Last week Donna Strickland, an associate professor at the University of Waterloo, won the Nobel Prize in Physics. She is the third woman to be awarded the prize in its history—Marie Curie received it in 1903 and Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963—but as recently as last May, Wikipedia rejected a draft page about Strickland on the grounds that she did not meet “notability guidelines.” The work for which she received the Nobel—generating the “shortest and most intense laser pulses ever created by mankind,” according to the prize committee—is over 30 years old. She published the groundbreaking paper, with co-authors and now co–Nobel winners Gerard Mourou and Arthur Ashkin, in 1985. Between then and now she has won many prizes, but it took a Nobel for her to become Wikipedia-worthy.



On the same day that Strickland became a Nobel laureate and Wikipedia’s editors quickly threw together a page about her, President Donald Trump used a rally in Mississippi to ridicule Christine Blasey Ford, the psychologist who testified of her assault at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh, who has since been sworn in as a Supreme Court justice. Trump’s words were cruel. He elicited laughter at Ford’s expense, making her trauma—and that of all sexual assault survivors—into the stuff of jokes. The president’s ridicule turned on the idea of Ford’s ignorance: “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know,” said Trump. “I don’t know, I don’t know. What neighborhood was it in? I don’t know. Where’s the house? I don’t know.”

These two events—a woman dragged from obscurity in the morning, belatedly recognized for her achievements; and a woman scorned in the evening, her memory deemed fallible, faulty—are connected. Their stories are part of the same, long history of undermining women’s epistemological authority, of doubting and denying their very ability to know. Wikipedia, which is largely overseen by male editors, rejected Strickland because she was not noteworthy enough to be accepted into the ranks of scientists who have unique insight into how the universe works—until, of course, she became excessively noteworthy for just that. Republicans rejected Ford not because they thought she was lying per se, but because they decided she must be misremembering the assault—that Kavanaugh’s memory is accurate but Ford’s is faulty, that between the two it is the woman’s mind that failed, that she with her explication of the neuroscience of trauma and not he with his adolescent calendars fell short of their criteria for knowing. (And all of this despite the fact that he was the drinker.)

Only around 17 percent of profiles on Wikipedia are of women, a problem with roots in the history of the encyclopedia itself. The great Encyclopédie of the French Enlightenment included the contributions of around 150 men—and not a single woman. The first version of Encyclopedia Britannica in the 18th century featured 39 pages on curing diseases in horses and three words on woman: “female of man.” On the surface, Wikipedia’s bias appears to stem from the fact that only around 10 percent of editors are female. But the problem goes much deeper—to the aggressiveness with which male editors and administrators delete pages on women and harass female editors who try to change this. They get called “cunts” and “feminazis”; they have had fake, pornographic images of them posted online. To avoid harassment, some women have resorted to using gender-neutral pseudonyms so male editors can’t identify them as female. Others simply quit.

“Wikipedia is probably the best example of the appropriation of human value in masculinist terms,” says Gina Walker, an intellectual historian and professor of women’s studies at The New School.