As the world’s largest and most-used information resource, Wikipedia is home to 6.4 million articles and counting. But despite how comprehensive it seems, 90% of the site’s editors are men, and women are vastly underrepresented as subjects in the encyclopedia. The problem is particularly glaring when it comes to biographical information. Of the 1.5 million biographical articles on the site, less than 20% are about women.
A new study co-authored by Isabelle Langrock, a Ph.D. candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Annenberg Associate Professor Sandra González-Bailón evaluates the work of two prominent feminist movements, finding that while these movements have been effective in adding a large volume of biographical content about women to Wikipedia, such content remains more difficult to find due to structural biases.
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.
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.
We need to help activist groups by highlighting their successes and building tools to help them do better at integrating women’s pages into the knowledge network as a whole.
Source: Bridging Wikipedia’s gender gap, one article at a time