A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
A bachelor's degree thesis by Feli Nicolaes [1] finds that, contrary to the general perception, male and female editors do not tend to edit biographical articles on people of their own gender.
Previous research suggested that one solution to the lack of Wikipedia's biographies of women could be to increase the number of female editors. This was based on the assumption that women would prefer to edit women's biographies, and men would prefer to edit men's biographies. Nicolaes refers to this as homophily in her thesis, "Gender bias on Wikipedia: an analysis of the affiliation network". However, homophily has so far neither been formally investigated nor proved to exist in Wikipedia. Nicolaes analyzes this using datasets from her research group at the University of Amsterdam, of English Wikipedia editors and the pages they edit. She tracks the editing behavior of both self-identified male and female editors on Wikipedia. Contrary to the mainstream assumption, homophily was not found. In other words, female users' edits are not focused on female biography pages. In fact, Nicolaes finds “inverted homophily” when considering female users who edit a single biographical article more than 200 times: they are more likely to direct this amount of attention to biography articles about men than male editors are.
This brings to mind an initiative to increase content about women—be it biography articles or other content related to women—that has been live since December 2015 in the Arabic Wikipedia. The initiative is in a form of contest where male and female editors try to achieve as much as they can from their self-set goals. Over the four rounds of the contest, only one woman reached the top three in two rounds. So, if the goal is to add more content about women, bringing more women might not be useful. However, Nicolaes also argues that the study should be replicated on larger datasets to validate the results. It remains to be seen whether the same editor behaviour exists in other language editions. Another limitation of the study is its apparent reliance on the gender information that editors publicly state in their user preferences—a method that is widely used but may be susceptible to biases (discussed in more detail in this review).
In a forthcoming paper, "'Anyone can edit' not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap" [2], Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman use some of the theoretical tools of feminist science and technology studies (STS) to describe underpinnings of the Wikipedia gender gap. The authors argue that three aspects of Wikipedia's infrastructure define it as a particularly masculine or male-dominated project:
The authors argue that each of these arenas represents a space where male activity and masculine norms of truth, scientific fact, legitimacy, and freedom define boundaries of legitimate contribution and action. Accordingly, these boundaries of legitimate contribution and action systematically exclude or devalue perspectives and contributions that could overcome the lack of female participation or perspectives in the Wikipedia projects. The result, according to Ford and Wajcman, is that Wikipedia has created a novel and powerful form of knowledge-production expertise on a foundation that reproduces existing gender hierarchies and inequalities.
The author analyzes [3] Wikipedia's citations to academic peer reviewed articles, finding that "older papers from before 2008 are increasingly less likely to be cited". The authors attempt to use Wikipedia citations as a proxy for public interest in astronomy, though the analysis makes no comparison to other research about public interest in sciences. The article notes that citations to articles from 2008 are most common, and it represents the peak of citations, with fewer and fewer citations for years since 2008. The analysis is also limited due to the cut-off date (1996), "because Scopus indexing of journals changes in this year". The author concludes that the observed citation pattern is likely "consistent with a moderate tendency towards obsolescence in public interest in research", as papers become obsolete and newer ones are more likely to be cited; older papers are cited for timeless, uncontroversial facts, and newer for newer findings. They also note that the late 2000s, i.e. the years around 2008, may represent when most of Wikipedia's content in astronomy was created, though this is not backed up by much besides speculation. Overall, it is an interesting question, but one that does not provide any surprising insights.
The topic of this conference paper, "Election prediction based on Wikipedia pageviews", [4] is certainly timely. The authors look at which of Wikipedia's articles related to the US presidential election registered high popularity, and then ask whether elections can be predicted based "on the number of views the spiking pages have and on the correlation between these pages and the presidential nominees or their political program". They provide an online visualization showing some "Wikipedia topics that have spiked before, during or after [an] election event."
The authors limit themselves (reasonably) to the English and Spanish Wikipedias. They do a good job of presenting their methods, and outlining problems with gathering data on popularity of articles—something that would be much easier if Wikipedia articles and databases were more friendly when it comes to information about their popularity. Within the limitations described in the paper, the authors conclude that Wikipedia articles about politicians are used mostly after, not before or during debates or other events such as primaries or elections, which suggests that they are not used for fact checking but instead as an information source after the event. "Wikipedia is not, in fact, a reliable polling source", write the authors, based on (this could be clarified further) the fact that people check Wikipedia after the events, not before them, hence making Wikipedia's pageviews problematic for prediction.
