Is Wikipedia ‘deeply biased’? Sandi Toksvig says it is – so she’s backing a rival
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...
Sandi Toksvig, a comedian, believes that Wikipedia is "deeply biased" against women. According to her, just 19% of the online encyclopedia's biographies are dedicated to women. This bias, she suggests, stems from Wikipedia being edited primarily by "mostly white, middle-aged, European men." Moreover, Wikipedia's content tends to favor wealthier countries, as evidenced by an Oxford Internet Institute study from 2013.
This study found that Wikipedia contained more coverage of Germany than of Africa and South America combined.
Despite its vastness - it holds 65 million articles across more than 300 languages - Wikipedia falls short when it comes to women's representation. Toksvig is determined to rectify this imbalance. She is currently on a global tour to raise funds for her Mappa Mundi project. This project aims to create an "interactive digital atlas" where sidelined or deleted knowledge, particularly about women, can find a home.
One such example Toksvig cites is Donna Strickland, a Canadian physicist who faced repeated rejection of her biographies on Wikipedia until she won a Nobel prize for her work. This is not an isolated case. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, only 19% of Wikipedia biographies concern women.
Toksvig attributes this disparity to the site's predominantly white, middle-aged, European male editors who reportedly have both the time and the technology to maintain the platform. She also notes that Wikipedia's content is heavily skewed towards wealthier countries. For instance, in 2013, the Oxford Internet Institute found that Wikipedia had more coverage of Germany than of Africa and South America combined.
In contrast, Elon Musk has recently attempted to counter this perceived left-wing bias on Wikipedia by launching his own platform, Grokipedia. However, a recent study found that Grokipedia articles are 13 times more likely to contain sources blacklisted by the English Wikipedia community. This includes 42 citations from the neo-Nazi website Stormfront.
Toksvig's proposed Mappa Mundi project, on the other hand, aims to update Wikipedia's list of people who died on the toilet to include more women. This is a small but significant step towards addressing Wikipedia's gender bias.
Written by urgent.news from Guardian Technology's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
