote a world leader: "SAD!" There are clearly heaps of notable women without Wikipedia representation across all disciplines, before we even start to think about women in chemistry.

Be bold, not reckless

At our London events we have been joined by Mikkaila Mckkever-Willis, MRes student at Imperial College London. We start off with stories from chemistry’s 175 faces, like that of Kathleen Lonsdale, an Irish crystallographer who is not as celebrated as she should be. We discuss some of the exciting scientific research underway where we work, at Diamond Light Source and Imperial College London.

Alice then talks through how to "be bold, not reckless", teaching them the ways of Wikipedia and the importance of proper referencing and creative commons. Before each event, we create lists of names of women relevant to the wikithon location. For our Imperial College event, we circulated a request for women to the Department of Chemistry.

Our first response was from Helen Sharman, the first Brit in space, calling for better representation of technicians on Wikipedia. The attendees pick a name, then begin to trawl university pages, archived journals and the resources of learned societies. Each and every one of them makes a direct difference to global knowledge by creating, editing and updating the pages of these outstanding women.

Exciting and empowering

This is an incredibly powerful kind of outreach, one that simultaneously gives students and participants direct ownership over their – incredibly public – work, but also preserves an accurate representation of the important people in our world for future generations. Both the volunteers, teachers and students leave feeling empowered and excited knowing that they have contributed towards making the world a better place.

It was very telling that both the students and teachers could only name four women scientists at the very start of the day (Try it yourself! No cheating!) but by the end of the day they were reeling off facts and achievements of the fantastic figures they had learnt about.

It is important to realise that everyone can (and should!) edit Wikipedia. You can make a difference right from your own laboratory, by ensuring that the beautiful science of chemistry is accurately and robustly represented on Wikipedia for future generations to enjoy.

There are lots of opportunities to get involved in these edit-a-thons or even to help make a difference from your own home. Check out the Wikiproject Women in Red and Wikiproject Women Scientists for inspiration.

And remember, science is for everyone, and should be accessible by anyone.

Dr Claire Murray works at the Diamond Light Source, Dr Alice White at the Wellcome Trust and Dr Jess Wade at Imperial College London.