Hi everyone. I’m Jess, a materials scientist working on next-generation optical and electronic devices. I spend all my free time trying to make science more inclusive. For the last four years I’ve spent every evening writing the Wikipedia biographies of scientists from historically excluded groups. I’m nearly at 1800!! #WomenInSTEM

Why Wikipedia? Because it’s the largest, most widely used, non-partisan democratised platform for sharing knowledge. Every day Wikipedia users include high school students, parents, teachers, journalists, policy makers and academics. It’s not behind a paywall and it’s not full of technical jargon. But like all encyclopaedias, Wikipedia has huge gaps – especially in biographies of women of people from other historically excluded groups.

Until now, encyclopaedias have mainly been written by men, about men, for other men. They’re full of content gaps, and when it comes to info about emerging scientific topics (eg the climate crisis), they go out of date as soon as they’re printed. Wikipedia gives us a chance to change that. We all have a responsibility to make the world’s most widely used reference source more accurate, inclusive and complete.https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/10/17/jess-wade-scientist-wikiepdia-women/