DOCSLIB.ORG

Detecting Biased Statements in Wikipedia

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Detecting Biased Statements in Wikipedia Detecting Biased Statements in Wikipedia Christoph Hube and Besnik Fetahu L3S Research Center, Leibniz University of Hannover Hannover, Germany {hube, fetahu}@L3S.de ABSTRACT editors only in the English Wikipedia. However, only a small mi- 1 Quality in Wikipedia is enforced through a set of editing policies nority, specifically 127,000 editors are active . Due to the diverse and guidelines recommended for Wikipedia editors. Neutral point demographics and interests of editors, to maintain the quality of of view (NPOV) is one of the main principles in Wikipedia, which the provided information, Wikipedia has a set of editing guidelines ensures that for controversial information all possible points of and policies. 2 view are represented proportionally. Furthermore, language used One of the core policies is the Neutral Point of View (NPOV) . in Wikipedia should be neutral and not opinionated. It requires that for controversial topics, Wikipedia editors should However, due to the large number of Wikipedia articles and proportionally represent all points of view. The core guidelines in its operating principle based on a voluntary basis of Wikipedia NPOV are to: (i) avoid stating opinions as facts, (ii) avoid stating editors; quality assurances and Wikipedia guidelines cannot always seriously contested assertions as facts, (iii) avoid stating facts as be enforced. Currently, there are more than 40,000 articles, which opinions, (iv) prefer nonjudgemental language, and (v) indicate the are flagged with NPOV or similar quality tags. Furthermore, these relative prominence of opposing views. represent only the portion of articles for which such quality issues Currently, there are approximately 40,000 Wikipedia pages that are explicitly flagged by the Wikipedia editors, however, the real are flagged with NPOV (or similar quality flaws) quality issues. 3 number may be higher considering that only a small percentage of These represent explicit cases marked by Wikipedia editors, where articles are of good quality or featured as categorized by Wikipedia. specific Wikipedia pages or statements (sentences in Wikipedia In this work, we focus on the case of language bias at the sen- articles) are deemed to be in violation with the NPOV policy. Re- tence level in Wikipedia. Language bias is a hard problem, as it casens et al. [17] analyze these cases that go against the specific represents a subjective task and usually the linguistic cues are sub- points from the NPOV guidelines. They find common linguistic tle and can be determined only through its context. We propose a cues, such as the cases of framing bias, where subjective words or supervised classification approach, which relies on an automatically phrases are used that are linked to a particular point of view (point created lexicon of bias words, and other syntactical and semantic (iv)), and epistemological bias which focuses on the believability of characteristics of biased statements. a statement, thus violating points (i) and (ii). Similarly, Martin [11] We experimentally evaluate our approach on a dataset consisting shows the cases of biases which are in violation with all guideli- of biased and unbiased statements, and show that we are able to nes of NPOV, an experimental study carried out on his personal 4 detect biased statements with an accuracy of 74%. Furthermore, we Wikipedia page . show that competitors that determine bias words are not suitable for Ensuring that Wikipedia pages follow the core principles in Wi- detecting biased statements, which we outperform with a relative kipedia is a hard task. Firstly, due to the fact that editors provide and improvement of over 20%. maintain Wikipedia pages on a voluntarily basis, the editor efforts are not always inline with the demand by the general viewership KEYWORDS of Wikipedia [21] and as such they cannot be redirected to pages that have quality issues. Furthermore, there are documented cases, Language Bias; Wikipedia Quality; NPOV where Wikipedia admins are responsible for policy violations and ACM Reference Format: pushing forward specific points of view on Wikipedia pages [2, 5], Christoph Hube and Besnik Fetahu. 2018. Detecting Biased Statements in thus, going directly against the NPOV policy. Wikipedia. In WWW ’18 Companion: The 2018 Web Conference Companion, In this work, we address quality issues that deal with language April 23–27, 2018, Lyon, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https: //doi.org/10.1145/3184558.3191640 bias in Wikipedia statements that are in violation with the points (i) – (iv). We classify statements as being biased or unbiased.A statement 1 INTRODUCTION in our case corresponds to a sentence in Wikipedia. We address one of the main deficiencies of related work [17], which focuses on Wikipeda is one of the largest collaboratively created encyclopedias. detecting bias words. In our work, we show that similar to [13], Its community of editors consist of more than 32 million registered words that introduce bias or violate NPOV are dependent on the This paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International context in which they appear and furthermore the topic at hand. (CC BY 4.0) license. Authors reserve their rights to disseminate the work on their personal and corporate Web sites with the appropriate attribution. 1 WWW ’18 Companion, April 23–27, 2018, Lyon, France https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_of_editors 2 © 2018 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view 3 under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 License. This number may as well be much higher for cases that are not spotted by the ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5640-4/18/04. Wikipedia editors. https://doi.org/10.1145/3184558.3191640 4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Martin_(social_scientist) Thus, our approach relies on an automatically generated lexicon of [15], and kill verbs. They also ask the workers for their political bias words for a given set of Wikipedia pages under consideration, identification and find that conservative workers are more likely to and in addition to semantic and syntactic features extracted from label a statement as biased. the classified statements. Wagner et al.