Survival of the Notable: Gender Asymmetry in Wikipedia Collective Deliberations

TL;DR

This study investigates gender bias in Wikipedia's deletion discussions, revealing women’s biographies are nominated for deletion faster, take longer to resolve, and are more often merged or redirected into men's biographies, highlighting systemic gender disparities.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive survival analysis framework to examine gender bias in Wikipedia's AfD discussions, addressing previous methodological limitations and uncovering persistent gender asymmetries.

Findings

Women’s biographies are nominated for deletion faster than men’s.

Deletions of women’s biographies take longer to reach consensus.

Biographies of women are more often redirected or merged into men's biographies.

Abstract

Communities on the web rely on open conversation forums for a number of tasks, including governance, information sharing, and decision making. However these forms of collective deliberation can often result in biased outcomes. A prime example are Articles for Deletion (AfD) discussions on Wikipedia, which allow editors to gauge the notability of existing articles, and that, as prior work has suggested, may play a role in perpetuating the notorious gender gap of Wikipedia. Prior attempts to address this question have been hampered by access to narrow observation windows, reliance on limited subsets of both biographies and editorial outcomes, and by potential confounding factors. To address these limitations, here we adopt a competing risk survival framework to fully situate biographical AfD discussions within the full editorial cycle of Wikipedia content. We find that biographies of women are nominated for deletion faster than those of men, despite editors taking longer to reach a consensus for deletion of women, even after controlling for the size of the discussion. Furthermore, we find that AfDs about historical figures show a strong tendency to result into the redirecting or merging of the biography under discussion into other encyclopedic entries, and that there is a striking gender asymmetry: biographies of women are redirected or merged into biographies of men more often than the other way round. Our study provides a more complete picture of the role of AfD in the gender gap of Wikipedia, with implications for the governance of the open knowledge infrastructure of the web.