Greetings!
I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do you?
I think this is an important question.
Here's what I've learned so far:
Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There is
also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured repository
(wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when this
could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible subset
of the citations.
My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary and
urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the citation
balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started? Does
the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter inhouse?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Greg
Currently, to open a sockpuppet investigation, you must name the two (or
more) accounts that you believe to be sockpuppets with "clear, behavioural
evidence of sock puppetry" which is typically in the form of pairs of edits
that demonstrate similar edit behaviours that are unlikely to naturally
occur. Now if you spend enough time on-wiki, you develop an intuition about
behaviours you see on your watchlist and in article edit histories. Often I
am highly suspicious that an account is a sockpuppet, but I cannot report
them because I don't know which other account is involved.
As a example, I recently encounted User:Shelati an account about 1 day old
at that time with nearly 100 edits in that day all about 1-2 minutes apart,
mostly making a similar change to a large number of Australian place
infoboxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&of
fset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati>
&offset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati
Genuine new users do not edit that quickly, do not use templates and do not
mess structurally with infoboxes (at most they try to change the values). It
"smelled" like a sockpuppet. However, as I did not recognise that pattern of
edit behaviour as being that of any other user I was familiar with, it
wasn't something I could report for sockpuppet investigation. Anyhow after
about 2 weeks, the user was blocked as a sockpuppet. Someone must have
noticed and figured out the other account:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Meganesia/
Archive
Two weeks and 1,279 edits later . that's over 1000 possibly problematic
edits after I first suspected them. But that's nothing compared with another
ongoing situation in which a very large number of different IPs are engaged
in a pattern of problem edits on mostly Australian articles (a few different
types of edits but an obvious "quack like a duck" situation). The IP number
changes frequently (and one assumes deliberately). The edits potentially go
back to 2013 but appear to have intensified in 2018/2019. Here's one user's
summary of all the IP addresses involved, and the extent to which they have
been cleaned up, given many thousands of edits are involved, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup
As well as the damage done to the content (which harms the readers), these
IP sockpuppets are consuming enormous amounts of effort to track them down
and revert them, which could be more productively used to improve the
content. We need better tools to foil these pests. So I want to put that
challenge out to this list.
Kerry
To reply to my own question .
Can we find a way to create a "signature" of an account's pattern of
editing? Perhaps it might be a set of signatures, maybe one for the
categories that the account appears to be active in, another for the type of
edit, etc. Then if these signatures were calculated for all banned accounts
or currently blocked accounts (or at least ones with a long enough
contribution history to make it worthwhile - we're not interested in
one-edit vandals), then we could have a tool that could be run to quickly
compare one account against the signatures of banned/blocked accounts as
well as the cumulative edits of a set of known sockpuppets (i.e. treat them
as a single account) to determine if this may be a sockpuppet case meriting
further investigation. I imagine that it would be too expensive
computationally to actually run comparisons of the contribution histories of
all "bad guy" accounts against the suspicious account which is why I propose
a "signature" approach (but I'm happy to be told otherwise).
If we had such a tool and it proves reasonably reliable in identifying
likely sockpuppets (not asking for guarantees but close enough not to be a
waste of time to investigate), then we could routinely use it on new
accounts or reactivating accounts (i.e. possible sleeper accounts) once they
have a long enough editing history to enable the tool to operate effectively
to provide automated early warning of new/reactivating accounts appearing
suspiciously similar to "bad guy" accounts.
But this is a hard problem, both technically and socially (Assume Good
Faith, Privacy, etc), so I welcome the thoughts of others.
Kerry
Thanks, WSC. All very interesting.
I've been thinking about Wiklpedia citations less in terms of kudos and
more in terms of a feedback loop. The cited sources get a significant
amount of attention (1 click per 200 pageviews is the number I saw
recently). When I imagine total Wikipedia traffic, that's huge. How many
students are finding sources this way? How many academics? And how many of
these citations are finding their way back into academic publications via
this mechanism?
Assuming this is happening to some degree, the gender imbalance of the
citations is also reflected. If the Wikipedia imbalance is the same as the
one in academia, that's one thing; if it is better on Wikipedia than it is
in academia, that's reason to celebrate; if the balance is worse, that's
concerning. In fact, if the gender imbalance conforms to my fears instead
of my hopes, and is magnified by the massive website traffic, I imagine it
could even explain the growth in the citation disparity researchers note in
their study of political science texts. (I link to that study in a previous
post; it was mentioned in the Washington Post recently)
There is a very real possibility that Wikipedia is making the citation
gender gap worse. I think we need to understand what is happening and take
immediate action if the news is not good.
Greg
>
>
>
Thanks again, Kerry. I am hoping that someone with access to more resources
(knowledge, support, etc) than I have will look into this.
A few more thoughts/questions:
1. The link to the citation dataset from the Medium article ("What are the
ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let’s ask the data.") is broken.
2. As far as I can tell, every named author in the top ten most cited
sources on Wikipedia is male. One piece is by a working group
3. This line from the Medium piece struck me: "Many of these publications
have been cited by Wikipedians across large series of articles using
powerful bots and automated tools."
Are citations being added by bots? I'm not sure that I understand that line
correctly.
