Let’s be real, Wikipedia is the ultimate "I'll just look it up" resource, but comedian Sandi Toksvig is officially calling it out for being lowkey problematic. Speaking at the Cheltenham literature festival, Toksvig argued that the site is heavily skewed because it’s primarily curated by "mostly white, middle-aged, European men who have both the time and the technology."## The gender gap issue
The stats actually back her up, too. According to the Wikimedia Foundation’s own data, only 19% of Wikipedia’s biographies are about women. Toksvig highlighted the wild case of Canadian physicist Donna Strickland, whose page drafts were repeatedly rejected until she finally won a Nobel prize. It’s giving gatekeeping, no cap.
It’s not just about gender, either. Research from the Oxford Internet Institute back in 2013 showed that the site had more content about Germany than the entire continents of Africa and South America combined. The vibes are definitely off when it comes to global representation.
Enter Mappa Mundi
Toksvig isn’t just venting; she’s building a solution. In collaboration with the University of Cambridge, she’s developing a project called Mappa Mundi. The goal? To create an interactive digital atlas that finally gives a home to all the knowledge that’s currently being ignored or erased.
The Elon Musk factor
Of course, Wikipedia has had other critics—most notably Elon Musk, who famously dubbed it "Wokepedia." He tried to launch his own AI-powered version, Grokipedia, but that experiment went south fast. A 2025 paper found that Grokipedia was 13 times more likely to cite blacklisted sources, including 42 citations for the neo-Nazi site Stormfront. Yeah, that’s a hard pass.
Why it matters
Wikipedia is the world’s biggest knowledge hub, but if a massive chunk of human history—specifically about women—is being filtered out by a lack of diversity among editors, the "truth" we’re consuming online is fundamentally incomplete. Mappa Mundi is a major attempt to fix that bias once and for all.
