Improving gender balance on Wikipedia – Royal Society of Chemistry

Category: 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.

More here:
Improving gender balance on Wikipedia - Royal Society of Chemistry

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August 21st, 2017
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