In this paper, [5] the researchers look at the relation between the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement and its coverage in Wikipedia, asking the following research questions:
They aim to contribute to academic discourse on social movements and claim to describe "knowledge production and collective memory in a social computing system as the movement and related events are happening." They conclude that Wikipedia is a neutral platform, but does indirectly support (or hinder) the movement (or its opponents) by virtue of increased visibility, in the same vein as coverage by the media would. The quality of the movement's history and documentation on Wikipedia is judged to be of higher value, accessibility, and quality than snapshots on social media platforms like Twitter. Wikipedia also provides space for interested editors to work on articles indirectly related to BLM, further increasing the visibility of related topics, as interested editors move beyond direct BLM articles to other aspects. Examples include historical articles about events preceding BLM that would probably not be written/expanded on in Wikipedia if not for the rise of the BLM movement. The authors conclude that social movement activists can use Wikipedia to document their activities without compromising Wikipedia's neutrality or other policies: "Without breaking with community norms like NPOV, Wikipedia became a site of collective memory documenting mourning practices as well as tracing how memories were encoded and re-interpreted." This is a valuable argument that draws interesting connections between Wikipedia and social movements, particularly considering that some (like this reviewer) consider Wikipedia itself to be a social movement.
The third annual Wiki Workshop will take place on April 4 as part of the WWW2017 conference in Perth, Australia. The workshop serves as a platform for Wikimedia researchers to get together on an annual basis and share their research with each other (see also our overview of the papers from the 2016 edition). All Wikimedia researchers are encouraged to submit papers for the workshop and attend it. More details at the call for papers.
See the research events page on Meta-wiki for other upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
A bachelor's degree thesis by Feli Nicolaes [1] finds that, contrary to the general perception, male and female editors do not tend to edit biographical articles on people of their own gender.
Previous research suggested that one solution to the lack of Wikipedia's biographies of women could be to increase the number of female editors. This was based on the assumption that women would prefer to edit women's biographies, and men would prefer to edit men's biographies. Nicolaes refers to this as homophily in her thesis, "Gender bias on Wikipedia: an analysis of the affiliation network". However, homophily has so far neither been formally investigated nor proved to exist in Wikipedia. Nicolaes analyzes this using datasets from her research group at the University of Amsterdam, of English Wikipedia editors and the pages they edit. She tracks the editing behavior of both self-identified male and female editors on Wikipedia. Contrary to the mainstream assumption, homophily was not found. In other words, female users' edits are not focused on female biography pages. In fact, Nicolaes finds “inverted homophily” when considering female users who edit a single biographical article more than 200 times: they are more likely to direct this amount of attention to biography articles about men than male editors are.
This brings to mind an initiative to increase content about women—be it biography articles or other content related to women—that has been live since December 2015 in the Arabic Wikipedia. The initiative is in a form of contest where male and female editors try to achieve as much as they can from their self-set goals. Over the four rounds of the contest, only one woman reached the top three in two rounds. So, if the goal is to add more content about women, bringing more women might not be useful. However, Nicolaes also argues that the study should be replicated on larger datasets to validate the results. It remains to be seen whether the same editor behaviour exists in other language editions. Another limitation of the study is its apparent reliance on the gender information that editors publicly state in their user preferences—a method that is widely used but may be susceptible to biases (discussed in more detail in this review).
In a forthcoming paper, "'Anyone can edit' not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap" [2], Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman use some of the theoretical tools of feminist science and technology studies (STS) to describe underpinnings of the Wikipedia gender gap. The authors argue that three aspects of Wikipedia's infrastructure define it as a particularly masculine or male-dominated project:
The authors argue that each of these arenas represents a space where male activity and masculine norms of truth, scientific fact, legitimacy, and freedom define boundaries of legitimate contribution and action. Accordingly, these boundaries of legitimate contribution and action systematically exclude or devalue perspectives and contributions that could overcome the lack of female participation or perspectives in the Wikipedia projects. The result, according to Ford and Wajcman, is that Wikipedia has created a novel and powerful form of knowledge-production expertise on a foundation that reproduces existing gender hierarchies and inequalities.
