 Hi, my name is Jess and I am a research fellow at Imperial College London and today tonight this morning wherever you are I thought I'd tell you a little bit about the work I've been doing on Wikipedia and trying to particularly use it as a platform to tell the stories of scientists and Thank you so much to Annie for all of the incredible work you do on Wikipedia and also to Bunty for arranging this amazing workshop So so yeah, I kind of work on new materials for different kinds of technologies and optical and electronic devices But I think I've become kind of Equally as interested throughout my research so far on how we develop and kind of train the next generation of scientists And really we want a scientifically literate society to look like I think providing people with access and information about science is a critical enabler in their decision making and Also will hopefully design a more equitable fair tomorrow. So so so yeah, I have these kind of two main interests I love the material science I do, but I also want everyone else to have that appreciation and awareness of science as well I think if we look at the challenges facing our world whether that's something like climate change a new pandemic Access to affordable and efficient and reliable health care Science has the potential to help people take on those big challenges, you know to solve these huge problems But unfortunately at the moment people opt out of science at a really really young age due to their biases and Misconceptions about the subject. I also think that the teams of people who get the opportunity to do science are Not as diverse as they could be and we know that when teams are not diverse They actually do worse science. We see it in the diversity of teams who design facial recognition software or develop and deploy Policing algorithms algorithms to determine who shouldn't shouldn't be pleased and then who shouldn't end up in prison And also the teams who do medical research that actually we have nowhere near the levels of diversity We need to reflect and serve the society who essentially these these disciplines respond to so if we take Facial recognition software for an example We know that the data sets that these facial recognition software models were trained on Incredibly biased it over represented certain face types particularly young white men particularly young white men in California And as a result couldn't identify faces who didn't fit that mold We see it in policing algorithms that policing algorithms Over-policed certain parts of the states and therefore we end up with Disproportionately higher numbers of young men from communities of color in US prisons And we see it in medical research how women and people from the global south are Consistently ignored and excluded from clinical trials and also that impacts the kind of doses and the recommended allowances that we have for certain medications So in some aspects of science and and society this lack of diversity has a Really profound and very clear impact on the technology that people creates And I think we'd be naive to think that it wasn't impacting the kind of blue skies You know big fundamental scientific questions were asking as well and in my field of research You know what kind of material makes a great solar panel What is the fundamental origin of matter at the start of the universe these big scientific questions? Have historically only had a few kinds of people contributing to try and solve them And I think that science has lost out as a result Just to give you a kind of picture of just how bad the statistics are if we look in physics departments in the UK Only about one in five of our undergrads women Less than 20% of our undergrads are from an underprivileged background So it's an incredibly white and incredibly privileged subject to study and actually less than three percent of our undergrads are black And if we see how that propagates through an academic career trajectory About one in ten of our physics professors are women and and fewer fewer than a Handful of our physics professors are black the statistic is that zero percent of our physics professors are black But this wouldn't count kind of one or two people for risk of identifying them So we have nowhere near enough women We have nowhere near enough people from certain socio-economic groups and we have nowhere near enough physicists of color I think this is for a few different reasons The big one is people's education and access to science and then how we're supported and guided through that our early careers And also how we recognize celebrate and honor phenomenal scientists from historically excluded groups. I think within this kind of three stage Sages of our career trajectory. There's a few different aspects where we can have an impact Thinking about people's perception and awareness of a subject like physics Building up young people's confidence and resilience saying hey There are physicists just like you who came from the same schools as you and are interested in the same things as you Also giving people the opportunity to build their own networks and give people advice and to act as cheerleaders and sponsors And I really think that Wikipedia is kind of a powerful way to do that first part and also a powerful way to do the cheerleading and sponsoring I've been thinking about this for a really long time, you know during my PhD I started organizing these big mass outreach activities and taking science and engineering and technical skills To as many young people as possible