For five years, Jess Wade has campaigned for minority advocacy in the online encyclopedia. He explained his approach in an interview washington post:October 17.
Make Wikipedia an equal platform between men and women. This is the mission given to 33-year-old British physicist Jess Wade. Since 2017, she has created Wikipedia pages for women scientists from around the world to give visibility to their work, which is often unknown to the general public.
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Promoting minorities in the scientific community
His initiative was born in 2017, from a meeting with American climate scientist Kim Cobb, he says in an interview with “The”. washington post: , published on October 17. A research physicist at Imperial College London is stunned to discover that there is no Wikipedia page devoted to the climate scientist’s discoveries. Then she quickly notes that female scientists are rare in online encyclopedias.
“Wikipedia is used by almost everyone,” he said. But while the site was an incredibly important resource, it suffered from a lack of content, especially for women, but also for people of color.”
Then Jess Wade decides to promote minorities in the scientific community and starts writing files on a participatory platform. Today, the British man has 1,750, but he says that “there is still work to be done”.
Wikipedia, the encyclopedia with male content
“Wikipedia is a powerful way to pay tribute to people who have long been left out of history,” comments the physicist in an interview. washington post:. We have enough women in science, but we don’t do enough to celebrate them.”
Agreed WikiProject The Woman in Red , a group of editors campaigning to reduce gender inequality on the platform, only 19% of English files are about women. Which means that “out of a total of 1,907,982 biographies on the site as of October 10, 2022, only 369,172 are about women,” they write on their Wikipedia page.
The latter being a collaborative site, volunteer-written papers must be validated by administrators who rely on popularity criteria to determine whether or not a page is worthy of publication, Jess Wade explains. “We’re stuck in a spiral where you have to be doubly exclusive when you’re a woman or a person of color to meet the eligibility criteria for articles on a site,” she laments.
Jess Wade’s hard work seems to be paying off already. Within three years, the percentage of women’s pages has increased from 15% to 19%, said Anusha Alikhan, Wikimedia Foundation’s deputy communications director. Washington Post. This represents over 75,000 new female profiles.
In turn, Jess Wade has already won several awards and medals for his scientific research. And now also has its own page in the online encyclopedia.
Source: Le Figaro