[20] use lexical bias, i.e. vocabulary that is typically As an example of language bias consider the following statement: used to describe women and men, as one dimension among other • Sanders shocked his fellow liberals by putting up a Soviet dimensions to analyze gender bias on Wikipedia. Union flag in his Senate office. Recasens et al.[17] tackle a language bias problem that is similar to our problem. Given a sentence with known bias they try to The word shocked introduces bias in this statement since it im- identify the most biased word using a machine learning approach plies that “putting a Soviet Union flag in his office” is a shocking based on logistic regression and mostly language features, i.e. word act. lists containing hedges, factive verbs, assertive verbs, implicative To this end, we make the following contributions in this work: verbs, report verbs, entailments, and subjectives. They also use • propose an automated approach for generating a lexicon of part of speech and a bias lexicon with words that they extracted bias words from a set of Wikipedia articles under considera- by comparing the before and after form of Wikipedia articles for tion, revisions that contain a mention of POV in their revision comment. • an automated approach for classifying Wikipedia statements The bias lexicon contains 654 words including many words that do as either biased or unbiased, not directly introduce bias, such as america, person, and historical. • a human labelled dataset consisting of biased and unbiased In comparison the approach for extracting bias words presented in statements. this paper differs strongly from their approach and our bias lexicon is more comprehensive including almost 10,000 words. Recasens et 2 RELATED WORK al. report accuracies of 0.34 for finding the most biased word and Research on bias in Wikipedia has mostly focused on different 0.59 for having the most biased word among the top 3 words. They topics such as culture, gender and politics [1, 8, 20] with some of also use crowdsourcing to create a baseline for the given problem. the existing research referring to language bias. The results show that the task of identifying a bias word in a given Greenstein and Zhu[4] analyze political bias in Wikipedia with sentence is not trivial for human annotators. The human annotators a focus on US politics. They use the approach introduced by Gent- achieve an accuracy of 30%. zkow and Shapiro[3] that was initially developed to determine Another important topic in the context of Wikipedia is vanda- newspaper slant. It relies on a list of 1000 terms and phrases that lism detection [16]. While vandalism detection uses some methods are typically used by either republican or democratic congress mem- that are also relevant for bias detection (e.g. blacklisting), it is im- bers. Greenstein and Zhu search for these terms and phrases within portant to notice that bias detection and vandalism detection are Wikipedia articles about US politics to measure in which spectrum two different problems. Vandalism refers to cases where editors (left or right leaning politics) these articles are. They find that arti- deliberately lower the quality of an article and are typically more cles on Wikipedia used to show a more liberal slant in average but obvious. In the case of bias, editors might not be aware that their that this slant has decreased over time with the growth of Wikipedia contribution violates the NPOV. and more editors working on the articles. For the seed extraction part of the approach we present in this paper we also use articles 3 LANGUAGE BIAS DETECTION APPROACH related to US politics but instead of measuring political bias our In this section we introduce our approach for language bias de- approach simply detects biased statements using features that are tection.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Culture of Wikipedia
    Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia Good Faith Collaboration The Culture of Wikipedia Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. Foreword by Lawrence Lessig The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Web edition, Copyright © 2011 by Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. CC-NC-SA 3.0 Purchase at Amazon.com | Barnes and Noble | IndieBound | MIT Press Wikipedia's style of collaborative production has been lauded, lambasted, and satirized. Despite unease over its implications for the character (and quality) of knowledge, Wikipedia has brought us closer than ever to a realization of the centuries-old Author Bio & Research Blog pursuit of a universal encyclopedia. Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is a rich ethnographic portrayal of Wikipedia's historical roots, collaborative culture, and much debated legacy. Foreword Preface to the Web Edition Praise for Good Faith Collaboration Preface Extended Table of Contents "Reagle offers a compelling case that Wikipedia's most fascinating and unprecedented aspect isn't the encyclopedia itself — rather, it's the collaborative culture that underpins it: brawling, self-reflexive, funny, serious, and full-tilt committed to the 1. Nazis and Norms project, even if it means setting aside personal differences. Reagle's position as a scholar and a member of the community 2. The Pursuit of the Universal makes him uniquely situated to describe this culture." —Cory Doctorow , Boing Boing Encyclopedia "Reagle provides ample data regarding the everyday practices and cultural norms of the community which collaborates to 3. Good Faith Collaboration produce Wikipedia. His rich research and nuanced appreciation of the complexities of cultural digital media research are 4. The Puzzle of Openness well presented.
