First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper investigates gender bias in Wikipedia biographies, revealing differences in how men and women are characterized across metadata, language, and network structure, highlighting underlying biases and their implications.

Contribution

It introduces a methodology for analyzing gender bias in Wikipedia biographies through comparative analysis of metadata, language, and network structure.

Findings

Differences in characterization of men and women in Wikipedia biographies.

Some biases reflect offline societal stereotypes.

Other biases are specific to Wikipedia content and editing practices.

Abstract

Contributing to history has never been as easy as it is today. Anyone with access to the Web is able to play a part on Wikipedia, an open and free encyclopedia. Wikipedia, available in many languages, is one of the most visited websites in the world and arguably one of the primary sources of knowledge on the Web. However, not everyone is contributing to Wikipedia from a diversity point of view; several groups are severely underrepresented. One of those groups is women, who make up approximately 16% of the current contributor community, meaning that most of the content is written by men. In addition, although there are specific guidelines of verifiability, notability, and neutral point of view that must be adhered by Wikipedia content, these guidelines are supervised and enforced by men. In this paper, we propose that gender bias is not about participation and representation only, but also about characterization of women. We approach the analysis of gender bias by defining a methodology for comparing the characterizations of men and women in biographies in three aspects: meta-data, language, and network structure. Our results show that, indeed, there are differences in characterization and structure. Some of these differences are reflected from the off-line world documented by Wikipedia, but other differences can be attributed to gender bias in Wikipedia content. We contextualize these differences in feminist theory and discuss their implications for Wikipedia policy.