Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2016-03-09/Blog



By day, Emily Temple-Wood (Keilana) is a biology undergraduate at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois. She has been accepted to Midwestern University medical school for the fall of 2017.

By night, she smites trolls on the Internet with positive punishment: for each harassing email she receives, one Wikipedia article on a woman in science is created.

Temple-Wood founded WikiProject Women Scientists in 2012 to be a collaborative drive to create and maintain Wikipedia’s biographies of women scientists throughout history—a steep task to accomplish, given that the project home page notes that “part of Wikipedia’s systemic bias is that women in science are woefully underrepresented.” As the blog recounted in our profile of her two years ago, she put the idea into action on one late night: “A substantial number of female fellows belonging to the prestigious Royal Society, a sort of who’s who in the world of science, had no Wikipedia articles written about them. ‘I got [angry] and wrote an article that night … I literally sat in the hallway in the dorm until 2am writing [my] first women in science [Wikipedia] article.’ ”

Only a few years in, things are well on their way: the project has gotten 376 women scientists onto Wikipedia’s front-page “Did you know?” section, and 30 articles through Wikipedia's peer-review process (designated with a “good” or “featured” rating).

Temple-Wood also hosts edit-a-thons at the university she attends and co-facilitated a Women in Red edit-a-thon with editor Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, who told us that Temple-Wood is the “poster child of the efforts to address Wikipedia’s scientific gender gap.”

Siko Bouterse, a former Wikimedia Foundation staff member, told the blog that Temple-Wood’s impact on the gender gap has been “epic”:

Unfortunately, Temple-Wood has been targeted by a significant amount of gender-based harassment. Throwaway email addresses frequently send her requests for dates, condescendingly discuss her body, insinuate that she got to where she is through sexual favors, ask her to reserve said favors for themselves, and when she doesn’t reply, they spew profanities.

This is not uncommon for prominent young women on the Internet, but Temple-Wood is fighting back in her own way by using it as motivation to continue her efforts. For every harassing email she receives, Temple-Wood and a growing number of fellow Wikipedians are quietly creating a new biography on a women scientist, such as Liliana Lubinska, Katharine Luomala, or Adelaida Lukanina.

This harassment is something that Bouterse calls “deplorable, unacceptable, and unfortunately all-too emblematic of what women are facing on the internet today.” The emotional labor of weathering this kind of harassment is huge. Notably, rather than deciding this particular public space must not be for her, Emily has instead channeled every instance of harassment into more fuel for her focus, so it’s backfiring against those who hope to silence women online. That takes courage.

Temple-Wood already has a backlog of articles to create; she thanks her harassers for helping to fight against systemic bias on Wikipedia. In a similar vein, Stephenson-Goodknight told the blog that “Someday we’ll be writing a biography about her and her scientific discoveries, mark my word. I wonder what her harassers and detractors will think about that, especially if Emily’s scientific discoveries help heal their mom or sister.”

Ed Erhart is an Editorial Associate at the Wikimedia Foundation.