17 Feb 2022 ~ University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication
While adding more and better content about women helps close the gap, thinking about how that content is linked and connected is key.
Langrock and González-Bailón’s study in the Journal of Communication, "The Gender Divide in Wikipedia: Quantifying and Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions," looks at two non-profit groups with similar missions: Art+Feminism is dedicated to adding content about women and nonbinary artists to Wikipedia, while 500 Women Scientists, a nonprofit that aims to improve representation and inclusivity in STEM, creates and edits Wikipedia pages for women scientists as part of its public outreach.
In the first [outcome], Langrock and González-Bailón measured how many new articles the edit-a-thons created, as well as those articles’ length, quality, and pageviews.
While Wikipedia pages about men tend to be longer and receive more views, the intervention flipped the script. The edit-a-thons created more extensive biographical articles for women, including 250 entirely new entries, that averaged more views than either men’s pages or non-intervention women's pages.
The second outcome is how the articles were connected to the entire network of content – in other words, how easy they were to stumble upon. On that measure, the edit-a-thon content fell short.
The researchers found that the intervention articles about women used fewer infoboxes. Infoboxes are indexed summaries that appear on the top right corner of Wikipedia articles and offer quick links and metadata. They help build connections to related articles, which increase the likelihood that people will find that content. Adding infoboxes to biographies, along with identifying and linking related pages – for example, a scientist’s mentor or an artist’s collaborator – builds the importance of biographical pages in the network of links that connects Wikipedia’s articles.If you start at any given article on Wikipedia, you're much less likely to eventually reach an article about a woman artist than you are about a male artist – and this was true for women across the board.
“These features are important for thinking about how Wikipedia data permeates across the internet, and how people use the site to find information,” Langrock says. “An estimated 20% of Wikipedia traffic is driven through these knowledge network links, which is really interesting to consider because it’s often hidden under other inequality measures.”
“This puts them on the fringes of the knowledge network,” Langrock says. “If you start at any given article on Wikipedia, you're much less likely to eventually reach an article about a woman artist than you are about a male artist – and this was true for women across the board.”Artists and scientists have fewer infoboxes than the comparison groups, and when infoboxes do exist, women’s are not as comprehensive. Women are also less represented in articles beyond their own biographies – for example, articles about institutions or mentors. This makes them less visible in the network of links that connect pages. As a result, readers aren’t as likely to stumble onto women’s biographies when spontaneously hopping from page to page.
As the authors note, these structural aspects haven’t been a major focus of prior efforts to close Wikipedia's gender gap. Adding new content and longer articles about women addresses one aspect of the disparity, but doesn’t improve biases and inequities on other parts of the platform.