But what I really started to realize is the types of people who show up to do a coding course on an evening Or on the weekend or the kinds of kids who are likely to come to a lecture at a university They're probably the ones who've already made their mind up, right? If you're showing up at a university on the weekend, you've probably opted in to some kind of scientific career anyway But how could we take these stories further? What way could we really use to celebrate and honor people's recognition? And that's really how I landed on Wikipedia If someone's made a phenomenal discovery, if there's a really awesome aspect of science that everyone in the world should know about it What better platform to put it on? Wikipedia is the most important reference tool in the entire world It's the fifth most popular website most frequently visited website in the world Which is really quite staggering when you consider what it's up against and also, you know, it's over its 20th birthday now This isn't just a kind of boom and a rush. This is this is here to stay this democratized open-source open-access platform for sharing knowledge is Critical to the way that our society runs Just to kind of give you an estimate of how many people are looking at Wikipedia It's about 15 billion page views every single month, which is just such a staggeringly big number It's really hard to get your head around But it really emphasizes that Wikipedia is a really powerful outreach tool It can let us communicate science and communicate what scientists are and what scientists do with a way bigger audience than me inside any lecture theatre Wikipedia is used by all different aspects of society from parents and children to home assistants things like Google and Amazon Alexa and and Siri and all of these things Google home Amazon Alexa and Siri they go to Wikipedia for that information Teachers academics professors they go to Wikipedia to populate their lecture courses and come up with curricula people in Policymaking go to Wikipedia when they're trying to design new laws and regulations people in journalism go to Wikipedia and Actually one of the most incredible ways that I think people don't recognize in Wikipedia is being influential is in science Itself there was an absolutely fantastic study a few years ago by a couple of computer scientists Neil Thompson and Douglas Hanley And in this study they looked at Wikipedia and they did a randomized control trial, which means they chose a subject like chemistry They got their students in their classes to write Wikipedia pages about topics in chemistry that weren't on Wikipedia And they uploaded half of them to Wikipedia and they didn't upload the other half this is a randomized control trial and then they looked for the presence of these topics in scientific literature and what they found Was that if something was on Wikipedia it was more likely to come up in scientific literature So that topic just by the nature of being on Wikipedia and being accessible and being easy to understand Was influencing the course of science itself They also found that these Wikipedia pages acted as a kind of mini review on a subject It would help introduce people to a field if pages were if Articles were cited on Wikipedia. They'd have more citations than their counterparts that weren't on cited on Wikipedia So it's kind of a cost-effective way of doing outreach and research communications. It's quite incredible So obviously what's on Wikipedia really really matters and I guess I've been asking for kind of the last few years now Is what matters on Wikipedia and unsurprisingly? I wouldn't be here today if the answer wasn't Harley Yes, I wouldn't be here today if I didn't deeply care about Wikipedia But also recognize that there's work that we could all be doing to make it better Particularly if you look at issues related to women biographies of women on English language Wikipedia still only make up 19% of the biographies so women are massively underrepresented actually people from all historically excluded groups and issues that they care about are Incredibly underrepresented on the site. It feels really complete. It feels really comprehensive But we know there are huge gaps and on pages about science and particularly Emerging areas of science and ever-changing areas of science like the climate catastrophe Pages go out of date almost as soon as they're written So scientists really have to be there to help out and improve and to fact-check these pages And actually I think something that has kind of bummed me out recently And I've started noticing a lot is that pop culture is incredibly overrepresented on Wikipedia and technical subjects like science and a lot of maths and engineering Really needs refreshing or really needs creating at all Actually, we find that not only are women underrepresented in the biographies of Wikipedia But the biographies about them when they do get written are even more likely than the biographies of men to be deleted from the site So not only do we have to do that legwork on creating the content But we have to do that advocacy to say hey women have this right to be documented in you know Incredibly important encyclopedic record and we're gonna keep doing it and keep shouting about them because these women are incredible So since the beginning of 2018 I've been writing every single day the biographies of one scientist and scientists of color and scientists and engineers from Historically excluded groups. It's been this kind of extraordinary journey Where I I have all of