Lost Women of Science Updates Wikipedia
Lost Women of Science is updating and adding information to the Wikipedia profiles of the female scientists we have featured on our podcast.
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, who took center stage in the scientific community.
In 2007, he 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.
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, we’ve put together a team to create and update Wikipedia pages for the female scientists we’ve profiled.
We’ve begun our Wikipedia project with a more comprehensive entry for Dr. Dorothy Andersen, the subject of our first season, who developed a groundbreaking diagnostic test for cystic fibrosis. We’ve also expanded the page for Katie’s grandmother, Leona Zacharias.
Also, listen to our interview with Dr. 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. It was Dr. Wade who created Leona’s Wikipedia page, and we are proud to have her serve on our Advisory Board.
