Royal Society To Re-Write History Of Women In Science With Mass Wikipedia Edit

Mass Wikipedia Edit To Re-Write History Of Women In Science

The Royal Society will attempt to give women in science more of their due credit next month, by staging a mass, co-ordinated edit of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia.

The Society will gather in London and online to rewrite articles about prominent historical women scientists and technologists who made an impact in their fields.

Many of the profiles chosen are currently under-written, or lacking in detail compared to their males counterparts.

The session will take place on 19 October in London, and online.

The edit has been organised as part of the annual celebration of Ada Lovelace, a pioneering engineer and mathematician who developed the world's first proto-computer with Charles Babbage in the early 19th century.

Lovelace is credited with having written the first computer program - an algorithm to compute Bernouilli numbers - even though the machine designed to run it was not completed in her lifetime.

Other profiles set to be re-written, according to the BBC, include Dr Elsie Widdowson, who helped make vitamin supplements a standard part of food rations during World War Two, chemist Dame Kathleen Lonsdale and Mary Buckland, a paleontologist who was until recently only mentioned in her husband's Wikipedia article.

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