You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.

Hey everybody, Emily Quonk here, with a story about the world's biggest encyclopedia

and favorite internet rabbit hole Wikipedia, which by the way turns 20 this month.

I was kind of a casual user of Wikipedia. I used it to cheat and pub quizzes when I was doing

a cross-wad.

This is Jess Wade, an experimental physicist at Imperial College London. For years,

her relationship to Wikipedia was a casual one.

I used it all the time, but I didn't ever contribute to it.

Until she realized that this website, which is edited by millions of volunteers,

sees 300 billion page views every day on average,

has the power to influence the direction of scientific research.

So if a research topic or a particular kind of emerging interdisciplinary area is well written

about and well documented on Wikipedia, that will grow and blossom. People will be attracted to

and read that. You know, chemists who read pages about cool new chiral molecules will further develop

those chiral molecules because they'll have read this kind of introduction.

We use it in classrooms. We use it in university lecture theatres.

So I was kind of learning all of these things like Wikipedia is very valuable and very important

and then learn about the kind of huge bias on the site. And obviously this is a bias that we see

reflected through a lot of society. A bias that affects who gets a Wikipedia page and who does not.

See by day, Jess studies materials like organic semi-conductors.

But at night, she takes to Wikipedia and writes entries about women and POC scientists.

Starting in January 2018, every day for three years, Jess has been

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