    [Show full text]
  • Florida State University Libraries
    )ORULGD6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\/LEUDULHV 2020 Wiki-Donna: A Contribution to a More Gender-Balanced History of Italian Literature Online Zoe D'Alessandro Follow this and additional works at DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES WIKI-DONNA: A CONTRIBUTION TO A MORE GENDER-BALANCED HISTORY OF ITALIAN LITERATURE ONLINE By ZOE D’ALESSANDRO A Thesis submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Degree Awarded: Spring, 2020 The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Zoe D’Alessandro defended on April 20, 2020. Dr. Silvia Valisa Thesis Director Dr. Celia Caputi Outside Committee Member Dr. Elizabeth Coggeshall Committee Member Introduction Last year I was reading Una donna (1906) by Sibilla Aleramo, one of the most important ​ ​ works in Italian modern literature and among the very first explicitly feminist works in the Italian language. Wanting to know more about it, I looked it up on Wikipedia. Although there exists a full entry in the Italian Wikipedia (consisting of a plot summary, publishing information, and external links), the corresponding page in the English Wikipedia consisted only of a short quote derived from a book devoted to gender studies, but that did not address that specific work in great detail. As in-depth and ubiquitous as Wikipedia usually is, I had never thought a work as important as this wouldn’t have its own page. This discovery prompted the question: if this page hadn’t been translated, what else was missing? And was this true of every entry for books across languages, or more so for women writers? My work in expanding the entry for Una donna was the beginning of my exploration ​ ​ into the presence of Italian women writers in the Italian and English Wikipedias, and how it relates back to canon, Wikipedia, and gender studies.
    [Show full text]
  • Reliability of Wikipedia 1 Reliability of Wikipedia
    Reliability of Wikipedia 1 Reliability of Wikipedia The reliability of Wikipedia (primarily of the English language version), compared to other encyclopedias and more specialized sources, is assessed in many ways, including statistically, through comparative review, analysis of the historical patterns, and strengths and weaknesses inherent in the editing process unique to Wikipedia. [1] Because Wikipedia is open to anonymous and collaborative editing, assessments of its Vandalism of a Wikipedia article reliability usually include examinations of how quickly false or misleading information is removed. An early study conducted by IBM researchers in 2003—two years following Wikipedia's establishment—found that "vandalism is usually repaired extremely quickly — so quickly that most users will never see its effects"[2] and concluded that Wikipedia had "surprisingly effective self-healing capabilities".[3] A 2007 peer-reviewed study stated that "42% of damage is repaired almost immediately... Nonetheless, there are still hundreds of millions of damaged views."[4] Several studies have been done to assess the reliability of Wikipedia. A notable early study in the journal Nature suggested that in 2005, Wikipedia scientific articles came close to the level of accuracy in Encyclopædia Britannica and had a similar rate of "serious errors".[5] This study was disputed by Encyclopædia Britannica.[6] By 2010 reviewers in medical and scientific fields such as toxicology, cancer research and drug information reviewing Wikipedia against professional and peer-reviewed sources found that Wikipedia's depth and coverage were of a very high standard, often comparable in coverage to physician databases and considerably better than well known reputable national media outlets.
