English Wikipedia’s Gender Gap: The Subcommunity-to-Active-Editor Pipeline
COMM_ST 378: Online Communities and Crowds
February 8, 2022
I. Introduction
The Wikimedia Foundation’s mission is to bring free educational content to the world. Their most notable project is Wikipedia, which features content peer-produced by volunteers around the globe who create and edit entries about an endless variety of topics while following Wikipedia’s strict guidelines on content quality and neutrality. However, the number of active editors has declined over the years, in part due to the steep learning curve, which acts as a barrier to newcomers to the contributor community. Further, there are clear “gaps” in who participates in the English language Wikipedia contributor community: studies find that the percentage of female editors is at most 20%, even though readership is roughly equal across genders. Similar gaps appear for age, race, socioeconomic status, and digital literacy, but for this report, I will focus on understanding and designing to solve Wikipedia’s gender contribution gap.
I argue that in addition to recruiting more female-identifying or gender-nonconforming editors, key problems with Wikipedia’s gender contribution gap include limited coverage of notable women and women’s topics and biased decisions about acceptable content when Talk page discourse is dominated by male-identifying editors. Subcommunities such as the Women in Red project encourage female-identifying newcomers to contribute and become socialized to a more unbiased and considerate editing culture, which they could then bring with them to other areas of Wikipedia through integration with the subcommunity’s goals and encouragement from existing contributors.
II. Problem Definition
I begin by discussing why this gender participation gap is a problem. After all, it is natural for online communities to have differences in participation rates across contributor segments; older, more experienced users may simply produce higher-quality content than newcomers. Given that Wikipedia articles are meant to be completely neutral, with no hint of an author’s personal voice, participation gaps may seem to be less important in this community compared to settings where representation of diverse, individual perspectives is more valuable.
However, in the case of a purely peer-produced knowledge source such as Wikipedia, the content that is included—treated as fact by millions of readers—carries connotations of importance and objectivity. The notability requirement, which requires Wikipedia articles to cite multiple secondary sources about a subject for that subject to be considered ‘worthy’ of an entry, is more difficult for women to meet than men, as “information about men is much more readily available in large quantities than it is about women [...] women who do make the cut have to be relatively more notable than their male counterparts” (McDonough). When there are fewer women represented on Wikipedia, this suggests that there are fewer ‘notable’ women or accomplishments by women—an impression which goes on to influence girls, who cannot find role models who look like them in their niche fields of interest, which may then lead to a lack of confidence that they will be able to make meaningful contributions.
While female-identifying editors are not responsible for ensuring that notable women and their accomplishments are represented on Wikipedia, the contributor gender gap is reflected in the articles available: less than 20% of biographies are about women, and existing biographies about women tend to be shorter than those written about men. In April 2017, nearly half of the biographies nominated for deletion due to lack of detail, neutrality, or notability were about women. The contributor gender gap also influences deliberations on content which occur on Wikipedia’s Talk pages, which are designed to allow discourse about changes to articles to prevent ‘editing wars.’ For example, in pages for movies, rape scenes may be called “sex scenes” or even “making love” because “[male] editors [...] note that unlike ‘sex,’ the word ‘rape’ is not neutral, so it should be left out” (Paling). Members of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee, an elected panel of users who have the final say on arguments between editors, are mostly male and “tend to be white, formally educated, and from the global north,” all factors which may collectively bias the direction of the committee’s decisions even if individuals on the committee aim to be impartial (Paling). The demographic makeup of the Wikipedia contributor community thus determines which article topics are likely to be written—and by extension, which topics are considered ‘notable’—as well as which kinds of people review articles to ensure that the content is representative, unbiased, and acceptable.
As described, the challenge of Wikipedia’s gender participation gap is not merely to encourage more female-identifying editors for the sake of increasing contributor diversity, but to increase coverage of female topics and individuals and to ensure that the cultural norms sanctioned by Wikipedia, both in its internal contributor discussions and its published content, do not perpetuate harmful, misogynistic attitudes.
III. Participation Theories and Solutions
Now that I have established why it is important to resolve this participation gap and the specific outcomes we hope to promote and prevent, I look to some theories for stimulating participation in communities. One solution may be to create new subcommunities within Wikipedia designed specifically for women’s interests. Leah Buechley and Benjamin Mako Hill study gender differences between the LilyPad and Arduino programming communities and conclude that “instead of trying to fit people into existing engineering cultures, it may be more constructive to try to spark and support new cultures” (Buechley and Hill 8).
On Wikipedia, this new culture might be found in Women in Red, a project which focuses on creating content including women’s biographies or covering women’s work and issues, directly addressing the outcome of increasing coverage of women’s topics. Women in Red is not separate from Wikipedia but does contain its own list of priority articles (‘redlists’). These publicized redlists align with Robert Kraut’s and Paul Resnick’s design suggestion that “making the list of needed contributions easily visible increases the likelihood that the community will provide them,” especially as these unwritten articles are not subject to as much conflict or overwriting by other users, allowing new contributors to feel that their work is more lasting and impactful and also “helping newcomers navigate the technical rules of Wikipedia” (Kraut and Resnick 6, Kramer). In addition to reducing the work required for contributors to identify meaningful tasks, Women in Red’s public list of soon-to-be-designated as ‘good articles’ provides positive feedback for work deemed high-quality by the community, further motivating contributions. Women in Red acts as a pocket of Wikipedia that feels less restrictive or daunting to newcomers in general—but especially to women, who tend to feel “less confident about their expertise, less comfortable with editing others’ work, [..] and [react] more negatively to critical feedback than men” (Torres).
