Physicist Writes Thousands of Wiki Biographies for Women in STEM
- Editor OGN Daily
- Oct 14
- 1 min read
Jess Wade wrote her first Wikipedia biography in 2019 about Kim Cobb, an American climatologist who - despite earning several scientific accolades - had never been written about on the world's most popular online encyclopedia.
“I met her at a science event, and I was massively impressed,” said Wade, a British physicist, who, after a quick search online, was stunned to see that Cobb had no profile on the public platform.
Wade had accidentally stumbled upon something she found troubling: Cobb was one of countless deserving women whose names - and lengthy list of achievements - had yet to be documented on Wikipedia, launched in 2001, and now used by roughly 2 billion people a month who are seeking information about people, ideas and topics.
“Despite women making up 51 percent of the global population, only about 19 percent of biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women,” Wade mentioned in a 2024 podcast recording with Scientific American. “And that’s not just women scientists. That’s women in all professional areas. That’s anyone that the Internet has deemed notable.”
Wikipedia is “used by pretty much everyone,” says Wade. She realized that “despite it being this incredibly important resource, it was suffering from a lack of content, particularly about women, but also about people of color.”
She decided to set about fixing this imbalance and, since 2019, has taken it upon herself to write more than 2,000 Wikipedia pages for female and minority scientists and engineers whose accomplishments were not chronicled on the site.
