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Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 08:26:45 +1000 From: "Kerry Raymond" &lt;kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com&gt; To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;rg>, &lt;jane023(a)gmail.com&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations Message-ID: &lt;006701d55def$aea84d50$0bf8e7f0$(a)gmail.com&gt; Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" FWIW, I think there would be pushback against a quality tag that highlighted little/no citation of women's work (whether we are talking first author or not) in an article. There's two reasons for this. One is the misogyny that really does exist within the English Wikipedia "community" (those who do most of the shouting and hence decision making); they will argue that firstly gender balance of citations doesn't matter, secondly it is a reflection of the real world and thirdly that Wikipedia has a policy that it is not there to Right Great Wrongs. More practically, we know that whole-of-article quality tagging doesn't tend to have a lot of impact in terms getting people to fix anything, compared to more specific tags like "citation needed", "dubious", "says who" and so on placed on specific pieces of text. People are much more likely to fix a specific problem and then remove the specific tag. Even when a person does respond to a generic tag like "more references needed" and add in some more references, they rarely remove the generic tag thinking "well, there's still plenty of scope here to add more references". Who among us is willing to declare "that article is 100% fully referenced by reliable sources"? Nobody it seems, it's a tag that lingers forever ... So I think a specific tag to encourage the expansion of "Bloggs et al" citations to full author listings might work. It's a somewhat boring and mechanical task to expand "et al" but we do have people who are happy to contribute in that way. It might even be possible to build a tool to assist them which looks up the paper in WikiCite or Google Scholar etc to extract the full author list as published (just as we have tools to make it easier to typo and spelling fixes, disambiguate links and so forth). That would address the problem of women authors not being first cited and lost in the mists of "et al". However, as it is unlikely to be obvious to the average contributor that the paper with the full author list of A.B. Brown, C.D. Jones, E.F. Smith and G.H. Walker does or doesn't have any female authors, so I can't see that it's going to be easy to motivate people to try to find additional citations which do have more female authors. And, as much as gender equity is a wrong I'd like to see rightened, I don't want to see campaigns just to "add in more female authored citations" (I call this "citation sprinkling") on Wikipedia. A citation has to be there because it verifies the information in the article and not to meet a gender quota. Remember that for a lot of Wikipedia contributors, academic literature is mostly behind a paywall so they can't actually read more than the title and abstract at best. A "sprinkling" campaign is likely to see citations based only on title and abstract ("well, it sounds like this paper which includes a woman author is talking about this topic") but the paper may not support the specific claim made in the text (indeed, it might say the exact opposite). A sprinkling campaign should only target the Further Reading section whose role is: "The Further reading section of an article contains a bulleted list of a reasonable number of works which a reader may consult for additional and more detailed coverage of the subject of the article. In articles with numerous footnotes, it probably is not obvious which ones are suitable for further reading. The "Further reading" section can help the readers by listing selected titles without worrying about duplications." which would avoid the risk of adding a citation that doesn't support the specific claims being made in the article. So maybe it would be possible to add a "skewed gender balance" tag onto the Further reading section and/or External links section whose role is "Some acceptable links include those that contain further research that is accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated to its accuracy." The downside is this idea for adding female authors to the Further Reading and External Links sections is whether anyone ever looks at them. Currently over 50% of Wikipedia hits are now via mobile device. The mobile render of a Wikipedia article is not the whole article as you see on desktop and laptop but rather you select the sections you want to read, so for mobile readers we do know precisely what sections they are opening from which we have learned that people in developed countries are not generally reading whole articles but specific sections (suggesting seeking answers to a specific need rather than a desire to fully appreciate the topic), and they don't tend to open anything after the References as a rule, so they aren't looking at Further Reading and External links anyway. Are desktop/laptop readers looking at them either? We don't really know as they get the whole article rendered as a single result and it would really only be eye-tracking studies (an expensive type of experiment) that would give us this insight with the same accuracy as our mobile data. Aside, in less developed countries, readers are more likely to read whole articles on a mobile device. While the reasons for this different are not proven, I'd be prepared to guess at two interlinked hypotheses. Firstly, such countries have poorer standards of education so people may be using Wikipedia to supplement their limited formal education. Also such countries are more likely to be using rote learning in their education system (valuing the ability to memorise and reproduce) rather than the more problem-solving learning approaches increasingly in use in the education systems of more developed countries. That would also explain whole-of-article viewing rather than selecting specific sub-sections. In some ways, I think a better solution might be to try to get Google scholar interested in the issue of gender. What if articles listed on Google scholar came with a little gender balance score (a bit like hotel ratings). One blue star (or some other symbol) for one male author, two blue stars (two male authors), one pink and one blue star (first author female, second author male), etc. Why I like the idea is that it is a simple-to-understand visual aid to draw attention to gender imbalance more widely but without a specific call to action (which as I outline above may backfire if citations get added for gender balance rather than content). It potentially helps address the real world problem which would hopefully flow through to Wikipedia. Also Google Scholar is probably a lot better resourced to build the tools to do the legwork of determining gender (I guess a white star is used when it can't). The risks though that Leia has previously mentioned is that automated tools don't do a great job of getting gender correct particularly as the tools are often trained on limited data sets such as mostly white people making the automated gender guessing of non-white people more likely to be incorrect. However, as authors can establish their own Google Scholar profile (if the author's name is underlined, it's a link to their profile, that's a place where they could disclose their gender if they desired or correct Google Scholar's mistaken guess or demand that Google Scholar not show their gender (whatever should be their choice). Hmm, might it lead to catfishing? Authors passing themselves off as a different gender? Hmm ... Another place we might explore is marking gender in some easily visible way is in WikiCite but frankly I know little about that project so cannot comment on it nor the merits of doing it there rather than on Google scholar. I don't think traditional journal publishers are likely to be keen to show gender balance on their own websites as I think they would realise it would enable webscraping to reveal their overall gender balance profile, leading to some adverse headlines about "Brandname journals worst for gender equity". But Google Scholar has less to fear unless it was demonstrated that they exhibited stronger gender bias than the journals themselves but I would think that Google Scholar aggregates papers without any regard to the gender of the authors, but I guess it might not aggregate all topic areas equally. For example, if they didn't make much effort to include (say) nursing publications (a more female academic discipline) but went hard on engineering publications (a more male academic discipline), I guess it would skew their author gender balance towards men. Kerry -----Original Message----- From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Greg Sent: Thursday, 29 August 2019 4:06 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities < wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt;gt;; jane023(a)gmail.com Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations Hi Jane, Thanks for the link. It's clear that there is a lot of work being done, and even more left to do. I've been thinking about what you said about second authors and was wondering if instead of fixing it (or in addition to fixing it), it would make sense to put some sort of tag on the page itself (like the ones I see questioning notability or requests for additional citations). Something along the lines of authors missing from a particular citation and how to fix that, or no work by women cited in this article (if this is the case). It strikes me that by fixing it yourself, you are doing great work, but that maybe it also makes sense to spread awareness about these issues to the broader editing community so more people are thinking about it/doing it. At any rate, I thought I'd float the idea. Such a tag/the response (if any), could also be interesting to study, though perhaps something like this already exists and I'm just not aware of it, or perhaps there is good reason not to do it. All best, Greg On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 5:00 AM < wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: wrote: topic: data manually. the gender imbalance. wrote: broken. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:IP_Editing:_Privacy_Enhancement_and_Ab… is that in them luck In significant publications than and sensible https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Scholarly_article_citations_in_Wik… to account the approach them gender popular I've from _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ------------------------------ Subject: Digest Footer _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l ------------------------------ End of Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 25 ************************************************