Exploring the gender gap in the Spanish Wikipedia: Differences in engagement and editing practices

Abstract

Wikipedia’s significant gender bias is widely acknowledged. In this paper we analyze the Spanish Wikipedia with the aim of estimating the percentage of women editors and measuring their engagement and editing practices with respect to their men counterparts. To identify the gender of Wikipedia registered users, we analyzed both the information contained in their user profile and the information provided by users about themselves on their personal user pages. Using our own coding procedure, it is possible to identify a greater number of women than by relying only on the gender reported in their user profile. Combining both methods, our results show that the percentage of women is small, a meagre 11.6% of all analyzed editors, though there is still a significant percentage of users whose gender cannot be determined by either method. Men outnumber women in all Wikipedia namespaces in a ratio that is always equal to or greater than 3:1. This fact can be partially explained by the lesser persistence of women editors, who tend to leave Wikipedia much more quickly. There is, however, a small group of veteran women editors who, in some cases, surpass men editors in terms of their editing practices and participation in different Wikipedia namespaces.

The Gender Perspective in Wikipedia: A Content and Participation Challenge

“…Analyzing users' profiles, they found that female editors only comprised 16.1% of the profiles and only accounted for 9.0% of edits. In a previous study based on a massive content codification, we showed that female editors represent a small minority of editors involved, accounting for just 11.3% of all the editors of the Spanish Wikipedia [28,29]. This evidence is similar to that of the English Wikipedia.…”

“…Although till now the data has been obtained by survey methods, it has been reported that the percentage of female editors is between 10% and 15% or even lower in the English Wikipedia [21,30]. Nevertheless, in our previous quantitative research, we found that for those editors with a large number of edits over time, such differences were not statistically significant, or even reversed, with females outperforming male editors [29].…”

“…Several studies have shown that women seem to stop editing Wikipedia sooner than men [21,29]. In the case of newcomers, the mechanisms used to attract potential editors are not enough to retain them, especially in the case of women.…”

Visual Gender Biases in Wikipedia: A Systematic Evaluation across the Ten Most Spoken Languages

“…And the same is true with respect to gender: research has documented that Wikipedia editors tend to write proportionally more about people and topics related to their own gender identity (Lam et al 2011;Hinnosaar 2019). Such self-reference to one's own gender could be generating deep biases in content selection, as several studies have shown that within Wikipedia only between 8.5% and 16.1% of editors are women (Glott, Schmidt, and Ghosh 2010;Wikimedia 2011;2012;Hill and Shaw 2013;Minguillón et al 2021).…”

Visual Gender Biases in Wikipedia: A Systematic Evaluation across the Ten Most Spoken Languages

“…And the same is true with respect to gender: research has documented that Wikipedia editors tend to write proportionally more about people and topics related to their own gender identity (Lam et al 2011;Hinnosaar 2019). Such self-reference to one's own gender could be generating deep biases in content selection, as several studies have shown that within Wikipedia only between 8.5% and 16.1% of editors are women (Glott, Schmidt, and Ghosh 2010;Wikimedia 2011b;2011a;Hill and Shaw 2013;Minguillón et al 2021).…”