Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I prefer not to know, but also that’s not why I’m doing it. I just want these stories there. But sometimes, if I’m trying to get, particularly academics, excited about editing and I’m like, “Well, there’s 15 billion people who look at this every month, and we did this Wikipedia edit last time, and a million people have already looked at the pages.” Then they’re like, “Well, I’m going to go on and write about the science I do, then.” The thing I find amazing isn’t the kind of Wikipedia data in the numbers that come back, but seeing how these people are then celebrated in the public eye. There is a phenomenal mathematician that I wrote about, called Gladys West, who is 91 now. Born in Virginia, went to a historically Black college and university, studied maths, became a high school teacher for maths before working for the US government and doing the calculations that enabled GPS. She worked out how far from a perfect sphere the surface of the earth was so that they could put satellites around it and help us with navigation. When I wrote about Gladys West, it was the beginning of my Wiki editing world. It was 2018, and there was very little about her online. She was 90. She’d done all these things in the ’60s and ’70s, and she is an extraordinary woman, but very little about her, and really little honoring her and celebrating her. Now her Wikipedia page is up. She’s in all of these lists of top women in the world. She’s been inducted into the US Air Force Hall of Fame. She’s won a medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering. Every time I see people talking about GPS, they’re like, “Yes, Dr. Gladys West, mathematician, enabled this.” I don’t want the metric from Wikipedia that tells me how many times that’s been viewed. I want society to be like, “Look at this cool, awesome woman, or this cool, awesome scientist of color.” Now we’re starting to celebrate them. I like that. I guess it’s enabled by Wikipedia that the world is starting to honor them. A lot of the problems of science funding, I think, stem from the fact that bureaucracies ossify over time and once-dynamic institutions become just very difficult to work with. Should we expect the same to happen with Wikipedia? Which, of course, is a nonprofit. I think it’s interesting. I don’t know if you’ve had Wikipedia people on the podcast.…

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