Is Wikipedia ‘deeply biased’? Sandi Toksvig says it is – so she’s backing a rival
Source: The Guardian ·
Just 19% of the online encyclopedia’s biographies are of women. Is this because it’s edited by ‘mostly white, middle-aged, European men’, as the comedian claims?Name: Wikipedia.Age: 25. Continue reading...
From the source
Appearance: Patronising and deeply biased. Is this because you haven’t got your own page? Well, yes. But these aren’t my words. They’re the words of Sandi Toksvig. But it has 65m articles across more than 300 languages! It’s the largest knowledge resource ever assembled! That may be, but it isn’t very good at women. According to Toksvig? Yes – and she’s very serious about it. As we speak, she is travelling the world trying to raise money to build something better. She is? Yes. Along with the University of Cambridge, she hopes that her Mappa Mundi project will be an “interactive digital atlas where we can find a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted”. And a lot of the sidelined or deleted knowledge is about women? It is. She cites the case of Donna Strickland, a Canadian physicist who repeatedly had her draft biographies rejected by Wikipedia, until she won a Nobel prize for her work. Awkward. But it goes broader. By the Wikimedia Foundation’s…