How to Edit Wikipedia Pages Effectively

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There's no obvious means of feedback where you know how effective you are. Do you like it that way or do you wish you had a way of measuring the efficacy of your output? I think sometimes it's useful. You can get page views. Sometimes that's useful as a kind of motivator for why people want to read my work. But seeing how these people are then celebrated in the public eye, there was a phenomenal mathematician called Gladys West who is 91 now born in Virginia. She worked out how far from a perfect sphere,. the earth was so that they could put satellites around it and help us with navigation.

Jessica Wade is a physicist at Imperial College London who, while spending her day working on special carbon-based materials that can be used as semiconductors, has spent her nights writing nearly 2,000 Wikipedia entries about underrepresented figures in science. That, along with numerous other forms of public engagement—including writing a children’s book about nanotechnology—is all in an effort to actually do something productive to correct gender and racial biases in STEM.

She joined Tyler to discuss if there are any useful gender stereotypes in science, distinguishing between productive and unproductive ways to encourage women in science, whether science Twitter is biased toward men, how AI will affect gender participation gaps, how Wikipedia should be improved, how she judges the effectiveness of her Wikipedia articles, how she’d improve science funding, her work on chiral materials and its near-term applications, whether writing a kid’s science book should be rewarded in academia, what she learned spending a year studying art in Florence, what she’ll do next, and more.

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Recorded February 21st, 2023

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