O'Really?

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

1. Harry Anderson
2. Judith Armitage
3. Keith Ball
4. Michael Bevan
5. Mervyn Bibb
6. Stephen R Bloom
7. Gilles Brassard
8. Michael Burrows
9. Jon Crowcroft
10. Ara Darzi
11. William Earnshaw
12. Gerard F Gilmore
13. Nigel Glover
14. Raymond E Goldstein
15. Melvyn Goodale
16. Martin Green
17. Gillian Griffiths
18. Joanna Haigh
19. Phillip Hawkins
20. Edith Heard
21. Gideon Henderson
22. Guy Lloyd-Jones
23. Stephen P Long
24. Nicholas Lydon
25. Anne Mills
26. Paul O’Brien
27. William Richardson
28. Gareth Roberts
29. Ronald Rowe
30. John Savill
31. Christopher Schofield
32. Paul M Sharp
33. Stephen Simpson
34. Terence Speed
35. Maria Grazia Spillantini
36. Douglas W Stephan
37. Brigitta Stockinger
38. Alan Turnbull
39. Jean-Paul Vincent
40. Andrew Wilkie
41. Sophie Wilson
42. Terry Wyatt
43. Julia Yeomans
44. Robert Young
45. Margaret Buckingham
46. Zhu Chen
47. John Hutchinson
48. Eric Kandel
49. Elliott Lieb
50. Kyriacos Nicolaou
51. Randy Schekman
52. Eli Yablonovitch
53. Andrew The Duke of York (eh?)
54. Bill Bryson