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According both to the The Telegraph and The Guardian, Danish-British comedian and presenter Sandi Toksvig is working with the University of Cambridge on the so-called Mappa Mundi project, which aims to supplement Wikipedia and other encyclopedic portals with more information about notable women. Her own words, though, seem to profile Mappa Mundi as yet another rival of Wikipedia, rather than an ally, in their common mission of equal representation.
Placement for The Telegraph quote:
Sandi Toksvig has revealed she is trying to raise money for an alternative to Wikipedia because “white, middle-aged men” compile most of it.
The Danish-British comedian and presenter said her rival service would list the achievements of inspiring women around the world.
She compared Wikipedia to a book she found, written in 1911, which provided “useful” information for women including “the best way to decorate a church” or “wash gloves” and “why women should not be dentists”.
Appearing at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Toksvig said: “You may be aware that since its inception in 2001, Wikipedia has grown to be the largest collection of knowledge in humanity’s history. These days, if anyone wants to find one source for everything, we know most people will say that it’s Wikipedia.
“It is astonishing that it is such a collection of knowledge, but what is remarkable when you drill down into it, Wikipedia has pretty much the same patronising attitude to women as that book.
“This online encyclopaedia is crowd-sourced, which means that anyone in the world that has the time and the access to technology can access the database and expand it.
“It sounds an incredibly egalitarian concept, except the practical upshot of this is that it is mostly white, middle-aged, European men who have both the time and the technology, and we now have a collection of knowledge which, for the English-speaking world, is 85 per cent by and about white men.
“You might say there are fewer women in it because women do less in the public sphere but, when you analyse it – and I really have spent a lot of time on this – you find that women are held to a completely different standard.
“They are much more likely to be subject to what is called a ‘drive-by deletion’. So, say, somebody inputs a biography of somebody they think should be in Wikipedia, somebody else will probably delete it almost immediately because it is determined that woman is not notable enough for inclusion.”
Toksvig cited Donna Strickland, a Canadian physicist, claiming her biography “kept getting deleted” from Wikipedia until the day she won the Nobel Prize. “That does seem to be what it takes,” she said.
The former presenter of The News Quiz and The Great British Bake Off has spent the past five years working on the Mappa Mundi project, “an interactive digital atlas where we can find a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted”.
She said that the project had a lot of support but not enough funding, a similar situation to the Women’s Equality Party, which she co-founded in 2015. The party was dissolved in 2024.
Explaining why she believed Wikipedia needed to be supplemented by other female-centric sources of information, Toksvig said: “This collection of deeply biased material is being scraped by AI and if we leave it alone it will set down the sum knowledge of information, leaving out 50 per cent of the world’s population.”
Placement for The Guardian quote:
Name: Wikipedia.
Age: 25.
Appearance: Patronising and deeply biased.
Is this because you haven’t got your own page? Well, yes. But these aren’t my words. They’re the words of Sandi Toksvig.
But it has 65m articles across more than 300 languages! It’s the largest knowledge resource ever assembled! That may be, but it isn’t very good at women.
According to Toksvig? Yes – and she’s very serious about it. As we speak, she is travelling the world trying to raise money to build something better.
She is? Yes. Along with the University of Cambridge, she hopes that her Mappa Mundi project will be an “interactive digital atlas where we can find a home for the vast amount of knowledge that is currently sidelined or deleted”.
And a lot of the sidelined or deleted knowledge is about women? It is. She cites the case of Donna Strickland, a Canadian physicist who repeatedly had her draft biographies rejected by Wikipedia, until she won a Nobel prize for her work.
Awkward. But it goes broader. By the Wikimedia Foundation’s own estimate, only 19% of Wikipedia biographies concern women. Toksvig puts this down to the site being edited by “mostly white, middle-aged, European men who have both the time and the technology”, she told Cheltenham literature festival this weekend.
I didn’t know that. Its content is weighted heavily towards wealthy countries. In 2013, for instance, the Oxford Internet Institute discovered that Wikipedia contained more coverage of Germany than of Africa and South America combined.
Isn’t Wikipedia too leftwing anyway? Oh God, are you Elon Musk? This is a claim he has repeated for the last couple of years, to the extent of calling it “Wokepedia”.
And what did he do about it? He started his own version – an AI-powered alternative called Grokipedia.
And is it better? A paper published in November 2025 discovered that Grokipedia articles are 13 times more likely to contain a source blacklisted by the English Wikipedia community.
What’s a blacklisted source? The paper pointed out that, at the time of its publication, Grokipedia included 42 citations for the banned neo-Nazi website Stormfront.
Yeesh. Bring on Mappa Mundi! Indeed, Toksvig’s version has better intentions. If nothing else, hopefully it will update Wikipedia’s list of people who died on the toilet to include more women.
Do say: “Wikipedia is systemically biased.”
Don’t say: “At last, something Elon Musk and Sandi Toksvig can agree on.”
The Spectator hosted a paywalled opinion article by conservative author Toby Young, whereas Finn McRedmond questioned Toksvig's initiative in her Opinion column for The Irish Times.
An earlier Toksig attempt to address the same subject was covered in this column following a 2019 article in The Times.
"Wikipedians Believed AI Would Come and Go. They Were Wrong" long-form story in Wired, excerpt from new book by Richard Cooke, The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia. The author also wrote about an appreciation of wabi-sabi and the community of sometimes pedantic, sometimes neurodivergent people who created Wikipedia in The Guardian.
The book title is taken from an essay the author wrote in 2020 for Wired (see Previous Signpost coverage).
You can find book reviews in The New York Times (paywalled) and The New Yorker. – B
Laura June Kirsch, a New York City photographer and artist, writes in Hyperallergic about how she learned that a short Wikipedia article had been written about her, and then [[ Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Laura June Kirsch|nominated for deletion]]. She got to see how strangers could dissect her life and decide on her notability. Later she received "an email from a stranger who runs a digital marketing company with a website that churns out what the kids would call 'AI slop.'" She sent him a more complete biography, but decided not to pay him any money.
She told The Signpost that "I will always wonder and never know who made the original (now removed) Wikipedia page about me (or how a scammer found it), I am glad I was able to share this bizarre story with Hyperallergic. The joy of making art is connecting with people authentically, which is exactly why I refused to pay an internet stranger to put my short-lived Wikipedia page back up."
The situation reminds this reporter of a scam warning that more people should read.
– S
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