{"id":644343,"date":"2026-10-12T18:24:13","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T18:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/644343\/"},"modified":"2026-10-12T18:24:13","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T18:24:13","slug":"is-wikipedia-deeply-biased-sandi-toksvig-says-it-is-so-shes-backing-a-rival-wikipedia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/644343\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Wikipedia \u2018deeply biased\u2019? Sandi Toksvig says it is \u2013 so she\u2019s backing a rival | Wikipedia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Name: Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Age: 25.<\/p>\n

Appearance: Patronising and deeply\u00a0biased.<\/p>\n

Is this because you haven\u2019t got your own page? Well, yes. But these aren\u2019t\u00a0my words. They\u2019re the words of\u00a0Sandi Toksvig<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But it has 65m articles across more than 300 languages! It\u2019s the largest knowledge resource ever assembled! That may be, but it isn\u2019t very good at women.<\/p>\n

According to Toksvig? Yes \u2013 and she\u2019s very serious about it. As we speak, she is travelling the world trying to raise money to build something better.<\/p>\n

She is? Yes. Along with the University of Cambridge, she hopes that her Mappa Mundi<\/a> project will be an \u201cinteractive digital atlas where we can find a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted\u201d.<\/p>\n

And a lot of the sidelined or deleted knowledge is about women? It is. She cites the case of Donna Strickland, a Canadian physicist who repeatedly had her draft biographies rejected by Wikipedia<\/a>, until she won a Nobel prize for her work.<\/p>\n

Awkward. But it goes broader. By the Wikimedia Foundation\u2019s own estimate<\/a>, only 19% of Wikipedia biographies concern women. Toksvig puts this down to the site being edited by \u201cmostly white, middle-aged, European men who have both the time and the technology\u201d, she told Cheltenham literature festival<\/a> this weekend.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t know that. Its content is weighted heavily towards wealthy countries. In 2013, for instance, the Oxford Internet Institute discovered that Wikipedia contained more coverage of Germany than of Africa and South America combined<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Isn\u2019t Wikipedia too leftwing anyway? Oh God, are you Elon Musk? This is a claim he has repeated for the last couple of years, to the extent of calling it \u201cWokepedia\u201d.<\/p>\n

And what did he do about it? He started his own version \u2013 an AI-powered alternative called Grokipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And is it better? A paper published in November 2025<\/a> discovered that Grokipedia articles are 13 times more likely to contain a source blacklisted by the English Wikipedia community.<\/p>\n

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What\u2019s a blacklisted source? The paper pointed out that, at the time of its publication, Grokipedia included 42 citations for the banned neo-Nazi website Stormfront<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Yeesh. Bring on Mappa Mundi! Indeed, Toksvig\u2019s version has better intentions. If nothing else, hopefully it will update Wikipedia\u2019s list of people who died on the toilet<\/a> to include more women.<\/p>\n

Do say: \u201cWikipedia is systemically biased.\u201d<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t say: \u201cAt last, something Elon\u00a0Musk and Sandi Toksvig<\/a> can agree on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters<\/a> section, please click here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Name: Wikipedia. Age: 25. Appearance: Patronising and deeply\u00a0biased. Is this because you haven\u2019t got your own page? Well,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":644344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-644343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=644343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/644343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/644344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=644343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=644343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=644343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}