this fun in the lab in the day I get home I have dinner and I sit down and I write my Wikipedia page And I get to learn about someone new or some discovery. That's new or some university That's new or some protest that's new or some part of the world that I've never thought about before I'm I'm over 1,700 now Which I'm super super proud about and the people I've written about are just absolutely Sensational you know people like Sarah Gilbert the dame who came up with the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine She was then made you know I'm sure this is a result of the Wikipedia page But she was then made into a Barbie or Kizzy Corbett the pioneer of the Moderna NIH vaccine Who was nominated by Anthony Fauci for time person of the year or the most incredible story Gladys? West Mathematician who was born in the 1930s in Virginia Gladys West actually attended a historically black college in university She studied math she worked in the US government and she did the early calculations for GPS technology So sat nav kind of Google Maps type thing and and actually Gladys West page when I made it at the beginning of February 2018 There was so little about her online and gradually it's grown It's grown to the point that the BBC nominated her for their top 100 people in the world So suddenly she was on the BBC home page and everyone was clicking through to her Wikipedia page The US Air Force inducted her to their Hall of Fame So now she's on the US Air Force Hall of Fame page And there's all of these incredible photographs of Gladys West in wiki commons The Guardian wrote an article about how Gladys West was the hidden figure who helped to invent GPS and then last June The Royal Academy of Engineering our big prestigious engineering body awarded Gladys West the Prince Philip Medal and Prize for engineering She's the first woman in history to win this award and I speak about Gladys West so often that I think a tech company who I was evangelizing to about Wikipedia felt sorry for me and thought why is this this little lonely physicist so obsessed with this Mathematician so they set up a zoom with me in Gladys West which was just the coolest thing in the entire world So you have this capacity with Wikipedia to really improve someone's recognition and awareness and people's awareness of their story Just to give you a kind of snapshot of a Wikipedia editathon we ran at the beginning of the pandemic This was for shutdown stem day as part of the strike for black lives The kind of black lives matter movement that took over the world and and really has had a strong influence on the way That we think about racial and ethnicity and and policies around these things We had a Wikipedia editathon to try and improve the representation of African-American and black faculty And Wikipedia and also topics that they researched and were interested in We had about 200 editors connecting over the course of 24 hours And they created or edited about 500 articles and and created 60 So we have people working on about 500 and creating 60 We then tracked the impact of these pages for like a month I think and after a really short time these pages had racked up millions of page views So this was all a one day editathon I've actually worked with my friend mariam and a bunch of other incredible people including farah quayser from 500 women scientists To write about why this is a critical thing that we do and also how academic institutions can get on board with helping us To improve wikipedia's gender and knowledge gap So I think wikipedia gives us this unique opportunity to build recognition and awareness and appreciation of a subject and of a scientist But also improve people's access to scientific knowledge You know often the kinds of topics that we research and are interested in are stuck behind paywalls or Enclosed in too much jargon for the general public to understand And wikipedia gives us the tool to tackle and change that and really open access to a discipline It also lets us fight this war against scientific misinformation and pseudo science that I hope you're on board with fighting as well I think you're going to hear a lot and probably have learned a lot at the course of this workshop About ways you can get involved with editing wikipedia But I would say you don't have to create a page entirely You know creating a page is fantastic But even if you just take a page and work on it and improve it You're already contributing to make the world one of the world's most important website an even better place to be You can add links between different pages Make sure Gladys west is connected to every page about virginia and mathematics and gps technology You can upload images and media You can start to translate a page and think about ways that you could Improve people's awareness and appreciation of it in other countries and of course you can create content and topics as well So I think that's enough from me wikipedia is this Incredibly important and vital source for sharing information for democratizing access to knowledge But really for giving us the opportunity to celebrate Incredible scientists and engineers from historically excluded groups because if you don't do it, no one else will So thank you so much. I'm gonna try and be up to answer questions But it's super early in the morning my time and I have a crazy teaching schedule this term So thank you so much. I'm on twitter for now and I'm also at jessica.wade at imperial.ac.uk Have a fantastic rest of your workshop and please please please edit wikipedia