Greg
On Sat, Aug 24, 2019 at 1:51 AM <wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: sockpuppets and how to find them sooner (Timothy Wood)
> 2. Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 17:51:41 -0400
> From: Timothy Wood <timothyjosephwood(a)gmail.com>
> To: Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> Cc: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] sockpuppets and how to find them sooner
> Message-ID:
> <CAMy3BEJ8=E1FgifdqgY+=
> vygN3ULqOmJghKm_29qWuY3P-Fd+g(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Then again, apparently the Foundation has a PR team whose only job is to
> compile the latest marketing buzzwords, and they seem to really love AI.
> You might get some buy in. Never know.
>
> V/r
> TJW/GMG
>
> On Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 11:23 Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That's why I think we need "signatures" which is my shorthand for things
> > like a hash function or a bounding box, a means by which many
> non-matching
> > accounts can be eliminated at low cost, reserving the high cost
> comparisons
> > (machine or human) only for high probability candidates. It is
> > machine-computed and *stored* on the banning/blocking of a user. When a
> > suspect user is presented, it calculates their signature and then
> compares
> > them against the pre-calculated signatures of the bad users. I don't
> think
> > it is too expensive if we can find the right "signature". CPU cycles are
> > pretty fast. I only have an average laptop CPU-wise but I burn through
> > loads of comparisons of geographic boundaries (complex polygons with many
> > points) thanks to bounding boxes which reduce the complex shape to the
> > smallest rectangle that contains it. Testing intersection of polygons is
> > expensive, testing the intersection of rectangles is trivial.
> >
> > I think we can probably ignore the myriad of trivial bad guys for the
> > purposes of signature collecting, eg blocked for vandalism after their
> > first few edits. Sock puppets or their masters don't immediately appear
> as
> > bad guys on individual edits. It's often more about long-term behaviours
> > like POV pushing, refusal to engage in consensus building, slow burning
> > edit wars, etc, that does not show on individual edits.
> >
> > Kerry
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> > On 23 Aug 2019, at 11:42 pm, Timothy Wood <timothyjosephwood(a)gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > You are correct that in all but the most obvious cases, filing an SPI can
> > be exceptionally time consuming. I'm afraid there is no obvious technical
> > solution there that would not involve a complicated AI that is probably
> > beyond the ability of the foundation to produce.
> >
> > There is quite a bit of data available in the form of years of SPIs, but
> > it seems like you're talking about Facebook or Google levels of machine
> > learning, and even years of SPIs is tiny compared to the amount of data
> > they work with.
> >
> > On a separate note, frequently changing IP adresses is most often an
> > indicator of nothing more than someone who is editing on a mobile
> > connection. This can usually be easily verified with an online IP lookup.
> >
> > V/r
> > TJW/GMG
> >
> >
> >
> > On Fri, Aug 23, 2019, 02:44 RhinosF1 <rhinosf1(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Just a note that you can still go through warnings for vandalism etc.
> and
> >> report to AIV.
> >>
> >> Or at that edit speed, you may have a chance at AN at reporting for
> >> bot-like edits which will draw attention to the account.
> >>
> >> If you ever need help, things like #wikipedia-en-help on Freenode IRC
> >> exist
> >> so you can ask other users.
> >>
> >> RhinosF1
> >> Miraheze Volunteer
> >>
> >> On Fri, 23 Aug 2019 at 06:57, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >> > Currently, to open a sockpuppet investigation, you must name the two
> (or
> >> > more) accounts that you believe to be sockpuppets with "clear,
> >> behavioural
> >> > evidence of sock puppetry" which is typically in the form of pairs of
> >> edits
> >> > that demonstrate similar edit behaviours that are unlikely to
> naturally
> >> > occur. Now if you spend enough time on-wiki, you develop an intuition
> >> about
> >> > behaviours you see on your watchlist and in article edit histories.
> >> Often I
> >> > am highly suspicious that an account is a sockpuppet, but I cannot
> >> report
> >> > them because I don't know which other account is involved.
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > As a example, I recently encounted User:Shelati an account about 1 day
> >> old
> >> > at that time with nearly 100 edits in that day all about 1-2 minutes
> >> apart,
> >> > mostly making a similar change to a large number of Australian place
> >> > infoboxes.
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati
> >> > <
> >> >
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&of
> >> > fset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati
> >> > <
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&of…
> >> >
> >> > >
> >> > &offset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > Genuine new users do not edit that quickly, do not use templates and
> do
> >> not
> >> > mess structurally with infoboxes (at most they try to change the
> >> values).
> >> > It
> >> > "smelled" like a sockpuppet. However, as I did not recognise that
> >> pattern
> >> > of
> >> > edit behaviour as being that of any other user I was familiar with, it
> >> > wasn't something I could report for sockpuppet investigation. Anyhow
> >> after
> >> > about 2 weeks, the user was blocked as a sockpuppet. Someone must have
> >> > noticed and figured out the other account:
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Meganesia/
> >> > Archive
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > Two weeks and 1,279 edits later . that's over 1000 possibly
> problematic
> >> > edits after I first suspected them. But that's nothing compared with
> >> > another
> >> > ongoing situation in which a very large number of different IPs are
> >> engaged
> >> > in a pattern of problem edits on mostly Australian articles (a few
> >> > different
> >> > types of edits but an obvious "quack like a duck" situation). The IP
> >> number
> >> > changes frequently (and one assumes deliberately). The edits
> >> potentially go
> >> > back to 2013 but appear to have intensified in 2018/2019. Here's one
> >> user's
> >> > summary of all the IP addresses involved, and the extent to which they
> >> have
> >> > been cleaned up, given many thousands of edits are involved, see:
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > As well as the damage done to the content (which harms the readers),
> >> these
> >> > IP sockpuppets are consuming enormous amounts of effort to track them
> >> down
> >> > and revert them, which could be more productively used to improve the
> >> > content. We need better tools to foil these pests. So I want to put
> that
> >> > challenge out to this list.
