TL;DR
This study investigates gender inequalities in Wikipedia across various dimensions, revealing notable biases and structural differences that reflect social contexts and editor influences, with implications for content policies and awareness.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive assessment of gender asymmetries in Wikipedia, analyzing notability, topical focus, linguistic bias, and structural properties, highlighting both expected and editor-driven differences.
Findings
Women are more notable than men in biographies.
Biographies of women focus more on family, gender, and relationships.
Linguistic bias favors positive descriptions for men and negative for women.
Abstract
Contributing to the writing of history has never been as easy as it is today thanks to Wikipedia, a community-created encyclopedia that aims to document the world's knowledge from a neutral point of view. Though everyone can participate it is well known that the editor community has a narrow diversity, with a majority of white male editors. While this participatory \emph{gender gap} has been studied extensively in the literature, this work sets out to \emph{assess potential gender inequalities in Wikipedia articles} along different dimensions: notability, topical focus, linguistic bias, structural properties, and meta-data presentation. We find that (i) women in Wikipedia are more notable than men, which we interpret as the outcome of a subtle glass ceiling effect; (ii) family-, gender-, and relationship-related topics are more present in biographies about women; (iii) linguistic bias…
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