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.”