    [Show full text]
  • Blind Trust Is Not Enough”: Considering Practical Verifiability and Open Referencing in Wikipedia
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies Perspective “Blind Trust is Not Enough”: Considering Practical Verifiability and Open Referencing in Wikipedia Cal Murgu and Krisandra Ivings ABSTRACT This article draws attention to the often-unseen information inequalities that occur in the way that Wikipedia content is referenced. Drawing on digital information control and virtual gatekeeping scholarship, we contend that by not considering the degree to which references are practically accessible and verifiable, Wikipedia editors are implicitly promoting a control mechanism that is limiting the potential of Wikipedia to serve, as Willinsky puts it, “as a gateway to a larger world of knowledge.” We question the widespread practice of referencing peer-reviewed literature that is obscured by prohibitive paywalls. As we see it, two groups are disadvantaged by this practice. First, Wikipedia editors who lack access to the most current scholarly literature are unable to verify a reference or confirm the veracity of a fact or figure. Second, and perhaps most important, general readers are left with two unsatisfactory options in this scenario: they can either trust the authority of the citation or pay to access the article. Building on Don Fallis’ work on epistemic consequences of Wikipedia, this paper contends that promoting practically verifiable references would work to mitigate these inequalities and considers how relatively new initiatives could be used to improve the quality and utility of Wikipedia more generally. Murgu, Cal and Krisandra Ivings. “’Blind Trust is Not Enough’: Considering Practical Verifiability and Open Referencing in Wikipedia,” in “Information/Control: Control in the Age of Post-Truth,” eds.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender Imbalance on Wikipedia- an Insider’S Perspective Saskia Ehlers This Paper Will Focus on the Gender Gap Within Wikipedia
    November 17 Gender Imbalance on Wikipedia- An Insider’s perspective Saskia Ehlers This paper will focus on the gender gap within Wikipedia. For this the current state of research will be summarized. Effect on participation and content of the encyclopedia resulting from the gender imbalance will be analyzed. An Insider’s perspective will be given on the current issues and dynamics within the German community and the Wikimedia foundation also including narratives from different community members from all over the world that are part of the global movement. Saskia Ehlers, Center for interdisciplinary gender studies , TU Berlin Table of contents LIST OF TABLES II LIST OF FIGURES II PREFACE 1 INTRODUCTION 1 CURRENT STATE OF RESEARCH ON THE TOPIC OF GENDER IMBALANCE ON WIKIPEDIA 2 ARGUMENTS IN FAVOR OF DIVERSITY 2 ARGUMENTS AGAINST DIVERSITY 3 FINDING OF STUDIES 3 REASONS FOR LOW FEMALE PARTICIPATION 4 CONTENT DISTORTION 5 STRATEGIES TO INCREASE FEMALE PARTICIPATION 9 SURVEY OF DIVERSITY EXPERTS IN THE WIKIPEDIA COMMUNITY 10 SURVEY RESPONSES 10 BEST PRACTICES FOR INCREASING FEMALE EDITORSHIP 16 OBSTACLES AND FAILED PROJECTS FOR INCREASING FEMALE EDITORSHIP 17 CURRENT PROJECTS ON THE GENDER GAP IN THE WIKIPEDIA COMMUNITY 19 CONCLUSION 20 REFERENCES 22 List of tables Table 1: Percentage of female editors found in different surveys (own illustration) Table 2: English language version gender- specific Likelihood Ratios (Wagner, Claudia It’s a Man’s Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia Proceedings of the Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. P. 454-463) List of figures Figure 1: Estimated proportion of female contributors in different language versions (Charting Diversity (2014) Charting Diverstiy- Working together towards diversity in Wikipedia by Wikimedia Foundation Germany and Beuth university for applied sciences.
    [Show full text]
  • Details of Module and Its Structure
    Details of Module and its Structure Module Detail Subject Name Sociology Paper Name Development, Globalisation and Society Module Name/Title Religious Resurgence Pre-requisites Understanding implications of globalisation on religion Objectives The module aims to understand the impact of globalisation on religion; initially religion losing its significance and then resurging with new dimensions. Keywords globalisation, secularisation and religious resurgence Structure of Module / Syllabus of a module (Define Topic / Sub-topic of module) Globalisation and its Impacts – Religious Resurgence Role Name Affiliation Principal Investigator Prof Sujata Patel Department of Sociology, University of Hyderabad Paper Coordinator Prof Sherry Sabbarwal Department of Sociology, Panjab University, Chandigarh Content Writer/Author (CW) Veenat Department of Sociology, Post Graduate Government College for Girls, Sector-11, Chandigarh Content Reviewer (CR) Prof Sherry Sabbarwal Department of Sociology, Panjab University, Chandigarh Language Editor (LE) Prof Sherry Sabbarwal Department of Sociology, Panjab University, Chandigarh 1 Course: Development, Globalisation and Society Unit: Globalisation and its Impacts Module Title: Religious Resurgence Introduction In the present times, religious terrorism, love jihad, religious conversions and re-conversions (ghar wapsi), fundamentalists’ agendas, etc. are the buzzwords. Interestingly, this is happening in midst of the phase that is supposedly the most advanced stage of civilisation where human beings are acquainted with best of scientific innovations and information technology and the whole world has shrunk, to what McLuhan calls a ‘global village’. When the process of globalisation gained momentum in the twentieth century, affecting almost all facets of human life like economy, politics, intellect and culture, surpassing all constraints of time and space, it also had a significant impact on religion.
