Jess Wade on science, storytelling and Wikipedia biographies: transcript

Key points

• Wade says mass media such as CSI and Hidden Figures shaped who studies science, so storytelling and representation matter.
• Wikipedia is widely used in schools, by the media and by voice assistants, so its content shapes public knowledge.
• Fewer than one in five English Wikipedia biographies are about women, and the UK curriculum for ages 15 and 16 names no woman scientist.
• Since 2018 she has written over 1400 biographies of women and other underrepresented people in science and engineering.
• Her article on Gladys West, who programmed early GPS technology, led to wider media coverage and a Royal Academy of Engineering medal.
• Closing thank-you messages from Wikimania organizers follow her talk.

Chapters

1. 0:27Introduction and motivation for outreach
2. 2:47Books, media and the power of representation
3. 5:33Why Wikipedia matters for education and media
4. 7:53The gender gap in Wikipedia biographies
5. 10:05Writing biographies of scientists
6. 10:35Gladys West and the hidden figure story
7. 14:31Why Wikipedia matters and closing birthday wishes
8. 15:34Wikimania organizers' thank-you messages

Full transcript

0:27That was such a great panel from such a group of eloquent experts. Thank you so much for joining us at Wikimania. I don't know about you, but this is the kind of nuanced conversation that always helps me put our work in perspective. We will now welcome a contribution by Dr. Jess Wade, a beloved community member and physicist at the Imperial College London. She will talk to us about science and storytelling. Who we are, who we talk about matters. Hello to everyone at Wikimania 2021. I am so thrilled that we could all come together and celebrate this completely bizarre year and what has been Wikipedia's 20th birthday.

1:08There's never been a more important time for democratized access to knowledge and I know that everyone attending this symposium and part of the Wikimania efforts is truly on the path the changing our future. My name is Jess and I'm a physicist at Imperial College London and today I'm going to talk to you. A little bit about the work that I've done on Wikipedia. I've been working for a really, really long time to try and improve the representation of women and people of colour and LGBTQ+, and generally people from historically marginalised communities in science and engineering.

1:45Because I truly believe that we will do the best research, we will make the best discoveries, and we'll build a better world if everyone is involved with that effort. and for a while i had been thinking i really really need to be part of this movement for change what can i do to improve the representation of women and people of color there's an incredible quotation that's inspired much of my efforts from the us novelist tony morrison and in that quotation she says i tell my students when you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for just remember that your real job is that if you are free you need to free somebody else if you have some power then your job is to empower somebody else and i believe that about outreach and advocacy i believe that about our work on wikipedia and i believe that about every single thing i'm passionate about i'm incredibly lucky to have found science to have been supported to become a scientist and to truly love what i do but some

2:47part of that luck means that I have to give back to the scientific community. So when I was an undergraduate and a postgraduate physicist at Imperial, I started arranging all of these events, bringing in high school students, bringing in hundreds of high school students to be introduced to science and engineering in our ancient lecture theatres and to learn about how extraordinary science can be. But that wasn't quite enough. I didn't feel like I was reaching most of the population. We're limited on the numbers of interactions that we can have in person.

3:21And also, I was left feeling a little bit like when these kids leave these lecture theatres or these seminar rooms, how are they going to remember that scientific information? How are they going to remember the stories that we told? I then read two phenomenally important and powerful books and books that really transformed my life. Inferior and Superior by Angela Saini. Angela is an engineer turned award-winning science writer and journalist. And in these two books, she unpicks the origins of racial and gender stereotypes in our societies and shows just how bad science has been weaponized against people from marginalized groups for centuries to try and show to them that they can't do science and how incorrect and damaging that has been.

4:10These books made me really speak up. They made me speak a lot louder than I had been before on issues around stereotypes and what we needed to do to change. And also what the scientific community needed to do to get better. I also started thinking about how people got information. You know, they get it in a whole bunch of different ways, whether that's what they see online, what they get through social media, what they watch on the television, what they watch on the radio. All of these different channels are plowing into what people feel or think about a subject or topic.

4:43And we know that mass media representation of different groups can have a huge impact. We've seen it with shows like CSI, where having female leads, having particularly women leading, had a huge impact on the number of women studying forensic science at universities and still has that legacy today. more recently we've seen it with incredible movies like hidden figures telling the stories of the african-american computers who enabled human space flight and the transformation that has made for young women and young men all across the states and beyond so storytelling matters who we put on platforms matters and how we engage with the public really matters And lo and behold, the best place I think that we can all make a difference in that is on Wikipedia.

