Reducing Bias in Wikipedia’s Coverage of Political Scientists

Notes from the Editors

“…Work by women, for example, is underrepresented not only in primary research publications, but also in review articles that claim to summarize the canon in particular fields and subfields, which is subsequently reflected in course syllabi (Kadera 2013; Hardt et al 2019; Smith et al 2020), perpetuating current gaps into future academic generations 3 . It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that an analysis of gender and Wikipedia entries found that only one in five biographies of political scientists on that site are of women and that half are biographies of American scholars (Baltz 2022).…”

Wikipedia Edit-A-Thons: Sites of Struggle, Resistance, and Responsibility

“…Identifying content gaps and distortions was the crux of the assignment and is at the heart of the efforts of most coursebased contributions to Wikipedia. The challenge, as Baltz (2022) and Norell (2022) discuss in this symposium, is that biases in the coverage and content of Wikipedia are only part of the editing politics constructed by Wikipedia's editing rules and definitions of notability. Certain Wikipedia pages conceal (and, to those who know, reveal) another politics of knowledge within Wikipedia.…”

Leveraging Recommender Systems to Reduce Content Gaps on Peer Production Platforms

“…Wikipedia's gender, geographical, and other content disparities have long been documented and criticized in the popular media (Baltz 2021;Cohen 2011;Gleick 2013;Mandiberg 2020;Resnick 2018;Torres 2016) and research literature (Antin et al 2011;Beytía 2020;Bjork-James 2021;Hargittai and Shaw 2015). Both the Wikimedia Foundation (non-profit that supports Wikipedia) and editor-led communities have devoted substantial attention to addressing the problem over the past several years (Halfaker 2017;Langrock and González-Bailón 2022;Scott 2018;Wikimedia Foundation 2017, 2023) but, while these efforts have succeeded in reducing some gaps, there remains much to be done.…”