Wikipedia Gets A Female Update
October 29, 2018
Wikipedia is one of the best parts of the Internet. It is an official unofficial resource and includes information that print encyclopedias do not include. What is even better about Wikipedia is that it covers pop and entertainment culture and it used to be very hard to find authoritative information about it. Very difficult. Another fantastic Wikipedia accomplishment is that it documents important historical unknowns aka people who made a contribution to history, but there is little information about them. BoingBoing shares how, “A Machine Learning System Trained On Scholarly Journals Could Correct Wikipedia’s Under-Representation Problem” and is adding female scientific unknowns to the online encyclopedia.
Quicksilver is a machine learning AI that used 30000 Wikipedia articles to create a model article to identify what makes a scientist worthy enough to be included in the online knowledge tome. Quicksilver then mined Semantic Scholar to identify 200,000 scholars and is composing Wikipedia entries for them if they are missing. In an even cooler move:
“In addition to correcting omissions in Wikipedia, Quicksilver (which is named for the Neil Stephenson novel) is particularly useful in improving the representation of women in the project. On 18% of Wikipedia’s biographic entries are about women and the vast majority of Wikipedians are men. In addition to creating new Wikipedia entries, Quicksilver can suggest new material for existing entries.”
Even if Wikipedia is low on female scientists and scholars, it is still a better resource to learn about them than so-called authoritative resources. Perhaps a fresh look at Wikipedia is needed?
Whitney Grace, October 29, 2018
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