Chicago-Area Alum Emily Temple-Wood Helped Challenge Gender Bias on Wikipedia

Before Emily Temple-Wood became known for documenting women in science on Wikipedia, she was a student in suburban Chicago with a talent for words and a willingness to question convention.

Temple-Wood attended the Avery Coonley School in Downers Grove. In 2008, she won the DuPage County Spelling Bee, earning a place at that year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee. She advanced to the quarterfinals and finished 46th overall. Later that June, she was recognized alongside other regional spelling-bee winners by then-Illinois Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn.

That early interest in language eventually became part of a much larger project. On Wikipedia, Temple-Wood edits under the name Keilana and has focused on addressing gender disparities in the encyclopedia’s coverage. One central part of that work has been creating articles about women working in science—figures who, despite their accomplishments, have often received less attention in traditional reference materials and online archives.

Her work made her a prominent figure in the Wikipedia community. At Wikimania in 2016, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales named Temple-Wood a joint recipient of the Wikipedian of the Year award. The recognition reflected both her editing and her efforts to confront the conditions that produce uneven representation on the site.

Temple-Wood continued her education at Loyola University Chicago before graduating from Midwestern University. She is a physician and practices in Minnesota.

Her path connects several kinds of public knowledge-making: the competitive precision of a spelling bee, the formal training of medicine and the collaborative, volunteer-driven work of building an online encyclopedia. The Chicago-area portion of that story is especially significant because it shows how a local student’s interest in research and language developed into sustained work on who gets represented in widely used sources.

Wikipedia remains a place where visibility can be shaped by which subjects receive reliable documentation and who takes the time to turn that documentation into an article. Temple-Wood’s contributions have centered on women in science, making the encyclopedia more expansive while drawing attention to the biases that can influence what readers find there.

For Chicago readers, her biography offers a local example of how education, civic recognition and independent digital work can intersect. It is also a reminder that correcting gaps in public knowledge does not happen only through major institutions. Sometimes it begins with an editor choosing to research one overlooked person at a time.

Source and reuse information This backgrounder adapts factual material from “Emily Temple-Wood” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Temple-Wood The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://wikimediadc.org/wiki/Board_of_Directors - https://twitter.com/keilanawiki/status/724317244789035008 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/03/11/how-one-young-female-scientist-decided-to-cope-with-online-harassment/ - https://www.questia.com/article/1G1-142593196/three-kids-outwit-outlast-and-outspell-opponents - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/arts/artsspecial/warming-up-to-the-culture-of-wikipedia.html - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/how-wikipedia-is-hostile-to-women/411619/ Image rights Original illustrative artwork created from story keywords. It is not a documentary photograph.