‘Not only do we not have enough women in science, but we aren’t doing enough to celebrate the ones we have,’ said physicist Jess Wade. She decided to take matters into her own hands.
“Wikipedia is a really powerful way to give credit to people who, for a long time, have been written out of history,” she said. “Not only do we not have enough women in science, but we aren’t doing enough to celebrate the ones we have.”
“We do an awful lot of talking about underrepresentation,” Wade added, “but not enough acting on it.” Most evenings, Wade sits at her desk for several hours, looking online for inspiring lesser-known scientists. There is no shortage of potential subjects, she said. “I’ve never sat down and not had someone to write about,” said Wade, who scours archived documents, scientific papers, journals and social media in search of notable people without a Wikipedia page.
She’ll often have 20 internet tabs open at one time, sifting through library archives and institutional sites to scrape together as much information as possible. Each profile takes a few hours to produce.Since Wikipedia is intended to be an unbiased resource, Wade refrains from writing about anyone she knows personally, and she does not contact her subjects to collect further information.“In the process, I actually learn so much science,” she said. “It’s a fun journey.