The Gender Gap in Wikipedia Talk Pages

Abstract

Wikipedia is an important source of information in today's world. Yet, the lack of gender diversity in its community has been shown to affect the topics covered. Each Wikipedia article has a talk page that volunteer editors use to discuss proposed changes. Research on the gender bias has focused on article contribution and topic coverage, but not talk page activity. It has been suggested that the conflicts that take place in talk pages are especially intimidating for women, but this assertion has not been quantified yet. To fill this gap, we collected a dataset of all comments on Wikipedia talk pages, enriching it with gender information available from users who have chosen to disclose their gender on their user profiles or settings. Among the users active in talk pages, 49,387 indicated that they are male while only 5,996 indicated that they are female. The comments of these users make up for 4 million comments, approximately one quarter of all comments on Wikipedia. In addition, we observed that female participation varies by topic, reflecting traditional gender stereotypes: compared to Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) topics, women were more active in categories such as Gender studies or Feminism. Results also indicate that a post on a talk page is 2.4\% less likely to be replied to if the author is female. Likewise, reply probability varies from topic to topic. These results provide quantitative support for a gender bias in Wikipedia talk pages, and serve as a basis for discussing why overall female participation is low.

Wikipedia gender gap: a scoping review

“…The content analysis of data pertaining to the gender gap on Wikipedia offers a comprehensive view of the research landscape in this area. Academic literature consistently highlights the bidirectional relationship between biased contribution and the gender gap in encyclopedic content (Zagovora;Flöck;Wagner, 2017;Cabrera et al, 2018). This reciprocal relationship underscores that bias in participation and content mutually reinforce each other.…”

“…Female participation on Wikipedia varies by topic, with a greater presence of women in categories related to gender studies or feminism compared to STEM topics. This variation reflects traditional gender stereotypes and preferences (Cabrera et al, 2018). It has also been argued that the site's generic constraints can limit women's digital credibility and authority, making it difficult for them to contribute to certain topics or to have their contributions recognized and valued by other contributors (Lukowski; Sparby, 2020).…”

“…In the context of editor participation within Wikipedia, there is a notable gender imbalance, with men outnumbering women, representing a minority percentage of the overall population Bear, 2012;Wagner et al, 2015;Hube, 2017). This lack of gender diversity affects the topics covered (Cabrera et al, 2018) and hinders editing persistence (Minguillón et al, 2021). In some articles, this distortion in participation is attributed to the Wikipedia contribution, which is said to involve competitive and aggressive behaviour that runs counter to the traditional feminine gender role Collier, 2016).…”

“…Although there were initial hopes that Wikipedia's open-source knowledge production could address the problem of gender gaps, it has proven insufficient in fully tackling this issue. Certain spaces within the platform, such as talk pages, where discussions on knowledge production occur, may contribute to the gender gap by creating an environment in which women feel less comfortable participating (Cabrera et al, 2018). These spaces often exhibit a perceived high level of conflict, and critical or confrontational environments are generally disliked by women Bear, 2012).…”

Inferring Sociodemographic Attributes of Wikipedia Editors: State-of-the-art and Implications for Editor Privacy

“…There is substantial research on Wikipedia's talk pages, where editors can communicate with each other about issues of the corresponding article. For example, Cabrera et al [4] studied gender bias by gathering a comment dataset together with editors' gender information extracted from their profile pages. The authors show that overall, men are more likely to write comments, especially in male-dominated fields like engineering or physics.…”