5:33You all know how important Wikipedia is, or you wouldn't be here, but it's the fifth most frequently visited website in the world. It's accessed every single month by about 1.5 billion devices who look at it about 15 billion times. And this has only become more true and more important throughout the pandemic. wikipedia is relied on in education settings whether that's in your high school whether that's in your college whether that's someone at university but particularly for countries which don't have access to printed materials and resources like some other countries do there they need offline content to really easy to access state-of-the-art high quality information and wikipedia is the platform that people go to to get that knowledge it's used by teachers putting together the walls that they have in their science classes it's used by kids putting together their science reports and science projects wikipedia is massively important in education in 2021 it's also used by the media and i never really appreciated this

6:39until I started editing. Wikipedia editors contribute to the global understanding of emerging issues. If you're about to go on air to talk about a particular topic, maybe you're going on to talk about a coronavirus vaccine, it's unlikely that the broadcaster will be trained in mRNA, but they can go on the Wikipedia page, have that jargon-free introduction, see who's really big on the research, see how the field has evolved, and be confident in their own knowledge to go and present that show.

7:09And really, Wikipedia is what enables and empowers that. It's also used by programmers when they're deciding who to bring on air or who to not have on air. Wikipedia is massively important in science and engineering, particularly for people like me. i work in a really interdisciplinary area of science and making sure that the pages that the research that i work on has content on wikipedia means that more people from chemistry physics and materials will join us in our effort to make more sustainable electronic devices but wikipedia is important in indirect ways too so if you've ever asked a question to siri or amazon alexa or google Go home.

7:53The place they go to for information is Wikipedia. So what's on Wikipedia really, really matters. And I guess for the last few years, since reading Angela's books, since thinking about this more and more, I've been asking whether what really, really matters is on Wikipedia. And overwhelmingly, the answer is no. Particularly when we look at the biographies on Wikipedia. Wikipedia has a bunch of biographies about incredible notable people in all different languages. But if you look at the genders of the people that those biographies are about, we see a massive issue.

8:28Less than one in five pages, biography pages on Wikipedia are about women. This is the statistic for English language Wikipedia, but it pretty much holds for every other language Wikipedia. English is just the biggest and the one that I edit in. So fewer than one in five of the biographies on Wikipedia are about women. so that means when you're putting together your science classroom or when you're doing your homework on a particular topic or you're creating that lecture course you're not getting the stories of the incredible women trailblazers who've built a better world and the same goes for other marginalized groups whether that's people of color or lgbtq plus scientists and engineers or even disability activists, we really don't have enough of their stories.

9:14It's why when you do things like Google Famous Physicist, you get a nice wall of old men physicists, because these are the people who have Wikipedia pages. These are the people who have great Creative Commons license images on their Wikipedias. it's why in countries like the uk our national curriculum which is what's taught to children when they're at school our national curriculum doesn't include a single name of a woman scientist in any of the sciences at the age of 15 and 16. now this is massively important because this is when young people are making decisions about their future and because there isn't content on encyclopedias like wikipedia textbook writers and teachers aren't getting that information and And that's influencing what young people perceive about science and about their own ability.

10:05So since the beginning of 2018, now just over three and a half years, I've been working every single day to write the pages, the biographies of women working in science and engineering, of people of color working in science and engineering, of people from historically marginalized groups contributing to our understanding of the world. And I've written about neuroscientists and physicists and chemists and deep water divers and all of these different people who've really, really made the world a better place.

10:35And also giving me huge amount to learn from and be inspired by. Actually, every single day, I feel phenomenally lucky to investigate, to research, and then to write these Wikipedia biographies. It's kind of kept me going. It's kept my enthusiasm and energy and love of science alive in so many different ways. i've actually just written over 1400 and and that's part of a growing effort from projects like wiki project women scientists and wiki project women in red to really make sure that women are recognized and celebrated on this incredibly important platform now there are lots of these stories that i think is sensational but perhaps my first most favorite wikipedia article that i've written is of the phenomenal Gladys West. Gladys West is an African-American mathematician who was born in the 1930s in Virginia. She studied maths at a historically black college and university and then went on to become a maths teacher. Now after she was a maths teacher, she worked for the US

11:38government and what she did for the US government was do all the early programming for GPS technology. So she is a true hidden figure and when I wrote her Wikipedia page in 2018 I was kind of clutching at straws. There were a few little facts about her on the internet but nowhere near enough of her phenomenal story. The movie Hidden Figures had just come out. So it's like, ah, this is a hidden figure. I'm writing it. All of her work had been redacted because she worked for the U.S. government. So there's so much secrecy around it. And I knew at the time I was writing about a staggering person.