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > Kerry
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> >
> >> > _______________________________________________
> >> > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> >> > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >> >
> >> --
> >> RhinosF1
> >> Miraheze Volunteer
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> >> Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >>
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2019 18:29:36 +1000
> From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations
> Message-ID: <004801d55a56$11f4a270$35dde750$(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> I am inclined to think that political science has more Point of View in it
> than say chemistry. I also suspect it has fewer authors per book/paper. So
> I can imagine that people citing political science literature may be more
> inclined to cherry pick the sources that support their own POV which may
> involve some gender bias in some way. I would think it less likely in
> chemistry to cherry pick sources (which is not to say there are no divided
> schools of thought in chemistry but it is a more experimental discipline
> with strong commitment to factual data and less to opinion).
>
> But having said all that, whether and in what circumstances that the
> selection of sources in Wikipedia might be sex/gender biased, I honestly
> don't know. But if it manifests outside of Wikipedia as you suggest, then I
> would be very surprised if it wasn't replicated in Wikipedia to some
> extent. But I guess your question is whether is Wikipedia merely reflects
> the society it lives in (similar levels of gender bias) or whether there is
> something about Wikipedia which acerbates or ameliorates the situation? I
> am genuine curious what a small study would discover and agree that
> replicating (as much as possible) the existing study outside of Wikipedia)
> provides a good starting point. You might approach the authors of that
> study to see if they are willing to collaborate on such a project, either
> in design, data sharing or more fully. I look forward to seeing the results.
>
> Kerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
> On Behalf Of Greg
> Sent: Friday, 23 August 2019 5:01 PM
> To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
>
> Wow, Kerry! Thank you for taking the time to write all these thoughts out.
>
> I'm asking the question because I'm concerned that the gender balance of
> the authors being cited on wikipedia is different from the already quite
> bad patterns in academia. My fear is that the citation gender imbalance on
> Wikipedia is more pronounced. If so, it is not just perpetuating the
> problem, but making it worse by surfacing certain authors and ideas even
> more frequently, or hardly at all. I would like to know if this is the
> case, and if so, how big the effect is.
>
> In my last message, I mention a study about a set of award-winning
> political science books (the researchers study the citation gender
> imbalance for that set). I just saw this study today, but I began to think
> that it/the set of works--or some similar set of titles--could possibly be
> a good place to begin, especially if the original researchers were willing
> to share the list of titles/authors/gender/etc that they put
> together/worked with. Then it seems it would mostly be a matter of figuring
> out how to understand how those titles are cited on Wikipedia--through
> either the citation dataset or wikicite--to see if/how the citation
> patterns differ (i.e., if the works by women/men are cited more
> frequently/at the same rate/less frequently on Wikipedia than what the
> researchers found in the original study).
>
> This seems like it would be easier to do than what you propose, but
> perhaps the idea is not sound. Until very recently, I thought I could find
> the answer in an existing paper! I honestly don't know the best way to get
> the answer, but I would like to know the answer and think it's important to
> look at.
>
> All of the things you bring up--from the gender of the editor, to the type
> of editing being done, to the issues around multiple authors/paywalls/year
> of publication/field--complicate the inquiry, and in particular a larger
> one. I agree with what you say about doing something small first to see
> what's there.
>
> Thanks again for all your thoughts.
> Greg
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:41 PM <
> wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > You can reach the person managing the list at
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> >
> > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> >
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> > 1. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 18:47:48 -0700
> > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > Message-ID:
> > <
> > CAOO9DNvBrw_aLkRUp5kYFLdaLJUEK+ddiz-A09MZwiotAdAmUw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > Hi Leila,
> >
> > Thanks for your thoughts.
> >
> > Having just read Troy Vettese's very powerful essay, Sexism in the
> > Academy (
> > https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/sexism-in-the-academy/), I
> > wish this were a top priority.
> >
> > I stumbled upon a study today--it came up in the Washington Post's
> > excellent series on gender bias in political science. The authors look
> > at a set of award winning political science books and the gender
> > imbalance in the citations drawn from google scholar. I'm linking the
> > piece here in case anyone on this list is interested now, or in the
> > future, in how the patterns on Wikipedia compare.
> >
> > Washington Post piece: "There’s a gender gap in who wins political
> > science book awards – and in how widely they’re cited"
> >
> > https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/22/theres-gender-gap-w
> > ho-wins-political-science-book-awards-how-widely-theyre-cited/
> > "Just as significantly, women’s award-winning books receive fewer
> > scholarly citations than men’s award-winning volumes — and this
> > disparity has grown, rather than shrunk, in recent years. Over the
> > entire period, APSA award-winning volumes by women averaged 43 percent
> > fewer citations per year than those by male authors."
