Katherine Maher

“ To fix Wikipedia’s gender imbalance, we need our contributors and editors to pay more attention to the accomplishments of women. This is true across all under-represented groups: people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, indigenous communities.
Although we don’t believe that only women editors should write pages about other women, or writers of color about people of color, we do think that a broader base of contributors and editors—one that included more women and people of color, among others—would naturally help broaden our content. ”

“ If journalists, book publishers, scientific researchers, curators, academics, grant-makers and prize-awarding committees don’t recognize the work of women, Wikipedia’s editors have little foundation on which to build. ”

“ A 2015 study found that, on English Wikipedia, the word “divorced” appears more than four times as often in biographies of women than in biographies of men. We don’t fully know why, but it’s likely a multitude of factors, including the widespread tendency throughout history to describe the lives of women through their relationships with men. ”

“ It is true that Wikipedia has a problem if Donna Strickland, an accomplished physicist, is considered worthy of a page only when she receives the highest possible recognition in her field. But this problem reflects a far more consequential and intractable problem in the real world. ”