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When Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize this month, she became only the third woman in history to receive the award in physics. An optical physicist at the University of Waterloo, Strickland is brilliant, accomplished and inspiring. To use Wikipedia parlance, she is very clearly notable.
Except that, somehow, she wasn’t. Despite her groundbreaking research on a method of generating laser beams with ultrashort pulses, Strickland did not have a Wikipedia page until shortly after her Nobel win.
Perhaps more disconcerting, a volunteer Wikipedia editor had drafted a page about Strickland in March only to have it declined in May. The reason: There wasn’t enough coverage of Strickland’s work in independent secondary sources to establish her notability. Her achievements simply weren’t documented in enough news articles that Wikipedia editors could cite.
Before Wikipedia points a finger that might rightly be pointed back at us, let me acknowledge that Wikipedia’s shortcomings are absolutely real. Our contributors are majority Western and mostly male, and these gatekeepers apply their own judgment and prejudices. As a result, Wikipedia has dozens of articles about battleships and not nearly enough on poetry. We’ve got comprehensive coverage on college football but significantly less on African marathoners.
At the same time, Wikipedia is by design a living, breathing thing — a collection of knowledge that many sources, in aggregate, say is worth knowing. It is therefore a reflection of...