> >
> > Paper: "Winning awards and gaining recognition: An impact analysis of
> > APSA section book prizes"
> > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S036233191830086
> > 7
> >
> >
> > Best,
> > Greg
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 3:44 PM <
> > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > >
> > >
> > > Today's Topics:
> > >
> > > 1. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Leila Zia)
> > > 3. Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup follow-up (Leila Zia)
> > > 4. Upcoming Research Newsletter (special issue on gender gap
> > > research): New papers open for review (Mohammed Sadat Abdulai)
> > >
> > >
> > > --------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > --
> > >
> > > Message: 1
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 09:57:15 -0700
> > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAOO9DNuSYzzaVwcdqiWA7pj671z3N43XOSwv6DtW0SxWg=
> > > L8GQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Hi Kerry,
> > > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking
> > mostly
> > > along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested in
> > > research in any of those areas.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Greg
> > >
> > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > >
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more
> > > > specific than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Today's Topics:
> > > >
> > > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > > ----
> > > >
> > > > Message: 1
> > > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > Message-ID:
> > > > <
> > > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com
> > > > CAOO9DNtY+>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > > this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > > There is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated
> > > > structured
> > > repository
> > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or
> > > > if/when
> > this
> > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> > > > sensible
> > > subset
> > > > of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > necessary
> > and
> > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > citation
> > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > Does
> > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > Message: 2
> > > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia
> > > > citations
> > > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender
> > > > balance
> > of
> > > > citations?
> > > >
> > > > Are you talking about:
> > > >
> > > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used
> > > > as citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men
> > > > vs
> > > women?
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered
> > > > by
> > some
> > > > other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action
> film)?
> > > >
> > > > Kerry
> > > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> > > wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > > this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > > There is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated
> > > > structured
> > > repository
> > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or
> > > > if/when
> > this
> > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> > > > sensible
> > > subset
> > > > of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > necessary
> > and
> > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > citation
> > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > Does
> > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > 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 11
> > > > ************************************************
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 2
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:43:51 -0700
> > > From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
> > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAK0Oe2uCo70_=ma2b=2d+fvr4GseEVxOP0sh=
> > > ELNOpKdCuUfqA(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Hi Greg,
> > >
> > > A few comments if you're going to go with "proportion of male vs
> > > female authors of the source material used as citations in arbitrary
> > > articles":
> > >
> > > * Please differentiate between sex (female, male, ...) and gender
> > > (woman, man, ...). My understanding from your initial email is that
> > > you want to stay focused on gender, not sex.
> > >
> > > * Unless you have reliable sources about the gender of an author, I
> > > would not recommend trying to predict what the gender is. (As you
> > > may know, this is not uncommon in social media studies, for example,
> > > to predict the gender of the author based on their image or their name.
> > > These approaches introduce biases and social challenges.)
> > >
> > > * Re your question about whether WMF has resources to look into this
> > > question in-house: I can't speak for the whole of WMF, however, I
> > > can share more about the Research team's direction. As part of our
> > > future work, we would like to "help contributors monitor violations
> > > of core content policies and assess information reliability and bias
> > > both granularly and at scale". [1] The question you proposed can
> > > fall under assessing bias in content (considering citations as part
> > > of the content). I expect us to focus first on the piece about
> > > violations of core content policies and information reliability and
> > > come back to the bias question later. As a result, we won't have
> > > bandwidth to do your proposal in-house at the moment. Sorry about that.
> > >
> > > I hope this helps.
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Leila
> > >
> > > [1] Section 2 of our Knowledge Integrity whitepaper:
> > >
> > >
> > https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Knowledge_Integrit
> > y_-_Wikimedia_Research_2030.pdf
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:57 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Hi Kerry,
> > > > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was
> > > > thinking
> > > mostly
> > > > along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested
> > > > in research in any of those areas.
> > > >
> > > > Thanks,
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > >
> > > > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > > >
> > > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > >
> > > > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > >
> > > > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more
> > > > > specific than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Today's Topics:
> > > > >
> > > > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > > >
> > > > > Message: 1
> > > > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > > Message-ID:
> > > > > <
> > > > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.c
> > > > > CAOO9DNtY+om>
> > > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > > >
> > > > > Greetings!
> > > > >
> > > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > > > this topic. Do
> > > you?
> > > > >
> > > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > > >
> > > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > > >
> > > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > > > There
> > is
> > > > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > > repository
> > > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or
> > > > > if/when
> > > this
> > > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> > > > > sensible
> > > subset
> > > > > of the citations.
> > > > >
> > > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > > necessary
> > > and
> > > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > > citation
> > > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite
> large.
> > > > >
> > > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community
> > > > > is interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get
> started?
> > > Does
> > > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > > inhouse?
> > > > >
> > > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > > >
> > > > > Greg
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > ------------------------------
> > > > >
> > > > > Message: 2
> > > > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia
> > > > > citations
> > > > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > > >
> > > > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender
> > > > > balance
> > > of
> > > > > citations?
> > > > >
> > > > > Are you talking about:
> > > > >
> > > > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material
> > > > > used as citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of
> > > > > men vs
> > > women?
> > > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are
> > > > > gendered by
> > > some
> > > > > other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action
> > film)?
> > > > >
> > > > > Kerry
> > > > >
> > > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> > > wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > >
> > > > > Greetings!
> > > > >
> > > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > > > this topic. Do
> > > you?
> > > > >
> > > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > > >
> > > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > > >
> > > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > > > There
> > is
> > > > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > > repository
> > > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or
> > > > > if/when
> > > this
> > > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> > > > > sensible
> > > subset
> > > > > of the citations.
> > > > >
> > > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > > necessary
> > > and
> > > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > > citation
> > > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite
> large.
> > > > >
> > > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community
> > > > > is interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get
> started?
