Where are (women) planetary scientists on Wikipedia?

Background

Wikipedia is an open source, web-based encyclopedia, and allows anonymous and registered users to edit and create articles. This means that anyone can create, edit and improve articles. However, several studies have shown the most of Wikipedia editors are male (See Fig. 1). In addition, there are fewer and less developed articles about women, especially in STEM [1].

Figure 1: Wikipedia editors are predominantly male (Source: Wikipedia)

In October 2014, only 15.53% of English Wikipedia's biographies were about women [2]. Founded in July 2015, the WikiProject Women in Red has the objective to increase this percentage, which has reached 18.46% as of 2 June 2020 [1].

Today, Wikipedia is within the 20 most popular website [3] and every month it attracts more than 1 billion unique visitors [4]. Wikipedia can therefore give a huge contribution to change the perception the general public has about who is doing science and how a scientist looks like.

My experience

In May 2020, I was selected to participate in the 500 Women Scientists Wiki Scholar [5] program May-June 2020. My initial objective was to promote and contribute to biographies of women planetary scientists. It was a surprise then to discover that the total number of planetary scientists’ articles on the English Wikipedia is only 189, of which 48 women (25%). This percentage is in agreement with the percentage of women in the International Astronomical Union from all ESA’s Member State (24%), which can give us an indication of the percentage of women in the field [6].

One of the reasons of this paucity could be that planetary scientists’ biographies are already on Wikipedia, but they are categorized under “astronomers” or “astrophysicists” and not as “planetary scientist”. A second reason could be that planetary scientists’ articles simply do not exist on Wikipedia.

Let’s organize an Edit-a-thon!

An Edit-a-thon (edit marathon) is an organized event where editors edit and improve a specific topic. I would like to encourage the planetary community as a whole to organize an Edit-a-thon focusing on creating content regarding (women) planetary scientists’ biographies. This could be done both as a live or virtual event. Special attention should be devoted to minorities or under-represented groups of people.

Acknowledgment

I would like to express my gratitude to 500 Women Scientists Wiki Scholar for the opportunity they gave me. A special thank you goes to Ryan McGrady, Ian Ramjohn and Elysia Webb from the Wiki Education Foundation to let me discover the “world” of Wikipedia.

References

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Red

[2] Eduardo Graells-Garrido, Mounia Lalmas, Filippo Menczer, "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia", arXiv, 9 February 2015, p. 3.

[3] "Wikipedia.org Traffic, Demographics and Competitors". www.alexa.com. Retrieved October 1, 2019.

[4] https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-wikipedia-projects

[5] https://wikiedu.org/500-women-wiki-scientists/

[6] Piccialli A., et al., “Participation of women scientists in ESA Solar System missions: an historical trend”, submitted to Advances in Geosciences (ADGEO).