Wikimedia Research/Showcase/Archive/2023/03

From mediawiki.org

March 2023[edit]

Time
9:30am PDT / 12:30pm EDT / 16.30 UTC: Find your local time here
Theme
Gender and Equity

March 15, 2023 Video: YouTube

Men Are elected, women are marriedː events gender bias on Wikipedia
By Jiao Sun, University of Southern California
Abstract: Human activities can be seen as sequences of events, which are crucial to understanding societies. Disproportional event distribution for different demographic groups can manifest and amplify social stereotypes, and potentially jeopardize the ability of members in some groups to pursue certain goals. Our study discovers that Wikipedia pages tend to intermingle personal life events with professional events for females but not for males, which calls for the awareness of the Wikipedia community to formalize guidelines and train the editors to mind the implicit biases that contributors carry.


Twitter reacts to absence of women on Wikipediaː a mixed-methods analysis of #VisibleWikiWomen campaign
By Sneh Gupta, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University
Digital gender divide (DGD) is visible in access, participation, representation, and biases against women embedded in Wikipedia, the largest digital reservoir of co-created content. This article examined the content of #VisibleWikiWomen, a global digital advocacy campaign aimed at encouraging inclusion of women voices in the global technology conversation and improving digital sustainability of feminist data on Wikipedia. In a mixed-methods study, Sentiment Analysis followed by a Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of the campaign tweets reveals how digital gender divide manifested in the public response. An overwhelming majority of tweets expressed positive sentiment towards the objective of the campaign. An inductive reading of the coded tweets (n = 1067) generated five themes: Feminist Activism, Invisibility & Marginalization of Women, Technology for Women Empowerment, Gendered Knowledge Inequity, and Power Dynamics in the Digital Sphere. Twitter discourse presented many agitated digital users calling out the epistemic injustice on Wikipedia that goes beyond the invisibility of women. Their tweets reveal that they want an equal social platform inclusive of women of color and varied identities currently absent in the Wikipedia universe. Extracting ideas, values, and themes from new media campaigns holds unparalleled potential in the diffusion of interventions and messages on a larger scale.