> > > Does
> > > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > > inhouse?
> > > > >
> > > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > > >
> > > > > Greg
> > > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > > 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 11
> > > > > ************************************************
> > > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > > > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 3
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:36:17 -0700
> > > From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
> > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup
> > > follow-up
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAK0Oe2sodYJpkuhSqgo3dtfDr=
> > > NQ5EK1TdH16F6BOkTyFho9Rg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > This message is for those of you who attended the disinformation
> > > meet-up [0] in Wikimania 2019 [1] or others who may be interested.
> > >
> > > * The notes from our meet-up are now posted in the bottom of the
> > > page
> > [0].
> > >
> > > * I was tasked to see if space.wmflabs.org is the place for us to
> > > continue conversations about this topic. The answer is yes. Thanks
> > > to the help of Elena Lappen, we now have a dedicated subcategory for
> > > disinformation:
> > > https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/c/research/disinformation . Feel
> > > free to subscribe, watch, and/or post new topics if you're involved
> > > in this space.
> > >
> > > * If you are new to this conversation, please read the purpose of
> > > the subcategory at
> > >
> > https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/about-the-disinformation-category/
> > 949
> > > and welcome! :)
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Leila
> > >
> > > [0] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Meetups/Disinformation
> > > [1] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Program
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 4
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 22:43:53 +0000 (UTC)
> > > From: Mohammed Sadat Abdulai <masssly(a)ymail.com>
> > > To: Research Into Wikimedia Content and Communities
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Upcoming Research Newsletter (special issue
> > > on gender gap research): New papers open for review
> > > Message-ID: <1625269943.668598.1566513833343(a)mail.yahoo.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> > >
> > > Hi everyone,
> > > We’re preparing for the August 2019 research newsletter and looking
> > > for contributors. Please take a look at
> > > https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN201908 and add your name next to
> > > any paper you are interested in covering. Our target publication
> > > date is on
> > 31
> > > August 11:59 UTC. As usual, short notes and one-paragraph reviews
> > > are
> > most
> > > welcome.
> > > For the August edition, we are planning a special issue focusing
> > > mainly on recent gender gap/gender bias research. (Upcoming special
> > > issues
> > topics
> > > may include health and education.) There are about 20 papers from
> > > this
> > area
> > > on our todo list which will all be covered in the August issue,
> > > either
> > as a
> > > mere list item or - with your help - in form of a more informative
> > writeup
> > > or review. They include:
> > > - Analyzing Gender Stereotyping in Bollywood Movies
> > >
> > > - Breaking the glass ceiling on Wikipedia| journal
> > >
> > > - Breastfeeding, Authority, and Genre: Women's Ethos in Wikipedia
> > > and Blogs
> > >
> > > - Cyberfeminism on Wikipedia: Visibility and deliberation in
> > > feminist Wikiprojects
> > >
> > > - Gender and deletion on Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Gender imbalance and Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Gender Markers in Wikipedia Usernames
> > >
> > > - How do students trust Wikipedia? An examination across genders
> > >
> > > - Investigating the Gender Pronoun Gap in Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - It’s Not What You Think: Gender Bias in Information about
> > > Fortune
> > > 1000 CEOs on Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Mapping and Bridging the Gender Gap: An Ethnographic Study of
> > > Indian Wikipedians and Their Motivations to Contribute
> > >
> > > - People Who Can Take It: How Women Wikipedians Negotiate and
> > > Navigate Safety
> > >
> > > - Redressing Gender Inequities on Wikipedia Through an Editathon
> > >
> > > - Similar Gaps, Different Origins? Women Readers and Editors at
> > > Greek Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Simulation Experiments on (the Absence of) Ratings Bias in
> > Reputation
> > > Systems
> > >
> > > - The Gendered Presentation of Professions on Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race,
> > > and the “Professor Test”
> > >
> > > - Who Wants to Read This?: A Method for Measuring Topical
> > > Representativeness in User Generated Content Systems
> > >
> > > - Women and Wikipedia. Diversifying Editors and Enhancing Content
> > > through Library Edit-a-Thons
> > >
> > > Masssly and Tilman Bayer
> > >
> > > [1] Research:Newsletter - Meta[2] WikiResearch (@WikiResearch) on
> > > Twitter
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > 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 12
> > > ************************************************
> > >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 14:41:09 +1000
> > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > Message-ID: <001001d5596c$fe22a100$fa67e300$(a)gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > Yes, that was my thought. It would be difficult to know the sex (or
> > the
> > gender) of an author name on a paper. There would inevitably be a lot
> > that you could not determine. And certainly in the sciences
> > multi-author pages are the norm and even where you did know the
> > sex/gender of all, do you assign some part-score? E.g. 0 for all male,
> > 1 for all female, 0.6 for 3 women and 2 men.
> >
> > But I am curious why you are asking the question? That the
> > writing/research of women is under-represented in Wikipedia citations?
> > If so, without conducting any research, I'd say "yes it is
> under-represented".
> > But my reason would be because women are under-represented as
> > writers/researchers in the first place. And certainly the older the
> > source, the more likely it is to be written by a man. So to
> > investigate gender bias in citations in Wikipedia, you would have to
> > estimate the proportion of men/women (or at least their outputs) over
> > time in a given discipline and then ask the question, "taking into
> > account of the time of publication of a citation and the proportion of
> > men/women active in this discipline at that time, do Wikipedia citations
> show a sex/gender basis?".
