it's a man's wikipedia?

Claudia Wagner Berlin, March 2015

It's a Man's Wikipedia?

Who are your life heroes?

How did you learn about them?

The heroes we share are the heroes we have

Our Study

• Compare for men and women:– Coverage– Lexical Presentation– Structural Position– Visibility

Claudia Wagner, David Garcia, Mohsen Jadidi and Markus Strohmaier, It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia, The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM2015)

Coverage

Coverage in 2011

• Britannica versus Wikipedia Coverage– Reference Lists: e.g. The Atlantic’s 100 most

influential figures in American history–Wikipedia misses 13% of women and 5% of

men– Britannica misses 49% of women and 33% of

men–Wikipedia’s coverage is more exhaustive–Women have a 2.6 (13/5) greater odds of

omission in Wikipedia and a 1.48 (49/33) greater odds of omission in Britannica Reagle, Joseph; Rhue, Lauren (2011). "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica". International Journal of Communication (Joseph Reagle & Lauren Rhue) 5: 1138–1158.

Our Study: Data

• 11% women in Freebase• 3% women in HA (people who made

contributions to arts and science prior than 1950)

• 13% women in pantheon

Coverage

Visibility

Visibility

Visibility

Structure

Asymmetry

L(from=M, to=W) = -0.26L(from=W, to=M) = -0.14

Asymmetry

Asymmetry

Assortativity

L(from=M, to=M) = 0.28L(from=W, to=M) = 0.15

Assortativity

Assortativity

Importance

So what?!?!

Algorithms often use structural properties to determine importance (e.g. Page Rank)– Researchers need to understand

social consequences of algorithms– 28. Feb 2015: “Google wants to

rank websites based on facts not links”, NewScientist

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530102.600-google-wants-to-rank-websites-based-on-facts-not-links.html

Page Rank

Eom YH, Aragón P, Laniado D, Kaltenbrunner A, Vigna S, et al. (2015) Interactions of Cultures and Top People of Wikipedia from Ranking of 24 Language Editions. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0114825. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0114825http://127.0.0.1:8081/plosone/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0114825

Text

Finkbeiner Test

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finkbeiner_test

Discriminative Words (DE)

Women• Autorin• Ehemann• Künsterlin• Gatte• Schriftstellerin• Herzoging• Weiblich• Tänzerin• Schauspielerin• Mrs• Großmutter• Tante• Miss• Heirat• Freundin• Prinzessin• Gemahlin

Men• Befördert• Reprasentantenhaus• Directory• Amtszeit• Republican• Division• Senat• Gouverneur• Congress• Biographical• Mannschaft• Rechtsanwalt• Senator• Expedition• Demokrat• Professor

Text

Discriminative Words (EN)

Discriminative Words (ES)

Text

“Biographies of women on Wikipedia disproportionately focus on marriage and divorce compared to those of men.”

David Bamman, Noel Smith. "Unsupervised Discovery of Biographical Structure from Text", Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2, 2014 (pp. 363–376), p. 369:

Summary

• Good News:– Visibility and Coverage of women looks

good

• Bad News:– Structural Inequality what are the

consequences?– How women are portrayed needs to be

improvedhttp://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:GGTF/Writing_about_women

Article-Writing Interaction Graph

Evolution

WikiWho and WikiVis

wikiwho

Fabian Flöck

WikiWho PluginFabian Flöck

WhoVisFabian Flöck

Future Questions…

• What causes the bias?–Wikipedia bias versus general media

bias?–Male versus female editors?

• Bias over time– Does the community improve?

Thank You

claudia.wagner@gesis.org fabian.flöck@gesis.org

Infos zu WikiWho and WikiVishttp://f-squared.org/wikiwho/