Jessica Wade: belief

Transcript context

…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? I think before we test that side, we should probably get data. I think there’s probably a huge number of autistic women who would say that, actually, it’s just very underdiagnosed in women because they socially assimilate to take on the very virtues or the stereotypes that you, as a woman, have to have as a young person in society. So, they put a blanket over issues of autism. But I’m not going to go there because I’m not an expert, but I think that’s what they’d say. Actually, I think everyone gets excited about this contribution to open knowledge. I’ve written a bunch of Wikipedia pages, but I’ve also trained a lot of people in how to edit Wikipedia, from young people in high schools to academics at universities to members of the general public. And they find it awesome, this idea that you can research something, pull together all of these different sources, maybe do some kind of history aspect and go through archives, and then write something that’s actually on the internet. If you tell a high school kid who’s used to writing papers that sit in a desk and then eventually get shredded, “You’re going to write something that the whole world will see,” everyone gets excited about that, irrespective of their gender or of their ethnicity. I think we should do the study. We should get the data and try and find out how many Wikipedia editors are autistic. But more, just creating this ecosystem where people who get this opportunity to learn and find out awesome facts also feel that social responsibility to give that back and give that access to everyone else in the world. Because maybe Wikipedia isn’t so important in North America or Europe, where we have free and open access to a lot of literature or a lot of texts, or we have popular-science publishing, but in other parts of the world where they don’t have access to that, actually having Wikipedia is completely critical. I wish we’d get away from this kind of blame. It’s just like the women scientists thing. A lot of people get angry that these kinds of topics aren’t on Wikipedia. Instead of getting angry, I think you should just do something about it. It takes nothing to contribute and to edit and to learn how to edit. Everyone should sit there and give everyone in the world this access to the knowledge that they have. Will GPT models take significant market share from Wikipedia? Because if you type in the name of an obscure female — or just an obscure scientist — into ChatGPT or its successors, it’ll give you a lot of information. It’s not perfect, but actually, the more obscure the person, the more likely it is to be accurate.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.