> > Hmm ... very tricky.
> >
> > I'd be inclined to suggest starting with a much simpler task. Pick a
> > discipline (preferably one with a professional society who can tell
> > your their estimate of current male/female ratio over (say) the past 5
> > years), limit the Wikipedia articles to topics in that discipline, and
> > limit the citations to those published within the last 5 years.
> > Indeed, perhaps limiting it to publications that are principally from
> > the same country(s) as the professional society from which you get the
> > data (as clearly men/women's participation in any discipline can vary
> > with different countries for cultural reasons). Then you have some way
> > to gauge whether Wikipedia is showing more or less gender bias in its
> > citations than the discipline itself exhibits through publication. Quite
> a challenge!
> >
> > And of course, it is not Wikipedia that adds citations. It is
> > individual contributor who add citations. Does the sex/gender of the
> > contributor have any correlation to any observed bias? Again, the task
> > is made more difficult because a lot of Wikipedians don't identify their
> sex/gender.
> >
> > The other thing to be alert to is the difference in how (I believe)
> > Wikipedians cite compared to researchers. As a researcher, I will of
> > course be reading papers in my field all the time and what I read will
> > influence my subsequent work. Therefore when I write about my
> > research, my citations are referring to papers that I have already
> > read and whose authors may be familiar to me from their other work,
> > having met them at a conferences, private correspondence, etc. However
> > as a Wikipedian, I am only partially operating that way (mostly when I
> > write new articles or significantly expand them, that is, when I am
> > doing the research). A lot of the time I am adding citations relating
> > to content other people (often new users) have added/changed without
> citation. These come up on my watchlist all the time.
> > What do I do? Of course I could revert saying "no citation provided",
> > but that's not the way to encourage new contributors nor to grow the
> > encyclopedia, so if the information seems plausible (not obviously
> > vandalism), I will attempt to find a citation for it (using tools like
> > Google and other topic-specialise search tools). This is what I call
> > "lucky dip" mode of citing as obviously I have no idea what the source
> > was for the original contributor. The sources I find from my search
> > may not already be known to me (frequently they are not). Or to
> > summarise, IMHO, researchers (or Wikipedians in "new content mode")
> > cite a source already known to them and whose authors may be known to
> > them and could consciously or unconsciously engage in some
> > discrimination in citation based on sex/gender or other criteria,
> > whereas Wikipedians in "updating mode" are likely to be citing a
> > source not previously known to them and may be happy just to have
> > found a source and are unlikely to be spending a lot of their time
> > researching the authors of that source to be extent they could then
> > consciously or unconsciously exercise discrimination on sex/gender. If
> > I invest any extra effort in such a situations, it's probably because
> > the wording of the source is a close match to the Wikipedia article
> > which begs the question of copyright violation (which needs to be
> > dealt with by deletion or rewriting) or being a Wikipedia mirror (which
> is obviously not an acceptable citation).
> >
> > So I suspect whether a citation was added by the same contributor as
> > the content it supports or a subsequent contributor probably makes a
> > difference to the likelihood of conscious/unconscious discrimination.
> >
> > Also, finally, often Wikipedia cites web pages and other sources that
> > do not have any individual authorship, e.g. government websites.
> > Remember that Wikipedia prefers open citations over paywalled
> > citations and a lot of the publications behind paywalls are individually
> authored.
> >
> > Your proposed research has a lot of interesting challenges and a
> > number of limitations. I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying
> > start very small and see if you can find any evidence to support your
> > hypothesis before embarking on a larger study. Because contributor
> > behaviour is what you are trying to study, you probably need to do
> > both quantitative and qualitative experiments. E.g. I have described
> > the two modes of citation I do, but I cannot say how typical my
> behaviour is.
> >
> > Kerry
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Wiki-research-l
> > [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
> > On Behalf Of Leila Zia
> > Sent: Friday, 23 August 2019 3:44 AM
> > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
> > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> >
> > Hi Greg,
> >
> > A few comments if you're going to go with "proportion of male vs
> > female authors of the source material used as citations in arbitrary
> > articles":
> >
> > * Please differentiate between sex (female, male, ...) and gender
> > (woman, man, ...). My understanding from your initial email is that
> > you want to stay focused on gender, not sex.
> >
> > * Unless you have reliable sources about the gender of an author, I
> > would not recommend trying to predict what the gender is. (As you may
> > know, this is not uncommon in social media studies, for example, to
> > predict the gender of the author based on their image or their name.
> > These approaches introduce biases and social challenges.)
> >
> > * Re your question about whether WMF has resources to look into this
> > question in-house: I can't speak for the whole of WMF, however, I can
> > share more about the Research team's direction. As part of our future
> > work, we would like to "help contributors monitor violations of core
> > content policies and assess information reliability and bias both
> > granularly and at scale". [1] The question you proposed can fall under
> > assessing bias in content (considering citations as part of the
> > content). I expect us to focus first on the piece about violations of
> > core content policies and information reliability and come back to the
> > bias question later. As a result, we won't have bandwidth to do your
> proposal in-house at the moment.
> > Sorry about that.
> >
> > I hope this helps.