The author analyzes [3] Wikipedia's citations to academic peer reviewed articles, finding that "older papers from before 2008 are increasingly less likely to be cited". The authors attempt to use Wikipedia citations as a proxy for public interest in astronomy, though the analysis makes no comparison to other research about public interest in sciences. The article notes that citations to articles from 2008 are most common, and it represents the peak of citations, with fewer and fewer citations for years since 2008. The analysis is also limited due to the cut-off date (1996), "because Scopus indexing of journals changes in this year". The author concludes that the observed citation pattern is likely "consistent with a moderate tendency towards obsolescence in public interest in research", as papers become obsolete and newer ones are more likely to be cited; older papers are cited for timeless, uncontroversial facts, and newer for newer findings. They also note that the late 2000s, i.e. the years around 2008, may represent when most of Wikipedia's content in astronomy was created, though this is not backed up by much besides speculation. Overall, it is an interesting question, but one that does not provide any surprising insights.
The topic of this conference paper, "Election prediction based on Wikipedia pageviews", [4] is certainly timely. The authors look at which of Wikipedia's articles related to the US presidential election registered high popularity, and then ask whether elections can be predicted based "on the number of views the spiking pages have and on the correlation between these pages and the presidential nominees or their political program". They provide an online visualization showing some "Wikipedia topics that have spiked before, during or after [an] election event."
The authors limit themselves (reasonably) to the English and Spanish Wikipedias. They do a good job of presenting their methods, and outlining problems with gathering data on popularity of articles—something that would be much easier if Wikipedia articles and databases were more friendly when it comes to information about their popularity. Within the limitations described in the paper, the authors conclude that Wikipedia articles about politicians are used mostly after, not before or during debates or other events such as primaries or elections, which suggests that they are not used for fact checking but instead as an information source after the event. "Wikipedia is not, in fact, a reliable polling source", write the authors, based on (this could be clarified further) the fact that people check Wikipedia after the events, not before them, hence making Wikipedia's pageviews problematic for prediction.
In this paper, [5] the researchers look at the relation between the Black Lives Matter (BLM) social movement and its coverage in Wikipedia, asking the following research questions:
They aim to contribute to academic discourse on social movements and claim to describe "knowledge production and collective memory in a social computing system as the movement and related events are happening." They conclude that Wikipedia is a neutral platform, but does indirectly support (or hinder) the movement (or its opponents) by virtue of increased visibility, in the same vein as coverage by the media would. The quality of the movement's history and documentation on Wikipedia is judged to be of higher value, accessibility, and quality than snapshots on social media platforms like Twitter. Wikipedia also provides space for interested editors to work on articles indirectly related to BLM, further increasing the visibility of related topics, as interested editors move beyond direct BLM articles to other aspects. Examples include historical articles about events preceding BLM that would probably not be written/expanded on in Wikipedia if not for the rise of the BLM movement. The authors conclude that social movement activists can use Wikipedia to document their activities without compromising Wikipedia's neutrality or other policies: "Without breaking with community norms like NPOV, Wikipedia became a site of collective memory documenting mourning practices as well as tracing how memories were encoded and re-interpreted." This is a valuable argument that draws interesting connections between Wikipedia and social movements, particularly considering that some (like this reviewer) consider Wikipedia itself to be a social movement.
The third annual Wiki Workshop will take place on April 4 as part of the WWW2017 conference in Perth, Australia. The workshop serves as a platform for Wikimedia researchers to get together on an annual basis and share their research with each other (see also our overview of the papers from the 2016 edition). All Wikimedia researchers are encouraged to submit papers for the workshop and attend it. More details at the call for papers.
See the research events page on Meta-wiki for other upcoming conferences and events, including submission deadlines.
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions are always welcome for reviewing or summarizing newly published research.
{{
cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(
help)CS1 maint: location (
link)
{{
cite journal}}
: Cite journal requires |journal=
(
help)
Discuss this story
Female-Wikipedians but women-biographies?
@ User:Czar: You can find more about the Amanda Filipacci controversy at: Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2014_July_13#Category:Women_historians. 70.70.22.22 ( talk) 18:39, 12 February 2017 (UTC) reply