While the Women in Red subcommunity may facilitate contributions from new, female editors, the project may be subject to a few additional participation issues. First, these contributors may not necessarily become active editors who continue to make edits on Wikipedia—and may not contribute to articles outside of the Women in Red project, thus failing to alleviate potential biases in regular articles’ Talk page discourse. If Women in Red becomes a bubble separate from the rest of the Wikipedia experience, only the external benefits of diverse gender participation (in the form of more articles about women) will be realized: the internal benefits of having more perspectives represented in Talk pages will be restricted to this subcommunity.
One solution here may be to expand the scope of Women in Red-designated articles to include additions to existing articles that do not sufficiently cover relevant women’s achievements. For example, Wikipedia articles about niche scientific discoveries could include more information about a woman’s contributions to the field and even link to a Women in Red article to increase exposure to the project. By editing a more general Wikipedia entry for the purpose of supporting Women in Red’s goals, editors will be participating in general Talk pages and may gradually transition to editing other general articles. This suggestion taps into Kraut and Resnick’s idea of complementary or contingent contributions: the Women in Red articles become more relevant through their linkage to other, more general-purpose articles and therefore encourage more contributions which will then be visible outside of the subcommunity (Kraut & Resnick 37). Alternatively, Kraut and Resnick suggest a method for retaining participants includes ensuring that newcomers have positive interactions with older members soon after joining the community or even undergoing formal mentorship by older members (Kraut and Resnick 36). Older contributors within the Women in Red subcommunity could encourage newcomers’ continued participation within both Women in Red and the larger Wikipedia community—and their guidance would likely ensure that newcomers’ edits are better-received and maintained on Wikipedia longer, such that the contribution experience is more rewarding. Both suggestions involve utilizing the task assignment authority or existing community of Women in Red to stimulate continued and extended participation in Wikipedia.
Another potential issue with the subcommunity solution to Wikipedia’s gender gap is simply that not all new contributors to Women in Red will be women—the founder of the Women in Red project was a man called Roger Bamkin, who was joined soonafter by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. This is not a bad thing: men who participate will be exposed to this subcommunity’s culture and best practices in their Talk pages and may thus accrue some of the described internal benefits of diverse gender participation. However, it does mean that growth of this subcommunity does not necessarily represent a lessening gender gap—and opens the potential for ill-intentioned newcomers to ‘vandalize’ Women in Red articles, start edit wars, or nominate work-in-progress articles for deletion. This problem, however, is not one of participation but of moderation. Whether employing a “sophisticated behind-the-scenes infrastructure” such as the moderator community of Reddit’s NoSleep subreddit or simply using warnings and bans, there exist a variety of solutions for deterring disruptors (Kiene et al. 1154).
IV. Conclusion
Subcommunities such as Women in Red may not offer a perfect solution to Wikipedia’s gender gap, especially as they face potential disruption from newcomers, but they are a promising step in the right direction. In October 2014, only 15.53% of English Wikipedia’s biographies were about women, while in January 2022, this percentage has increased to 19.14%. At the very least, subcommunities focused on creating content related to women’s topics can employ design suggestions such as clearly listing tasks, tracking progress towards a goal, and celebrating individual accomplishments publicly to support newcomers and encourage participation. Such subcommunities support Wikipedia’s goal of lowering the barriers to contribution for newcomers, increasing coverage of women’s topics, and could also expose male-identifying participants in the project to a more friendly editing culture. In the long-term, such subcommunities should still utilize more traditional methods of newcomer ‘onboarding,’ such as mentorship from older contributors, in order to encourage exploration of the wider Wikipedia community, where female-identifying contributors can continue to demonstrate an unbiased, representative editing culture in the arenas such advocacy is most needed.
Works Cited
Kramer, Melody. “Women in Red Is Changing Wikipedia's Coverage of Women, One Article at a Time.” Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Oct. 2018, https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/10/18/women-in-red-wikiproject/.
McDonough, Meghan. “Women Are Writing Themselves Back into History on Wikipedia.” LX, LX, 31 Mar. 2021, https://www.lx.com/social-justice/women-are-writing-themselves- back-into-history-on-wikipedia/34029/.
Paling, Emma. “Wikipedia's Hostility to Women.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 30 Oct. 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/how-wikipedia-is- hostile-to-women/411619/.
Torres, Nicole. “Why Do so Few Women Edit Wikipedia?” Harvard Business Review, 2 June 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/06/why-do-so-few-women-edit-wikipedia.
“WikiProject: Women in Red.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 8 Feb. 2022, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red.
