Wikipedia editing and gender gaps Special Libraries Association's Education Division's Inside Byte's webinar Presented by: Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, MBA ● Visiting Scholar, Northeastern University (Boston) ● Vice-president, Wikimedia District of Columbia February 8, 2019 | CC-BY-SA 4.0 Introduction @Rosiestep @SLAhq @Wikipedia #SLA #Wikipedia 2 Wikipedia What exactly is it anyway? 3 4 Jimmy Wales “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.” -Jimmy Wales 5 6 Wikimedia Foundation What’s that? 7 Wikidata 8 Wiki Commons 9 10 Editing 11 12 13 14 ● Help editing How to edit ● Writing your first article ● Tutorials ○ How to edit ○ Formatting ○ Links ○ Citing sources ○ Talk pages ○ What to keep in mind ○ Why create a username and how to register ● “Editing Wikipedia: a guide to improving content on the online encyclopedia” 15 Peer support for new editors 16 How to create your account 17 Five Pillars 1. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia 2. Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view 3. Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute 4. Wikipedia's editors should treat each other with respect and civility 5. Wikipedia has no firm rules 18 Some policies/guidelines ● Neutral Point of View ● Notability ● Verifiability ● No original research ● Assume good faith ● Conflicts of interest 19 20 #1lib1ref 21 Wikipedia’s gender gaps 22 Gender Gap #1: the participants 23 The 9% 2010: 12.6% 2011: 8.5% 2018: 9% 24 “Some women don’t edit Wikipedia because...” 25 1. ... the editing interface isn’t sufficiently user-friendly. 2. … they are too busy. 3. … they aren’t sufficiently self-confident, and editing Wikipedia requires a lot of self-confidence 4. … they are conflict-averse and don’t like Wikipedia’s sometimes-fighty culture. 5. … the information they bring to Wikipedia is too likely to be reverted or deleted. 6. … they find its overall atmosphere misogynist. 7. … [they] find Wikipedia culture to be sexual in ways they find off-putting. 8. … social relationships and a welcoming tone are important to them, and Wikipedia offers fewer opportunities for that than other sites. 9. Some women whose primary language has grammatical gender find being addressed by Wikipedia as male, off-putting. 26 Conflict Confidence Criticism 27 Assumptions 1. It is the responsibility of women to fix sexism on Wikipedia. 2. Women do not further patriarchal knowledge and power structures. 3. Women will edit underrepresented topics. 4. Women will make Wikipedia a nicer place. 5. Women have free time to dedicate to Wikipedia. 28 Gender Diversity Mapping 65 29 26 People Countries Languages interviewed represented represented 29 Gender Equity Report 30 Gennder Gap #2: the content 31 Women’s biographies: Venezuelan encyclopedia Diccionario biográfico, geograf́ico e histórico de Venezuela, -Ramón Armando Rodriguez (1957) 3.6% 32 Women’s biographies: English Wikipedia 2014: 15.5% 2019: 17.79% 33 Emily Temple-Wood Dr. Jess Wade 34 Sarah Stierch Art+Feminism team: Sian Evans, Jacqueline Mabey, McKensie Mack, Michael Mandiberg 35 Roger Bamkin Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight Women in Red 36 “First Women, Second Sex” 1. Differences in meta-data are coherent with results in previous work, where women biographies were found to contain more marriage-related events than men’s. 2. Sex-related content is more frequent in women biographies than men’s, while cognition-related content is more highlighted in men biographies than women’s. 3. A strong bias in the linking patterns results in a network structure in which articles about men are disproportionately more central than articles about women. 37 38 2030 strategic direction 39 Thank you Contact: ● Twitter: @Rosiestep ● Email: [email protected] ● Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Rosiestep Citation: ● R. Stephenson-Goodknight (2019) Wikipedia editing and gender gaps. CC BY 4.0 Appendices 41 Training materials ● http://j.mp/wikistart ● http://j.mp/wikiedit ● http://j.mp/wikinew ● https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AEditing_Wikipedia_brochure_EN.pdf&page=1 ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CreateAccount?returnto=Wikipedia:Why_create_an_account%3F ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book:Key_Wikipedia_Policies_%26_Guidelines ● Helpful place for new editors to ask questions: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Teahouse_presentation.pdf 42 People ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrianne_Wadewitz ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Strickland ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Temple-Wood ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacqueline_Mabey ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jess_Wade ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Mandiberg ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_Stephenson-Goodknight ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Si%C3%A2n_Evans_(librarian) ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sue_Gardner ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham 43 Links ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Commons ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiLeaks ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art%2BFeminism ● https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Red ● https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Whose_Knowledge%3F ● https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Engagement_Insights/2018_Report#Diversity_of_contributors_on_the_ Wikimedia_projects_seems_to_remain_unchanged. ● https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library ● https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library/1Lib1Ref ● https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Wikipedia_Library/1Lib1Ref ● https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction ● https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Technology/Annual_Plans/FY2019/CDP3:_Knowledge_Integrity ● https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_Diversity_Mapping ● https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_equity_report_2018 ● http://whgi.wmflabs.org/gender-by-language.html 44 Bibliography ● Barnum, Susan, "Writing women into the encyclopedia". WikiProject Women in Red, Wikipedia. ● Bateman, Oliver Lee (1 February 2017). "Wikipedia Is Being Ripped Apart By a Witch Hunt For Secretly Paid Editors. With undisclosed paid editing on the rise, Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Foundation are working together to stop the practice without discouraging user participation". Motherboard. ● Cole, Samantha (7 November 2018). "A Third of Wikipedia Discussions Are Stuck in Forever Beefs". Motherboard. ● Collier, Benjamin; Bear, Julia (11 February 2012). "Conflict, confidence, or criticism: An empirical examination of the gender gap in wikipedia". CSCW '12 Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Seattle, WA, USA. pp. 383–392. doi:10.1145/2145204.2145265. ● Cruz, Maria (27 October 2018). "Women in the Wikimedia movement: Roles, culture and opportunities". Medium. ● "Decolonizing the Internet conference". Whose Knowledge. ● Fernandez, Robert (13 November 2018). "Five ways academics can contribute to Wikipedia". Wikimediafoundation.org. ● Gardner, Sue (20 February 2011). "Nine Reasons Women Don't Edit Wikipedia (in their own words)". Sue Gardner's Blog. ● Graells-Garrido, Eduardo; Lalmas, Mounia; Menczer, Filippo (2 June 2015). "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia" (PDF). ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media 2015. ● McMillen, Andrew (6 February 2017). "One Woman's Brilliant "Fuck You" to Wikipedia Trolls". WIRED. ● "OCLC and Wikipedia Library link citations to millions of library materials, expanding access to quality sources". www.oclc.org. 11 May 2017. 45 ● Outlines of the women's franchise movement in New Zealand (1905) by William Sidney Smith (1852-1929). Public domain. ● Pearl, Mike (25 November 2016). "A Wikipedian Explains How Wikipedia Stays Reliable in the Fake News Era". Vice. ● Sengul-Jones, Monika (1 June 2018). "Three things librarians wanting to engage with Wikipedia should think about first". OCLC Next. ● Shteynberg, Catherine (28 March 2012). "Meet Sarah Stierch: The Archives' Wikipedian in Residence". Smithsonian Institution Archives. ● Wadewitz, Adrianne (26 July 2013). “Wikipedia's gender gap and the complicated reality of systemic gender bias Page” Hastac. ● Wagner, Claudia, Graells-Garrido, Eduardo, & Garcia, David, "Women Through the Glass-Ceiling: Gender Asymmetries in Wikipedia", arXiv, 19 January 2016. ● WHGI Dev Team. "Gender by Wikipedia Language | WHGI". whgi.wmflabs.org. ● "Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force". Wikipedia. 29 October 2018. 46 Image attribution ● Anasuyas [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ● Andrew Laing [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ● AnselmiJuan [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons - ﺑﺣث - बहस - اﻟﻣﻧﺎﻗﺷﺔ - Be_bold.png: Helix84derivative work: Oile11 (talk - debate - débat - debatte - discussione - 辩论 ● дебаты - 議論) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ● Brian Feinzimer (LA Fundraising Event) [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons ● Charlie Kritschmar (WMDE) [CC0], from Wikimedia Commons ● Carolina De Luna for Wikimedia Mexico [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons ● Cole Camplese from Hinsdale, USA (Camplese