My Weetabix spoon froze in mid-air when I saw that Sandi Toksvig, affable host of televisual fluff, and activist for various progressive causes, has her sights set on a new target: Toksvig is taking aim at, of all things, Wikipedia.
Toksvig’s Wiki crusade is fascinatingly barmy. What next, I wonder?
Why? Because, apparently, it is not left-wing enough. In fact, in her estimation it is ‘deeply biased’ and a positive hotbed of wrongthink, because it is controlled and edited by ‘middle-aged white men’ (boo hiss).
Toksvig revealed to an audience at the Cheltenham Literature Festival – that well-known hangout for young people of colour – that she has spent the last few years travelling the world raising funds for Mappa Mundi, a new online encyclopaedia to be overseen by the University of Cambridge. Mappa Mundi? Boring name. And Tokipedia was right there.
Now, Wikipedia is many things – often wildly inaccurate, frequently libellous – but too right-wing is not one of them. Toksvig is particularly convinced that women are hard done by on Wikipedia, which is edited ‘mostly by white middle-aged European men who both have the time and the technology…We now have a collection of knowledge that for the English-speaking world is 85 per cent by and about white men…women are held to a completely different standard.’
Where are these armies of busy-fingered old European chaps? Are there grey-haired Italians and doddery Swedes logging on day after day, hour after hour, deleting the profiles of female scientists? Anybody that uses Wikipedia as a single source of research on any subject is likely to run into trouble pretty quickly, it’s true. But its biases and omissions are pretty obviously not coming from where Toksvig thinks. I speak as somebody whose Wiki bio once contained a long section on how unsavoury I was because I posted a photo on Twitter of Ronnie Corbett in character as an African tribesman. Campaigners against antisemitism and political transvestism have routinely been traduced by activist editors.
So Toksvig’s take is a fascinatingly obtuse one. What next? Is she going to denounce Rupert Lowe as a communist? Attack the Pope for his fervent Protestantism?
She also told Cheltenham that she hadn’t met anybody who disagrees with her on the matter. This may be true. But only in the same way, I suspect, that folk who stand outside Little Waitrose holding their left foot in their right hand and screaming that aliens will land on Thursday don’t meet people who disagree with them – only people backing hurriedly away and trying to avoid eye contact.
Toksvig has wider trouble with her world view. The Times also tells us how she bemoaned a sharp recent decline in the acceptance of homosexuality among the young. This she blames on social media, not seeming to notice that the plunge correlates with pretty much the exact period in which lesbians and gays have been rebranded as ‘LGBT’, and blessed by the ‘inclusion’ in our ranks by fellers who enjoy barging into women’s spaces. Not to mention mass uncontrolled immigration from backwards countries. Funny, that.
Ironically, Toksvig the soi-disant feminist is all for including men into the category of women, on their whim. So let me get this straight. Men editing Wikipedia? Bad. Very bad. Men rocking up in women’s toilets and dating apps? Come on in fellers, kettle’s brewing!
I’ve tried to make sense of Toksvig’s world. The best I can do is to offer the suggestion that, like so many ageing progressives, she is still in her comfort zone, refighting battles that her side won, comfortably and conclusively, decades ago. Last week, for example, historian Mary Beard – also at Cheltenham, of course – inveighed against the history syllabus in the national curriculum, demanding that kids learn more than just dates, battles, kings and queens. Now, I left school 42 years ago, and I was never taught this way. And look at Andy Burnham, still re-legislating Brexit and fighting Mrs Thatcher.
I feel I should join in with this ancient grudging. Perhaps my next column should be a blast at David Reece for nicking my dinner money in 1981?
Still, Toksvig’s Wiki crusade is fascinatingly barmy. What next, I wonder? ‘Diminutive Dane plans cat charity to help save firemen from trees’? Or ‘QI host demands urgent action on “too-long” TikTok videos’?
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