Introducing the ‘Body Atlas’ project
Improving information across sexual and reproductive health on Wikipedia and across the internet.
By providing better and more accurate information about sexual and reproductive health — an area that often predominantly or disproportionately affects women’s health and lives — this WikiCred project seeks to improve the gender bias that exists on Wikipedia.
While I was writing my book, Losing It, it didn’t take long to learn that there wasn’t as much information on the internet as I would have liked about sexual and reproductive health. It was a book that attempted to debunk sex myths with a journalistic lens, and as I researched and wrote in the middle of a pandemic I often found myself spiraling down internet wormholes, or mining my way through academic research papers that were inaccessible to laypeople. The internet might seem full of sexual content, but reliable information on sexual and reproductive health where you live as well as abroad is a completely different story.
In many cases I found research that had never trickled into mainstream media coverage, or research that, considering its biased backers or murky methodology, had received too much uncritical media coverage. These were things that I could spot as a reporter in this space, but that someone with weaker digital literacy or sexual health knowledge may not. As I researched, I learned one of my favorite phrases to describe one of my least favorite things: sex research is WEIRD. Not weird, but WEIRD — “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.” Published findings across sex research in the late 2010s were likely to use samples ranging anything from 68% to 88% WEIRD.
What we actually know about sexual behaviors, before we even start reporting on our sexual attitudes or rights access, remains all too vague and exclusionary. As a member of news media, I know how hard we try to report on the un- and under-reported; but in doing this research I realized first-hand how important journalistic inquiry was not only in investigating where research has not yet tread, but in investigating research interests themselves. There are many who want to curtail rights, such as reducing abortion access, policing sexuality, or cutting access to comprehensive sex education.
We’ve learned to identify the Covid-19 pandemic as crashing into our lives alongside an infodemic — an excessive amount of information about a problem that is typically unreliable, spreads rapidly, and makes a solution more difficult to achieve. The above smorgasbord I have described of good, bad and middling information around sexual and reproductive health is why I try to explore in my work how health access, rights and justice conversations have also been paired with an infodemic, and how we let a sex misinformation crisis proliferate if we don’t work to prebunk and debunk information about our relationships with our own bodies and the bodies of others. And I think Wikipedia is one of the hallowed spaces of the internet where we can do something about this.
Wikipedia can perform a vital public service with the rigor of its objectivity and quality citations, its community of editors, and its ability to be constantly updated as laws or news events develop to act as an important resource for sexual and reproductive health information. Unlike the issues social media creators face in this space, Wikipedia editors can focus on fact, quality citations and writing without worrying that a word or concept may trigger suppression or removal by a social media algorithm. Citations can direct people to reliable, further information on these topics and, most importantly, pages can be translated into languages across the world, democratizing research and reports that are all too often only published in English.
Next Steps
I am already well into writing my landscape review, which shows the extent to which sexual and reproductive health has been under-prioritized on Wikipedia. There are some pages on ‘Abortion in [insert country here]’, but they remain regionally unbalanced and of low quality. In a sample of 193 states and territories, just five locales have b-class articles on abortion, the highest rating any page in this section has achieved. By Wikipedia’s standards, not a single article meets all criteria for a “good” article. A gaping regional inequality amongst abortion country pages reflects not only abortion legality and illegality worldwide, but also where less research has been funded or prioritized. In Africa, 34 out of 53 states have no page for abortion. For Asia country pages, it’s 25 out of 49.
Contraception is another focus area for this project. So far, the landscape review shows disparities between countries that do or don’t have dedicated pages, as well as varieties of ‘birth control’ and ‘family planning’ language used worldwide, reflecting cultural challenges of discussing these issues. These pages may be even more poorly translated than the abortion articles. ‘Birth control in the US’, for example, is only available in English and Hebrew, despite the United States being home to 42 million Spanish speakers.
How to Get Involved
I hope that I can use the WikiCred grant to make a small but encouraging start to narrowing some of these information gaps on Wikipedia. I also hope to identify one or two spaces in which an illustration would be of benefit and use the grant to commission an artist to assist. But mostly, I will be organizing a few in-person edit-a-thons that I hope will create a new generation of Wikipedia editors, invested in positive information futures, and use my personal social media and contacts in this space to onboard as many people as I can.
The best way to get involved is to formally register your interest in this Google form and to join our Discord server that I’ve just built. Over the next year or so you’ll see me post updates via email as well as on my Instagram stories, so my Instagram would be a good place to head, too.