    [Show full text]
  • POLITICAL INTERACTION in WIKIPEDIA Jointly They Edit
    JOINTLY THEY EDIT: POLITICAL INTERACTION IN WIKIPEDIA 1 Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Wikipedia Jessica G. Neff1, David Laniado2, Karolin Eva Kappler2, Yana Volkovich2, Pablo Aragón2 & Andreas Kaltenbrunner2 University of Southern California1 Barcelona Media Foundation2 Abstract In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political discourses is shifting from mass media to social media. Continued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display (or not to display) their political affiliation. Next, we more closely examined the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community. Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a ‘Wikipedian’ even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of ‘being Wikipedian’ may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation. JOINTLY THEY EDIT: POLITICAL INTERACTION IN WIKIPEDIA 2 Introduction Online media have become an increasingly important source of political information in recent years.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Wikipedia Often Overlooks Stories of Women in History Lara Nicosia Rochester Institute of Technology
    Rochester Institute of Technology RIT Scholar Works Articles 3-16-2018 Why Wikipedia Often Overlooks Stories of Women in History Lara Nicosia Rochester Institute of Technology Tamar Carroll Rochester Institute of Technology This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.rit.edu/article Part of the History of Gender Commons, and the Information Literacy Commons Recommended Citation Nicosia, Lara and Carroll, Tamar, "Why Wikipedia Often Overlooks Stories of Women in History" (2018). The Conversation,Accessed from http://scholarworks.rit.edu/article/1847 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by RIT Scholar Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of RIT Scholar Works. For more information, please contact [email protected]. https://theconversation.com/why-wikipedia-often-overlooks-stories-of-women-in-history-92555 Academic rigor, journalistic flair Why Wikipedia often overlooks stories of women in history March 16, 2018 6.25am EDT Less than a third of biographical entries on Wikipedia are about women. aradaphotography/shutterstock.com Why Wikipedia often overlooks stories of women in history March 16, 2018 6.25am EDT Movements like #MeToo are drawing increased attention to the systemic discrimination Authors facing women in a range of professional fields, from Hollywood and journalism to banking and government. Discrimination is also a problem on user-driven sites like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the fifth most popular website worldwide. In January, the English-language version of the online Tamar Carroll Associate Professor of History, Rochester encyclopedia had over 7.3 billion page views, more than 2000 percent higher than other Institute of Technology online reference sites such as IMDb or Dictionary.com.
    [Show full text]
  • View / Open Ada07-Wpthr-Pea-2015
    2/26/2021 WP:THREATENING2MEN: Misogynist Infopolitics and the Hegemony of the Asshole Consensus on English Wikipedia - Ada New Media ISSUE NO. 7 WP:THREATENING2MEN: Misogynist Infopolitics and the Hegemony of the Asshole Consensus on English Wikipedia Bryce Peake When schools discourage reporting, they collude with many societal forces to cover up sexual violence. Sexual violence thrives on secrecy. – Jennifer Freyd, ’Official Campus Statistics for Sexual Violence Mislead’ (http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/7/college-campus- sexualassaultsafetydatawhitehousegender.html) Spring 2014 was a long season, marked by a campus-wide anti-rape movement that took off at the University of Oregon (UO). In the wake of a high profile case, administrators callously and robotically rehearsed the “one time is too many” catch phrase that, through its rhetorical singularity, renders campus sexual violence an “isolated issue.” Arguments that UO was somehow unique or unusual in its unsafe environment and unethical public relations approach to public safety became rampant in public forums and the comment sections of online articles. The idea of writing campus sexual violence into Wikipedia was born of these circumstances, growing out of a conversation with campus activists about universities’ efforts to keep campus sexual violence invisible. By increasing the amount of freely available information on the long history of campus sexual violence across the United States, we could provide information for people looking to learn about the ways Oregon was
    [Show full text]
  • Reader Responsibility in Knowledge Organisation Readers Between Reference Books, Commonplace Books, Wikipedia, and Pinterest
