Wikipedia has been slammed for “systematically” writing women and ethnic minorities “out of history” by QI presenter Sandi Toksvig.
In a bombshell new interview, the outspoken feminist TV personality praised the online encyclopedia as the “largest collection of knowledge ever amassed in humanity’s history”, but took aim at its alleged bias in a scathing attack on the site’s white, male editors.
Last October, the Copenhagen-born Toksvig was handed the chance to curate a “Mappa Mundi” – named after Medieval world maps – which she called a “view of the globe from a female perspective” by her alma mater Cambridge University.
Cambridge said the presenter’s project would create “a digital resource documenting women’s position, achievements and struggles across the globe” – which she said would counter the male-dominated writing available on Wikipedia.
The QI host has slammed the online encyclopedia
PA/Wikipedia
Toksvig said: “I am trying to change the world by changing how we view it,” in an interview with the Times.
And while she talked up the wide-ranging website’s 61million-strong article count as “amazing”, she claimed it suffers systemic problems.
The former Bake Off star said: “It is 85 per cent by and about white men… Women and people of colour, ethnic minorities, are systematically being written out of history.
“They’ve tried to fix it and even Wikipedia themselves has said it’s unfixable – because if you set up something that is crowdsourced, so anybody can contribute who has the time and access to technology, it’s going to be white, mostly middle class men.
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The former Bake Off star said Wikipedia “is 85 per cent by and about white men”
PA
“Women are much more likely not to be inputted at all but, if they are inputted, to be victims of what they call a ‘drive-by deletion’, so a man just decides she’s not important enough.”
Toksvig’s “85 per cent” claim echoes one made by a fellow campaigner on the issue, Patricia Horrillo, who told the Guardian that less than 20 per cent of the site’s content is focused on women – which in itself corresponds to a 2016 study which found this to be true.
And this isn’t the first call for representation from the QI host – in a RadioTimes interview at the start of this year, she said: “I would still like to see more women in charge of shows.
“Being the quizmaster, between you and me, is the easiest job in the world because they tell you the answers beforehand.
“And those cards on which the answers are printed are not as heavy as some of those boys led us to believe; it’s really fine for a woman to do it.”
She added: “Knowledge doesn’t belong to one demographic, it belongs to all of us.”
GB News has approached Wikipedia for comment.
