Difference between revisions of "Gender bias in Wikipedia"

Revision as of 18:56, 15 March 2019

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, makes knowledge sharing easy and accessible to a wide audience. Because anyone can access and edit Wikipedia with little training, the site offers a neutral setting to contribute one's personal expertise to a collective knowledge base. However, among other biases, a stark gender bias can be seen in both Wikipedia content and the culture of Wikipedia editing.

Evidence of the Gender Gap

Differences in Wikipedia Editors

Content Imbalances

Women-specific Characterization

Why Don't More Women Edit Wikipedia

Foundational Issues in Wikipedia

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia was originally founded to reflect a culture that encourages honest, diplomatic thought and neutral points of view. ^[1] The foundational structure of Wikipedia allows the editing of any pages with little policing, though a select group of editors keep a close watch on popular, well-visited pages. Because Wikipedia was meant to reflect the neutrality of an encyclopedia, one must look at the foundations of encyclopedia's themselves. Encyclopedias were originally developed to create a collective, foundational knowledge between educated men. ^[2]

This argument suggests the question: For whom was this knowledge sharing space created and who has inhabited this space the longest? If encyclopedias and Wikipedia were created with an intended male audience, the content and culture of the site will share these values and reflect this bias. This bias against women can take the form of transparent biases, like blatant online harassment, or opaque biases, like the lack of content regarding notable women. ^[3]

Harassment Online

Policing in a Male-Dominated Space

Survey Responses

Responsive Measures

Wikimedia Foundation Efforts

• WikiProject Women Scientists:
• WikiProject Women in Red:
• WikiProject Gender Gap Task Force:
• Inspire Campaign: Offers grants to
• Art+Feminism campaign:
• WikiWomenWeek:

Other External Efforts

• Wikid GRRLS: This project teaches online and research skills and encourages teenage girls in the Detroit area to participate in online discussion.

Other Suggestions

While the explicit language and personal perspectives of women come from editors themselves, the gender bias found in Wikipedia also reflects the biases found in the secondary sources that Wikipedia relies on.^[4] Due to a lack of coverage in independent sources about notable women and woman-related topics from other fields of academic and research, Wikipedia also lacks the reflection of this coverage. To account for this difference, other fields also need to recognize gender biases they may face to build the repository from research that Wikipedia editors may pull from.

• “a broader base of contributors and editors…would naturally help broaden our content” ^[5]
• “implementing a system to assess contributors’ actual expertise, deliver positive feedback, and provide training to increase female participation.” ^[6]

Ethical Concerns

Bias

Drachen Traffic Example/Wikipedia Articles

1. ↑ Emma Paling “Wikipedia’s Hostility to Women”, (The Atlantic, Technology, Oct 21 2015)
2. ↑ Emma Paling “Wikipedia’s Hostility to Women”, (The Atlantic, Technology, Oct 21 2015)
3. ↑ Philip Brey "Values in technology and disclosive computer ethics" (2010)
4. ↑ Eduardo Graells-Garrido, et. al. "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia" (Cornell University, Computer Science, Social and Information Networks, 2015)
5. ↑ Katherine Maher “Wikipedia mirrors the world’s gender biases, it doesn’t cause them”, (The Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed, Oct 18 2018)
6. ↑ Nicole Torres “Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?” (Harvard Business Review, Gender, Jun 02 2016)