12:14a couple of months later just about three months later the BBC nominated Gladys West as one of their top 100 women so on the BBC homepage was Gladys West's story and that means you know the traffic to the Wikipedia article was absolutely massive and then the US Air Force inducted her into their Hall of Fame and as all of you wiki commons contributors will know this means that we then had Creative Commons license images of Gladys West that we could use on a Wikipedia page which made me completely thrilled only a couple of years well maybe this was a year afterwards but the guardian last year so so last november actually the guardian our big national newspaper in the uk wrote an incredible story about gladys west and how she was the hidden figure who'd helped to invent gps and this just made me so happy to think that there were journalists out there now going to her wikipedia page to read that biography find that story and put it on a national if not international platform the most extraordinary thing happened in june though when the royal

13:17academy of engineering which is a super prestigious engineering body in the uk Made the announcement that Gladys West had won the Prince Philip medal for engineering. This has never gone to a woman in its 30 year history. And the first person to get it is hidden figure Gladys West. So I've been talking about Gladys West anywhere and everywhere I can for as long as physically possible since I learned her name. And actually, I was talking about her at a big tech conference a few months ago, and they said, Oh, Jess, are you free on Thursday for a zoom? And I said, Oh, yeah, I mean, I'm sure I can make it work.

13:51And lo and behold, this was the best Zoom of my life because they managed to get me on a Zoom in this very room speaking to Gladys West. So really, she is a queen in my eyes. She is an absolutely sensational person. And Wikipedia has been a platform that let me share that story and hopefully let other people read about her too. But it doesn't stop at people like Gladys West. It's people like Sarah Gilbert and Kizzy Corbett, the incredible vaccine designers and scientists who, through the AstraZeneca vaccine and the Moderna NIH vaccine, are helping to get us out of this extraordinary past few years.

14:31So what you're doing matters. Wikipedia massively matters. It gives us the opportunity to give proper recognition to people who actually did the work. It helps us to improve global access to scientific knowledge, which has never been more important, particularly now as the kind of fights around science and these discussions become increasingly partisan. To have a nonpartisan, up-to-date, localized platform like Wikipedia is more important than any ever before.

15:03It's also part of these ongoing efforts to fight scientific misinformation and pseudoscience. And every single one of you in this Wikimania audience is part of the efforts to make that happen. So I wanted to end by saying happy birthday to Wikipedia. You're 20. You've grown up a lot. You're changing. There's still work to do, and that's why everyone's here. And to remind you that Wikipedia really is the last best place on the Internet. and we have to truly celebrate that and reflect upon how extraordinary you all are.

15:34Thanks so much for listening. If you have any questions, you can find me on Twitter at Jess Wade or you can drop me an email at my Imperial email and I will endeavor to reply to you. Thanks so much for everything that you're doing and hopefully catch you an in-person Wikimania soon. Bye. Hi, my name is Phoebe Erz and I am a member of the Wikimania Steering Committee and on behalf of the committee we wanted to say thank you to all of the participants and all of the organizers of this year's Wikimania. Thank you to all of the volunteers and staff who worked so hard and thank you to everyone who participated in sessions and made this conference a success.

16:34Ciao a tutti, mi chiamo Yolanda Pensa e un grazie da parte di tutti noi, agli organizzatori e ai partecipanti di Wikimania. Ciao, sono Dror Avilin, sono anche un amore di ricerca di Wikimania, voglio ringraziare tutti i miei studenti che sono statunitoli e sono statunitoli in realtà, e quindi, per favore, vi ringrazio la prima ricerca di Wikimania online, che ora vogliamo capire. Ciao, mi nome è Ivan Martínez e sono parte del Comitè Impulsor di Wikimania e questo video solo è per dar las grazie a tutte le persone che invirtieron il tempo in fare una gran Wikimania, questo è specialmente valioso in tempi come questi, così duri che stiamo vivendo, solo voglio dire grazie a tutti Hello, my name is Ivan Martinez and I'm part of the Wikimanias Touring Committee. I just want to say thank you very much to all the volunteers who invested a lot of their time in making a great Wikimania. This is especially available in hard times like this. Thank you. I just want to say, Salud!

17:41Hi, I'm Butch Bustia from the East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific speaking to you from Singapore in this very late hour. I would like to thank everyone who participated in Wikimania 2021. It's been a very tough time. We cancelled Bangkok 2020, but we're hoping that we will be meeting soon in an in-person event. And I would like to thank everyone who participated and contributed to Wikimania. To Wikimedia Foundation, the Wikimedia Steering committee the core organizing committee and those who watch hours and participated in lectures and interactive sessions i would like to thank every one of you nagpapasalamat po po sa inyong lahat na sa tulong na ibigay niyo sa wikimania buong puso kong binibigay ang aking baso ay glass

18:43para sa inyong lahat. Cheers. Kampai. Tagay na. Cheers, Wikimania. We're so glad you came this year and we hope to see you again next year. Yes. Cheers.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2021 Science and Storytelling.webm by Jess Wade (2021-08-17), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.