> >
> > Best,
> > Leila
> >
> > [1] Section 2 of our Knowledge Integrity whitepaper:
> >
> > https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Knowledge_Integrit
> > y_-_Wikimedia_Research_2030.pdf
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:57 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi Kerry,
> > > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking
> > > mostly along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be
> > > interested in research in any of those areas.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Greg
> > >
> > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM
> > > <wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
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> > > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more
> > > > specific than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Today's Topics:
> > > >
> > > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > > --
> > > > --
> > > >
> > > > Message: 1
> > > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > Message-ID:
> > > > <
> > > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com
> > > > CAOO9DNtY+>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > > this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > > There is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated
> > > > structured repository (wikicite). I do not know the current status
> > > > of wikicite or if/when this could be used for this inquiry--either
> > > > to examine all, or a sensible subset of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > necessary and urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or
> > > > worse than the citation balances we already know, and the scale of
> > > > the
> > effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > > > Does the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this
> > > > matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > Message: 2
> > > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia
> > > > citations
> > > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender
> > > > balance of citations?
> > > >
> > > > Are you talking about:
> > > >
> > > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used
> > > > as citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men
> > > > vs
> > women?
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered
> > > > by some other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs
> > > > action
> > film)?
> > > >
> > > > Kerry
> > > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Wiki-research-l
> > > > [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > > this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > > There is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated
> > > > structured repository (wikicite). I do not know the current status
> > > > of wikicite or if/when this could be used for this inquiry--either
> > > > to examine all, or a sensible subset of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > necessary and urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or
> > > > worse than the citation balances we already know, and the scale of
> > > > the
> > effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > > > Does the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this
> > > > matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > 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 11
> > > > ************************************************
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> > > _______________________________________________
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> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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> >
> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> >
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> > ************************************************
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>
I am inclined to think that political science has more Point of View in it than say chemistry. I also suspect it has fewer authors per book/paper. So I can imagine that people citing political science literature may be more inclined to cherry pick the sources that support their own POV which may involve some gender bias in some way. I would think it less likely in chemistry to cherry pick sources (which is not to say there are no divided schools of thought in chemistry but it is a more experimental discipline with strong commitment to factual data and less to opinion).
But having said all that, whether and in what circumstances that the selection of sources in Wikipedia might be sex/gender biased, I honestly don't know. But if it manifests outside of Wikipedia as you suggest, then I would be very surprised if it wasn't replicated in Wikipedia to some extent. But I guess your question is whether is Wikipedia merely reflects the society it lives in (similar levels of gender bias) or whether there is something about Wikipedia which acerbates or ameliorates the situation? I am genuine curious what a small study would discover and agree that replicating (as much as possible) the existing study outside of Wikipedia) provides a good starting point. You might approach the authors of that study to see if they are willing to collaborate on such a project, either in design, data sharing or more fully. I look forward to seeing the results.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Greg
Sent: Friday, 23 August 2019 5:01 PM
To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
Wow, Kerry! Thank you for taking the time to write all these thoughts out.
I'm asking the question because I'm concerned that the gender balance of the authors being cited on wikipedia is different from the already quite bad patterns in academia. My fear is that the citation gender imbalance on Wikipedia is more pronounced. If so, it is not just perpetuating the problem, but making it worse by surfacing certain authors and ideas even more frequently, or hardly at all. I would like to know if this is the case, and if so, how big the effect is.
In my last message, I mention a study about a set of award-winning political science books (the researchers study the citation gender imbalance for that set). I just saw this study today, but I began to think that it/the set of works--or some similar set of titles--could possibly be a good place to begin, especially if the original researchers were willing to share the list of titles/authors/gender/etc that they put together/worked with. Then it seems it would mostly be a matter of figuring out how to understand how those titles are cited on Wikipedia--through either the citation dataset or wikicite--to see if/how the citation patterns differ (i.e., if the works by women/men are cited more frequently/at the same rate/less frequently on Wikipedia than what the researchers found in the original study).
This seems like it would be easier to do than what you propose, but perhaps the idea is not sound. Until very recently, I thought I could find the answer in an existing paper! I honestly don't know the best way to get the answer, but I would like to know the answer and think it's important to look at.
All of the things you bring up--from the gender of the editor, to the type of editing being done, to the issues around multiple authors/paywalls/year of publication/field--complicate the inquiry, and in particular a larger one. I agree with what you say about doing something small first to see what's there.
Thanks again for all your thoughts.
Greg
On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:41 PM <wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 18:47:48 -0700
> From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID:
> <
> CAOO9DNvBrw_aLkRUp5kYFLdaLJUEK+ddiz-A09MZwiotAdAmUw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Hi Leila,
>
> Thanks for your thoughts.
>
> Having just read Troy Vettese's very powerful essay, Sexism in the
> Academy (
> https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/sexism-in-the-academy/), I
> wish this were a top priority.
>
> I stumbled upon a study today--it came up in the Washington Post's
> excellent series on gender bias in political science. The authors look
> at a set of award winning political science books and the gender
> imbalance in the citations drawn from google scholar. I'm linking the
> piece here in case anyone on this list is interested now, or in the
> future, in how the patterns on Wikipedia compare.
>
> Washington Post piece: "There’s a gender gap in who wins political
> science book awards – and in how widely they’re cited"
>
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/22/theres-gender-gap-w
> ho-wins-political-science-book-awards-how-widely-theyre-cited/
> "Just as significantly, women’s award-winning books receive fewer
> scholarly citations than men’s award-winning volumes — and this
> disparity has grown, rather than shrunk, in recent years. Over the
> entire period, APSA award-winning volumes by women averaged 43 percent
> fewer citations per year than those by male authors."
