Gender bias in Wikipedia
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.
Contents
Evidence of the Gender Gap
Differences in Wikipedia Editors
According to a study performed by Wikipedia, 15% of Wikipedia contributors from the United States are women, with only 13% women contributors worldwide. [1][2] Other studies have found the proportion of editors identifying as female to be as high as 23%, though the moderators and contributors remain predominantly male. [3] This lack of female voices can result in the erasure of women's perspectives in WIkipedia's content. Wikipedia has struggled to maintain women editors and contributors due to other culture complications. When there is a lack of female contribution, the editable content and editor culture can be hostile towards women, potentially driving away other female editors. [4]
Content Imbalances
- From a pure content perspective, men and women may bring different interests and preferences, and they may focus on different issues,” ... “If we have such a small percentage of women contributing, then there are a lot of issues that will potentially be skewed or get less attention than they should.”- Julia Bear
- “Wikipedia is a representation of knowledge. If you go there, and you don’t see any female representation or role models, it shows an implicit bias in the way things are ordered and prioritized,” - Joseph Reagle [5]
- in 2014, Wikipedia editors evaluated all the biographies on English Wikipedia and found that only about 15% of them were about women.
Women-specific Characterization
- "We found that the words most associated with men are mostly about sports, while the words most associated with women are about arts, gender and family. Of particular interest are two concepts strongly associated with women: her husband and first woman." ... "These results can be contextualized in terms of stereotyping theory [44], as they categorize women, either as norm breaking (being the first is an exception to the norm) or as with predefined roles (being wives)." [6]
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. [7] 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. [8] 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.[9]
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. [10]
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.” [11]
- “…when women express anger, they tend to be penalized more than men would be; when they assert themselves, they face more backlash; and they tend to be judged more harshly for their mistakes.” [12]
Policing in a Male-Dominated Space
- "these gatekeepers apply their own judgment and prejudices,” [13]
- “As a website built on the idea that anyone can access and add information, user bias is ingrained within its self-policing wiki model.” [14]
- "Governance on the site relies heavily on community-generated social norms, which are articulated in artifacts of governance called “policy.” ... "norms are a more powerful governing mechanism for supporting collective action than rules and laws becomes complicated when the rules are explicitly intended to reflect norms." [15]
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.” [1]
- “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.” [16]
Responsive Measures
To balance the gender gap, Wikipedia requires a broader population of editors to broaden the topics and knowledge covered on its site. [17] 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. [18]
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.[19] 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.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Nicole Torres “Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?” (Harvard Business Review, Gender, Jun 02 2016)
- ↑ Noam Cohen “Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List” (New York Times, Media, Jan 30 2011)
- ↑ Aysha Khan “The slow and steady battle to close Wikipedia’s dangerous gender gap” (Think Progress, Dec 15 2016)
- ↑ Emma Paling “Wikipedia’s Hostility to Women”, (The Atlantic, Technology, Oct 21 2015)
- ↑ Nicole Torres “Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?” (Harvard Business Review, Gender, Jun 02 2016)
- ↑ Eduardo Graells-Garrido, et. al. "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia" (Cornell University, Computer Science, Social and Information Networks, 2015)
- ↑ Emma Paling “Wikipedia’s Hostility to Women”, (The Atlantic, Technology, Oct 21 2015)
- ↑ Emma Paling “Wikipedia’s Hostility to Women”, (The Atlantic, Technology, Oct 21 2015)
- ↑ Aysha Khan “The slow and steady battle to close Wikipedia’s dangerous gender gap” (Think Progress, Dec 15 2016)
- ↑ Philip Brey "Values in technology and disclosive computer ethics" (2010)
- ↑ Aysha Khan “The slow and steady battle to close Wikipedia’s dangerous gender gap” (Think Progress, Dec 15 2016)
- ↑ Nicole Torres “Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?” (Harvard Business Review, Gender, Jun 02 2016)
- ↑ Monica Hesse “History has a massive gender bias. We’ll settle for fixing Wikipedia.” (The Washington Post, Perspective, Feb 17 2019)
- ↑ Aysha Khan “The slow and steady battle to close Wikipedia’s dangerous gender gap” (Think Progress, Dec 15 2016)
- ↑ Andrea Forte , Vanesa Larco & Amy Bruckman "Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance" (Journal of Management Information Systems, 26:1, 49-72, 2009)
- ↑ Aysha Khan “The slow and steady battle to close Wikipedia’s dangerous gender gap” (Think Progress, Dec 15 2016)
- ↑ Katherine Maher “Wikipedia mirrors the world’s gender biases, it doesn’t cause them”, (The Los Angeles Times, Op-Ed, Oct 18 2018)
- ↑ Nicole Torres “Why Do So Few Women Edit Wikipedia?” (Harvard Business Review, Gender, Jun 02 2016)
- ↑ Eduardo Graells-Garrido, et. al. "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia" (Cornell University, Computer Science, Social and Information Networks, 2015)
