Wikipedia Needs More Women

Guest: Tamar Carroll, PhD, Associate Professor of History, Rochester Institute of Technology When I was young and had a random question about the world, my dad would send me to our book shelf of encyclopedias to find the answer. Remember how the full collection literally took an entire shelf? These days we ask Alexa, Siri or Google, and up comes a Wikipedia entry. The genius of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit and contribute to it. But most of the 33 million volunteer editors constantly keeping Wikipedia up-to-date are men. Combine that with the rules Wikipedia follows to make sure entries are accurate, and it’s not surprising that content about women is under-represented on the site.