Exploring Wikipedia Gender Diversity Over Time $\unicode{x2013}$ The Wikipedia Gender Dashboard (WGD)

TL;DR

This paper introduces the Wikipedia Gender Dashboard (WGD), a tool that visualizes gender disparities in Wikipedia articles over time, revealing persistent male dominance and encouraging efforts toward gender equality.

Contribution

The paper presents the development of WGD, a novel interactive dashboard that tracks gender distribution and age trends in Wikipedia content using data from multiple sources.

Findings

Female articles constitute around 17% of English Wikipedia.

Gender disparities have decreased over the last 20 years.

Most 'Person' subclasses are male-dominated.

Abstract

The Wikipedia editors' community has been actively pursuing the intent of achieving gender equality. To that end, it is important to explore the historical evolution of underlying gender disparities in Wikipedia articles. This paper presents the Wikipedia Gender Dashboard (WGD), a tool designed to enable the interaction with gender distribution data, including the average age in every subclass of individuals (i.e. Astronauts, Politicians, etc.) over the years. Wikipedia APIs, DBpedia, and Wikidata endpoints were used to query the data to ensure persistent data collection. The WGD was then created with Microsoft Power BI before being embedded on a public website. The analysis of the data available in the WGD found that female articles only represent around 17% of English Wikipedia, but it has been growing steadily over the last 20 years. Meanwhile, the average age across genders decreased over time. WGD also shows that most subclasses of `Person' are male-dominated. Wikipedia editors can make use of WGD to locate areas with marginalized genders in Wikipedia, and increase their efforts to produce more content providing coverage for those genders to achieve better gender equality in Wikipedia.