Examining Gender and Power on Wikipedia Through Face and Politeness

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new framework combining face acts and politeness to analyze discourse on Wikipedia, revealing gender and power dynamics in editor interactions through a novel annotated corpus and face act tagger.

Contribution

It presents a new corpus and a face act tagger, enabling the first detailed analysis of face and politeness in Wikipedia discussions related to gender and power.

Findings

Female Wikipedians are more polite than males.

Politeness differences diminish among editors with administrative power.

Women tend to use language that humbles their own face.

Abstract

We propose a framework for analyzing discourse by combining two interdependent concepts from sociolinguistic theory: face acts and politeness. While politeness has robust existing tools and data, face acts are less resourced. We introduce a new corpus created by annotating Wikipedia talk pages with face acts and we use this to train a face act tagger. We then employ our framework to study how face and politeness interact with gender and power in discussions between Wikipedia editors. Among other findings, we observe that female Wikipedians are not only more polite, which is consistent with prior studies, but that this difference corresponds with significantly more language directed at humbling aspects of their own face. Interestingly, the distinction nearly vanishes once limiting to editors with administrative power.