Lost Women of Science Updates and Creates Profiles of Forgotten Female Scientists on Wikipedia

If you’re a regular listener of?Lost Women of Science, you might have caught our January 2023 episode featuring?Leona Zacharias, the grandmother of our co-executive producer Katie Hafner. Leona was a biologist who conducted important research into a blindness epidemic affecting premature babies in the 1940s. But as Katie explains, it was her grandfather,?Jerrold Zacharias, a prominent nuclear physicist, whose career took center stage in the family. In 2007, Jerrold Zacharias? got a well-deserved entry in Wikipedia — with absolutely no mention of Leona or her achievements. But shortly after our episode about Leona aired, something miraculous happened: a Wikipedia page of her own appeared. And it turned out that the author was Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London, who has created and updated thousands of Wikipedia pages on scientists who are female and/or of color.

That got us thinking. Wikipedia is one of the first places people go when they start their research, and too many of the pages about female scientists — when they exist at all — are incomplete or inaccurate.?

So, with a grant from?craig newmark philanthropies ?–? thank you, Craig! – we’ve put together a team to create, correct, and update Wikipedia pages for the female scientists we’ve profiled. There’s now a more comprehensive Wikipedia entry for?Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the subject of our first season, who developed a groundbreaking diagnostic test for cystic fibrosis. And we’ve expanded the page for ?Leona Zacharias. In addition, we took this opportunity to interview?Dr. Jess Wade, our inspiration for this project. She explains why she does what she does.?

Don’t forget to visit Lostwomenofscience.org and listen to more episodes about remarkable female scientists.