Difference between revisions of "Gender bias in Wikipedia"

Revision as of 19:16, 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] The creation of the internet also emerged during a time where the intersection of male-dominated focuses - government, military, academia and engineering - were at the center of culture.^[3]

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. ^[4]

Harassment Online

• - “In Wikimedia’s 2011 survey, more than half of editors reported getting into an argument with other editors on discussion pages; 12 percent of female editors reported someone leaving inappropriate messages about or for them.” ^[5]

Policing in a Male-Dominated Space

• "these gatekeepers apply their own judgment and prejudices,” ^[6]

Survey Responses

• “Women reported feeling less confident about their expertise, less comfortable with editing others’ work (a process which often involves conflict), and reacting more negatively to critical feedback than men.” ^[7]
• “In Gardner’s informal survey of women who use Wikipedia, she found that many women found the interface complicated. Others lacked the time or confidence in their expertise to write for a community site, or found the site’s culture too sexualized, misogynistic, and aggressive.” ^[8]

Responsive Measures

To balance the gender gap, Wikipedia requires a broader population of editors to broaden the topics and knowledge covered on its site. ^[9] To do this is no easy task. To attract more women contributors and editors, Wikipedia could rely on both internal and external efforts.

Internally, Wikipedias current self-policing system could also be altered to maintain a space for women editors. This could be accomplished by implementing a fuller security system that gauges a contributor's expertise, monitors for harassment or vandalism, and encourages training or education in including multiple perspectives in knowledge sharing. ^[10]

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.^[11] Due to a lack of coverage in external, 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.

Example Efforts from the Wikimedia Foundation

• 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.

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. ↑ Aysha Khan “The slow and steady battle to close Wikipedia’s dangerous gender gap” (Think Progress, Dec 15 2016)
4. ↑ Philip Brey "Values in technology and disclosive computer ethics" (2010)
5. ↑ Aysha Khan “The slow and steady battle to close Wikipedia’s dangerous gender gap” (Think Progress, Dec 15 2016)
6. ↑ Monica Hesse “History has a massive gender bias. We’ll settle for fixing Wikipedia.” (The Washington Post, Perspective, Feb 17 2019)
7. ↑ Nicole Torres “Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?” (Harvard Business Review, Gender, Jun 02 2016)
8. ↑ Aysha Khan “The slow and steady battle to close Wikipedia’s dangerous gender gap” (Think Progress, Dec 15 2016)
9. ↑ Katherine Maher “Wikipedia mirrors the world’s gender biases, it doesn’t cause them”, (The Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed, Oct 18 2018)
10. ↑ Nicole Torres “Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?” (Harvard Business Review, Gender, Jun 02 2016)
11. ↑ Eduardo Graells-Garrido, et. al. "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia" (Cornell University, Computer Science, Social and Information Networks, 2015)