In 2013, 44% of newly elected Fellows of the Royal Society had biography pages on wikipedia.
Earlier this month confusingly-named “Royal Society” announced their new fellows for 2013. The society is made up of (quote):
“…the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the UK and the Commonwealth. Fellows and Foreign Members are elected for life through a peer review process on the basis of excellence in science.”
A quick-and-dirty measure of the scientific coverage of wikipedia is the percentage of these fellows that have a profile on wikipedia at the time of their election to the prestigious Society. Let’s call it the Fellows of the Wiki Society index (FWSi), a good score of 100% indicates that wikipedia has excellent coverage of science while 0% indicates the opposite. Last year, that index was 40% because 21 out of 52 fellows were also Fellows of the Wiki Society.
This year the index is slightly better at 44%, with 24 out of 54 fellows having a wiki-biography, see [1-54]. So as well as more women this year, there’s more wikipedia too, although the difference isn’t particularly big.
If you’d like to improve the content of wikipedia because there’s plenty of good reasons for doing so, why not take a look at the guidelines for biographies of living persons and create or improve a page for one of the people below?
References
- Harry Anderson
- Judith Armitage
- Keith Ball
- Michael Bevan
- Mervyn Bibb
- Stephen R Bloom
- Gilles Brassard
- Michael Burrows
- Jon Crowcroft
- Ara Darzi
- William Earnshaw
- Gerard F Gilmore
- Nigel Glover
- Raymond E Goldstein
- Melvyn Goodale
- Martin Green
- Gillian Griffiths
- Joanna Haigh
- Phillip Hawkins
- Edith Heard
- Gideon Henderson
- Guy Lloyd-Jones
- Stephen P Long
- Nicholas Lydon
- Anne Mills
- Paul O’Brien
- William Richardson
- Gareth Roberts
- Ronald Rowe
- John Savill
- Christopher Schofield
- Paul M Sharp
- Stephen Simpson
- Terence Speed
- Maria Grazia Spillantini
- Douglas W Stephan
- Brigitta Stockinger
- Alan Turnbull
- Jean-Paul Vincent
- Andrew Wilkie
- Sophie Wilson
- Terry Wyatt
- Julia Yeomans
- Robert Young
- Margaret Buckingham
- Zhu Chen
- John Hutchinson
- Eric Kandel
- Elliott Lieb
- Kyriacos Nicolaou
- Randy Schekman
- Eli Yablonovitch
- Andrew The Duke of York (eh?)
- Bill Bryson
O'Really? 