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Quicksilver, helping improve Wikipedia’s science coverage & gender bias

Wired: “Miriam Adelson is an accomplished physician who has published around a hundred research papers on the physiology and treatment of addiction. She also runs a high-profile substance-abuse clinic in Las Vegas. Oh, and she’s the publisher of Israel’s largest newspaper and, with her billionaire husband Sheldon, a philanthropist and influential Republican party donor. Yet Wikipedia does not have an entry for her. Adelson was among thousands of names flagged by Quicksilver, a software tool by San Francisco startup Primer designed to help Wikipedia editors fill in blind spots in the crowdsourced encyclopedia. Its under representation of women in science is a particular target. The world’s fifth-most-visited website has a long-running problem with gender bias: Only 18 percent of its biographies are of women. Surveys estimate that between 84 and 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are male.  Quicksilver uses machine-learning algorithms to scour news articles and scientific citations to find notable scientists missing from Wikipedia, and then write fully sourced draft entries for them…”

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