Home / Technology / Wikipedia's Woman Problem: Sandi Toksvig Fights Back
Wikipedia's Woman Problem: Sandi Toksvig Fights Back
12 Oct
Summary
- Only 19% of Wikipedia biographies are about women.
- Sandi Toksvig is creating Mappa Mundi, an inclusive digital atlas.
- Elon Musk's Grokipedia includes blacklisted sources like Stormfront.
Sandi Toksvig is actively working to rectify a significant gender imbalance on Wikipedia, where biographies of women constitute a mere 19%. She is leading the Mappa Mundi project, an interactive digital atlas designed to house knowledge often excluded from mainstream platforms. This initiative, developed in partnership with the University of Cambridge, seeks to provide a home for information that is frequently marginalized or deleted.
Toksvig attributes Wikipedia's skewed content to its editor base, describing them as "mostly white, middle-aged, European men." This demographic, she suggests, influences the site's coverage, which historically has favored wealthier nations, as evidenced by more content on Germany than on Africa and South America combined in 2013.
In contrast to efforts for more inclusive knowledge, Elon Musk's AI-powered alternative, Grokipedia, has encountered issues with source credibility. A November 2025 paper revealed that Grokipedia articles are significantly more prone to citing blacklisted sources. Notably, Grokipedia included 42 citations from the banned neo-Nazi website Stormfront, raising serious concerns about its journalistic integrity.