    Reader Responsibility in Knowledge Organisation Readers between Reference Books, Commonplace Books, Wikipedia, and Pinterest Lea Maria Ferguson (B.A.), s1283464 Master’s Thesis Book and Digital Media Studies, Leiden University First reader: Prof. A. H. van der Weel Second reader: P. Verhaar Date of Submission: 1st July 2015 Words: 19.530 (incl. footnotes) Abstract The possibilities for exerting reader responsibility as an expression of democracy on the Internet are manifold. Reader responsibility may be seen as the process of finding, accessing, making sense of, interpreting, judging, and putting to use the information that can be gained through reading, and thereby turning it into knowledge. However, the 'democratisation discourse' on the Internet is often (mis-)used to promote mere economic aims, even under the guise of ‘digital socialism’. This is not only an obstacle to understanding reader responsibility and the process of reading, but also to gaining access to knowledge and making use of information resources successfully and effectively. It is encouraging to see though that the potential presented by reading and writing is (partly) being implemented. Historically, this occurred through commonplace and reference books, and currently it is happening through Pinterest and Wikipedia - despite some problematic economic and political circumstances. Embracing the responsibilities of the reading process will be conducive to developing the political potential of reading and as such be beneficial for society at large. Despite the connected and implied struggles of this, it is important to realise that readers can only turn information into knowledge and utilise it in their lives by being active and informed. Keywords Reader responsibility, textual knowledge navigation, commonplace books, reference books, Wikipedia, Pinterest Contents Abstract...............................................................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Men Are Elected, Women Are Married: Events Gender Bias on Wikipedia
    Men Are Elected, Women Are Married: Events Gender Bias on Wikipedia Jiao Sun1;2 and Nanyun Peng1;2;3 1Computer Science Department, University of Southern California 2Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California 3Computer Science Department, University of California, Los Angeles [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Name Wikipedia Description Human activities can be seen as sequences Career: In 1930, when she was 17, she eloped of events, which are crucial to understanding with 26-year-old actor Grant Withers; they were married in Yuma, Arizona. The marriage was societies. Disproportional event distribution Loretta for different demographic groups can mani- Young annulled the next year, just as their second fest and amplify social stereotypes, and po- (F) movie together (ironically entitled Too Young tentially jeopardize the ability of members in to Marry) was released. some groups to pursue certain goals. In this pa- Personal Life: In 1930, at 26, he eloped to per, we present the first event-centric study of Yuma, Arizona with 17-year-old actress Loretta gender biases in a Wikipedia corpus. To facili- Grant Young. The marriage ended in annulment in tate the study, we curate a corpus of career and Withers 1931 just as their second movie together, titled (M) personal life descriptions with demographic in- Too Young to Marry, was released. formation consisting of 7,854 fragments from 10,412 celebrities. Then we detect events with Table 1: The marriage events are under the Career sec- a state-of-the-art event detection model, cali- tion for the female on Wikipedia. However, the same brate the results using strategically generated marriage is in the Personal Life section for the male.
    [Show full text]
  • Gender Inequality in New Media: Evidence from Wikipedia
    ISSN 2279-9362 Gender Inequality in New Media: Evidence from Wikipedia Marit Hinnosaar No. 411 May 2015 www.carloalberto.org/research/working-papers © 2015 by Marit Hinnosaar. Any opinions expressed here are those of the authors and not those of the Collegio Carlo Alberto. Gender Inequality in New Media: Evidence from Wikipedia∗ Marit Hinnosaary May 2015 Abstract Media is considered to be critical for gender equality. I analyze Wikipedia, one of the prominent examples of new media. I study why women are less likely to contribute to Wikipedia, the implications of the gender gap, and what can be done about it. I find that: (1) gender differences in the frequency of Wikipedia use and in beliefs about one's competence explain a large share of the gender gap in Wikipedia writing; (2) the gender gap among contributors leads to unequal coverage of topics; (3) providing information about gender inequality has a large effect on contributions. JEL codes: L86; L82; J16; H41 Keywords: Gender, Internet, Media, Public goods 1 Introduction United Nations is engaged in an initiative to increase female presence in the media.1 The initiative was established \in recognition that the media are critical to the achievement of gender equality and women's empowerment".2 In most traditional media outlets, men vastly outnumber women, and several major media organizations have taken steps to change that. Examples include Bloomberg introducing gender quotas for news stories3 and BBC for panel ∗I'm grateful to Ainhoa Aparicio, Gabriele Camera, Matthias Doepke, Martin Dufwenberg, Avi Goldfarb, Shane Greenstein, Toomas Hinnosaar, Ryan McDevitt, David McKenzie, Mario Pagliero, Andrea Prat, Stephan Seiler, Alex Tetenov, and Michael Zhang for helpful comments and discussions.
    [Show full text]