WHEN Jess Wade isn鈥檛 working in the physics laboratories of Imperial College London, she is fighting to make science more accessible for all. Her flagship project is to create and edit articles on Wikipedia, humanity鈥檚 largest ever encyclopedia, to ensure that the scientific contributions made by women and other under-represented communities aren鈥檛 lost to posterity. It is thanks to her that the website has pages on Magdalena Skipper, the first woman to serve as editor-in-chief of the journal Nature, Jo Dunkley, the astrophysicist and science communicator at Princeton University, and almost 900 other pioneering women in science.
Anybody with an internet connection can edit Wikipedia, but most of its tens of thousands of editors remain in the shadows. Wade has made headlines, however, winning the Wikimedia Foundation鈥檚 2019 award for UK Wikimedian of the year. But not all the attention has been positive. Late last year, a string of her articles were flagged for deletion by fellow editors, ostensibly because their subjects were insufficiently noteworthy for a global audience. She publicly called those editors out for systematic bias and the controversy made it into the UK press, highlighting the shadowy power plays that dictate what information ends up on Wikipedia.
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We spoke to her about what drove her to undertake this project and why it sometimes isn鈥檛 so well received.
Joshua Howgego: What makes Wikipedia worth your time?
Jess Wade: Wikipedia is visited millions of times a day 鈥� that鈥檚 just the English version 鈥� by people all over the world, in all walks of life, which makes it a super, super important platform. But only about 18 per cent of the English-language biographies are about women and, while it鈥檚 harder to get data on other under-represented groups, there is no doubt that scientists with disabilities and from the LGBTQ community, for example, are less likely to have a Wikipedia page. So since the beginning of 2018, I鈥檝e been trying to improve the representation of women scientists and people of colour on it, and particularly people from the global south.
Have you faced any challenges getting these profiles on Wikipedia?
Wikipedia has strict eligibility criteria for notability. Fair enough 鈥� not every single person you meet should be on there. The problem is that the criteria are written in a way that ensures white male academics are more prevalent on the site than other scientists: achievements like holding named chairs at an institution, having contributed widely to scientific literature and holding prestigious awards and fellowships. Things we know are biased towards white men from Western countries. The hardest one is finding some independent, reputable source that has already written about these scientists. As a result, my biographies sometimes get flagged as being not notable enough for inclusion. One weekend in late 2019 I tweeted about this issue, and it got a lot of attention because people thought that it was Wikipedia that was responsible rather than other editors.
Why do you think those editors flag your pages in this way?
It really surprises me that this happens. Wikipedia really is a global project, and we鈥檙e all working together on this free knowledge. Why then, when some other editor reads a page that they think could do with an extra citation, do they not look for one themselves? I think there are some weird power dynamics going on, with a few individual editors at the top of Wikipedia鈥檚 hierarchy who think that they can control what information is valued by the site.
What was it that got you started as a campaigner outside your day job?
It was when I read Angela Saini鈥檚 book Inferior. I think Angela is the most important writer and broadcaster that we have in the UK right now. Inferior looks at the way women have been misinterpreted in and misreported by science. When I read that book, it completely transformed the way I think about inequality.
Have you had to overcome any obstacles yourself?
One episode in particular really frustrated me. I had just been invited to speak at a nanomaterials conference in Paris. I looked at the website and it was sadly typical: a wall of 32 photographs of white men. Instantly when you see that kind of thing, it makes you think: they didn鈥檛 invite me for my research, but because someone had criticised their lack of diversity. I wrote back and raised some concerns, and, to cut a long story short, I ended up recruiting a group of fantastic women to come and speak at this meeting. But then we were sidelined into a parallel session for about 12 people called 鈥淲omen in nanomaterials鈥�. It was just us women talking to each other about our work. I have never felt so patronised and humiliated in my life.
Tell us more about your work on nanomaterials.
I鈥檓 trying to make new materials for use in TV screens and mobile phone displays. I work in particular with semiconductors that have chiral properties, which means that their structures are non-superimposable mirror images, like your left and right hand. We can get these molecules to absorb and emit light in far more sophisticated ways than present-day materials so that when you put them in your TV or mobile phone, the screen is much brighter and uses much less power.
鈥淭here are some weird power dynamics on Wikipedia鈥�
Does chirality matter beyond the lab bench?
Lots of things are chiral, including snail shells, screws and fusilli pasta. Actually, it turns out that about 95 per cent of fusilli is a right-handed helix. But the most efficient way to pack the pieces of pasta together would be if we had equal quantities of the left and right-handed sort. Because we disproportionately make right-handed pasta, the packets have to be about 10 per cent bigger than needed.
What do you think we should do to encourage more girls to study physics?
We鈥檝e got to a state in the UK where people are doing an awful lot of outreach at the school level. But for physics, the gender balance of both hasn鈥檛 shifted in 50 years. We still have this misconception that if scientists go and stand in front of 40 kids for a lunchtime, we鈥檒l inspire them all to study A level physics. That鈥檚 naive. Instead, we should try to think about using evidence a bit more, using things that have worked. For example, if a scientist worked with one schoolteacher for the whole of their PhD, this would probably result in more pupils having chosen to study physics than if they went to a different school every week.
If you could have a long conversation with any of the people you鈥檝e written about, who would it be?
A mathematician called . Hers was one of the first Wikipedia pages I made. She was born in 1930 in Virginia, and studied maths in a completely different environment to today. She went on to work for the US government and did early computing that was the basis for GPS technology. Since the Wikipedia page went up, she鈥檚 been in the BBC鈥檚 100 Women list, an annual line-up of influential and inspirational women chosen from around the world. She鈥檚 been inducted into the Hall of Fame, and she finished her PhD by distance learning in 2018. This woman is approaching 90 and is still a rock star.
