Jessica Wade: belief

Transcript context

…We put you in charge. How do you make it better? Or is it perfect? It can’t be perfect, right? I think it’s a perfect vision. It’s a perfect idea. From working in universities, we have so much access to knowledge, largely taxpayer-funded access to knowledge that people don’t have, so we do have this responsibility to take that information and give it to them. Unfortunately, Wikipedia does have huge gaps in its content because of the types of people who edit it. So, because you’ve got a relatively small group of people who edit Wikipedia a lot, doing this huge public service in creating content, the majority of them are men. The majority of them are from the Northern Hemisphere; they’re mainly men from North America. You have certain gaps in the type of content that’s on there, particularly in biographies of women. Anything to do with current science is quite badly written about on Wikipedia because lots of academics don’t see it as a good time investment. If I was going to change Wikipedia for the better, not that I think it — well, I do think it could be a little bit better — I would work on improving those content gaps. I’d work on really saying we need more academic people to start contributing their time to editing this. You know what it’s like working in a university, getting people to want to teach and not just do their research all the time. Actually, we need to focus on this public service act of giving people access to knowledge. But we really need to start rectifying some of these content gaps about the global south, about emerging science, fixing pages about climate so that we provide nonpartisan information to lots of people, but also on detailing the contributions of women to all aspects of society. I focus on science and engineering, but there are women doing awesome things in casting and movies and in writing, and I think we need to start telling their stories too. What if I said something like the following hypothesis? Autistic people very much enjoy organizing information. Males are much more likely to be autistic than women. Autistic people therefore really like Wikipedia, so it’s no surprise it’s a matter of preference that there are so many male editors on Wikipedia. That’s a kind of scientific claim, right? It could be true. Maybe it’s even likely to be true. Or not?…

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