桑迪·托克斯维格（Sandi Toksvig）指出了历史上关于女性生活的信息中存在的系统性偏见，这一点非常正确（参考文章：《维基百科真的存在严重偏见吗？桑迪·托克斯维格认为确实如此——因此她选择支持另一家竞争对手》）。不过，她的评论暗示维基百科本身并没有采取任何措施来纠正这些偏见。我参与了一些旨在缩小维基百科中性别差距的项目。
Sandi Toksvig is right to highlight the systemic bias in information about women's lives in history ( Pass notes: Is Wikipedia 'deeply biased'? Sandi Toksvig says it is – so she's backing a rival, 12 October ). Her comment about Wikipedia, however, implies that no one is working to correct this bias on the site itself. I belong to several projects whose goals are to reduce the gender gap on Wikipedia. Women in Red, started in October 2014.
“Women in Red”项目始于2014年10月：当时，维基百科上关于女性的传记仅占所有传记总数的15.53%；到了2026年10月，这一比例上升到了20.42%，这主要得益于众多志愿者的努力——他们利用业余时间寻找可靠的资料来源。目前，“Women in Red”项目每月平均会新增1,500篇女性传记。
At that point, only 15.53% of biographies on the encyclopedia were of women. As of October 2026, that has risen to 20.42%, in part thanks to the many volunteers who spend their spare time searching for reliable sources to draw on. The Women in Red project currently publishes an average of 1,500 new biographies every month.
然而，当志愿者们撰写传记时，他们所面临的偏见远不止维基百科本身的那些偏见。更根本的问题在于：早期的历史学家和档案工作者往往没有记录女性的生平，这使得相关资料更难以被后人发现。在书店里随便翻阅一下就会发现，这种“以男性为中心”的历史观依然盛行——关于男性的传记数量远远多于关于女性的传记。
Whenever volunteers are creating a biography, we are hampered by far wider system biases than Wikipedia's alone. There is the well-established difficulty that earlier historians and archivists did not record the lives of women, making it harder to retrieve them from the shadows. A quick look in a bookshop shows that this bias towards the Great Man view of history still holds sway, with far more biographies of individual men than of individual women being published.
由于维基百科不允许志愿者编辑直接使用原始研究资料，因此迫切需要更多二手资料（如托克斯维格提出的“Mappa Mundi”工具或来源可靠的传记）。这并不是一个非此即彼的选择题；我们需要共同努力，才能构建一个更加包容的世界历史。
As Wikipedia does not accept primary research by the volunteer editors, there is an urgent need for more secondary sources such as Toksvig's proposed Mappa Mundi and well-sourced biographies. This is not an either/or situation, but one where people need to work together to build a more inclusive history of the world.
Mags L Halliday Exeter 您的文章重复了桑迪·托克斯维格的说法，即该网站由“主要是白人、中年、欧洲男性”编辑，仿佛这是一个封闭的俱乐部。事实并非如此。任何人都可以编辑维基百科，无论是否有账户，今天就可以用手机编辑。如果女性传记缺失，解决办法是免费且开放的，对托克斯维格、剑桥以及这份报纸的每一位读者都适用。只有当障碍是访问问题时，竞争对手项目才需要筹款，而事实并非如此。
Mags L Halliday Exeter Your article repeats Sandi Toksvig's claim that the site is edited by "mostly white, middle-aged, European men", as if it were a closed club. It isn't. Anyone can edit Wikipedia, with or without an account, from a phone, today. If women's biographies are missing, the remedy is free and open to Toksvig, to Cambridge and to every reader of this paper. A rival project needs fundraising only if the obstacle were access, and it isn't.
差距的大部分有更简单的原因。维基百科只收录那些已经在其他地方被写过的人。如果报纸和历史学家忽视了女性，维基百科就几乎没有可依据的材料。这是记录的问题，而不是编辑者的问题。
Most of the gap has a simpler cause. Wikipedia only covers people who have already been written about elsewhere. If newspapers and historians ignored women, Wikipedia has little to work with. That is the record's fault, not the editors'.
维基百科是互联网产生的最好的东西之一：免费、开放、有来源，且任何人都可以修正。它的缺失值得进行严肃的讨论。暗示论点却不真正提出论点的笑话并不算数。
Wikipedia is one of the best things that the internet has produced: free, open, sourced, and fixable by anyone. Its gaps deserve a serious debate. Jokes that hint at an argument without making it are not that.
Shane Ritchie Bangor, County Down
Shane Ritchie Bangor, County Down