It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia

TL;DR

This paper develops a computational method to assess gender bias on Wikipedia, revealing disparities in portrayal and coverage of women compared to men across multiple dimensions, aiming to raise awareness of online gender biases.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel computational approach to measure gender bias on Wikipedia across various dimensions, highlighting differences in portrayal and coverage.

Findings

Women are well covered and featured in many Wikipedia editions.

Portrayal of women differs significantly from that of men.

Gender biases manifest in multiple levels on Wikipedia.

Abstract

Wikipedia is a community-created encyclopedia that contains information about notable people from different countries, epochs and disciplines and aims to document the world's knowledge from a neutral point of view. However, the narrow diversity of the Wikipedia editor community has the potential to introduce systemic biases such as gender biases into the content of Wikipedia. In this paper we aim to tackle a sub problem of this larger challenge by presenting and applying a computational method for assessing gender bias on Wikipedia along multiple dimensions. We find that while women on Wikipedia are covered and featured well in many Wikipedia language editions, the way women are portrayed starkly differs from the way men are portrayed. We hope our work contributes to increasing awareness about gender biases online, and in particular to raising attention to the different levels in which gender biases can manifest themselves on the web.