>
> Paper: "Winning awards and gaining recognition: An impact analysis of
> APSA section book prizes"
> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S036233191830086
> 7
>
>
> Best,
> Greg
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 3:44 PM <
> wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> >
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> > 1. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Leila Zia)
> > 3. Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup follow-up (Leila Zia)
> > 4. Upcoming Research Newsletter (special issue on gender gap
> > research): New papers open for review (Mohammed Sadat Abdulai)
> >
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------
> > --
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 09:57:15 -0700
> > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > Message-ID:
> > <CAOO9DNuSYzzaVwcdqiWA7pj671z3N43XOSwv6DtW0SxWg=
> > L8GQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > Hi Kerry,
> > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking
> mostly
> > along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested in
> > research in any of those areas.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Greg
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > >
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more
> > > specific than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > >
> > >
> > > Today's Topics:
> > >
> > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > ----
> > >
> > > Message: 1
> > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <
> > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com
> > > CAOO9DNtY+>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Greetings!
> > >
> > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > this topic. Do
> you?
> > >
> > > I think this is an important question.
> > >
> > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > >
> > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > There is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated
> > > structured
> > repository
> > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or
> > > if/when
> this
> > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> > > sensible
> > subset
> > > of the citations.
> > >
> > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > necessary
> and
> > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> citation
> > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > >
> > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> Does
> > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> inhouse?
> > >
> > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > >
> > > Greg
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 2
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia
> > > citations
> > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender
> > > balance
> of
> > > citations?
> > >
> > > Are you talking about:
> > >
> > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used
> > > as citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men
> > > vs
> > women?
> > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered
> > > by
> some
> > > other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action film)?
> > >
> > > Kerry
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> > wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > >
> > > Greetings!
> > >
> > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > this topic. Do
> you?
> > >
> > > I think this is an important question.
> > >
> > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > >
> > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > There is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated
> > > structured
> > repository
> > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or
> > > if/when
> this
> > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> > > sensible
> > subset
> > > of the citations.
> > >
> > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > necessary
> and
> > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> citation
> > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > >
> > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> Does
> > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> inhouse?
> > >
> > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > >
> > > Greg
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > 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 11
> > > ************************************************
> > >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:43:51 -0700
> > From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
> > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > Message-ID:
> > <CAK0Oe2uCo70_=ma2b=2d+fvr4GseEVxOP0sh=
> > ELNOpKdCuUfqA(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > Hi Greg,
> >
> > A few comments if you're going to go with "proportion of male vs
> > female authors of the source material used as citations in arbitrary
> > articles":
> >
> > * Please differentiate between sex (female, male, ...) and gender
> > (woman, man, ...). My understanding from your initial email is that
> > you want to stay focused on gender, not sex.
> >
> > * Unless you have reliable sources about the gender of an author, I
> > would not recommend trying to predict what the gender is. (As you
> > may know, this is not uncommon in social media studies, for example,
> > to predict the gender of the author based on their image or their name.
> > These approaches introduce biases and social challenges.)
> >
> > * Re your question about whether WMF has resources to look into this
> > question in-house: I can't speak for the whole of WMF, however, I
> > can share more about the Research team's direction. As part of our
> > future work, we would like to "help contributors monitor violations
> > of core content policies and assess information reliability and bias
> > both granularly and at scale". [1] The question you proposed can
> > fall under assessing bias in content (considering citations as part
> > of the content). I expect us to focus first on the piece about
> > violations of core content policies and information reliability and
> > come back to the bias question later. As a result, we won't have
> > bandwidth to do your proposal in-house at the moment. Sorry about that.
> >
> > I hope this helps.
> >
> > Best,
> > Leila
> >
> > [1] Section 2 of our Knowledge Integrity whitepaper:
> >
> >
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Knowledge_Integrit
> y_-_Wikimedia_Research_2030.pdf
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:57 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi Kerry,
> > > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was
> > > thinking
> > mostly
> > > along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested
> > > in research in any of those areas.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Greg
> > >
> > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > >
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more
> > > > specific than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Today's Topics:
> > > >
> > > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > Message: 1
> > > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > Message-ID:
> > > > <
> > > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.c
> > > > CAOO9DNtY+om>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > > this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > > There
> is
> > > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > repository
> > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or
> > > > if/when
> > this
> > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> > > > sensible
> > subset
> > > > of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > necessary
> > and
> > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > citation
> > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community
> > > > is interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > Does
> > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > Message: 2
> > > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia
> > > > citations
> > > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender
> > > > balance
> > of
> > > > citations?
> > > >
> > > > Are you talking about:
> > > >
> > > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material
> > > > used as citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of
> > > > men vs
> > women?
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are
> > > > gendered by
> > some
> > > > other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action
> film)?
> > > >
> > > > Kerry
> > > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> > wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > > this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > > There
> is
> > > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > repository
> > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or
> > > > if/when
> > this
> > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> > > > sensible
> > subset
> > > > of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > necessary
> > and
> > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > citation
> > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community
> > > > is interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > Does
> > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > 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 11
> > > > ************************************************
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 3
> > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:36:17 -0700
> > From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
> > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup
> > follow-up
> > Message-ID:
> > <CAK0Oe2sodYJpkuhSqgo3dtfDr=
> > NQ5EK1TdH16F6BOkTyFho9Rg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > This message is for those of you who attended the disinformation
> > meet-up [0] in Wikimania 2019 [1] or others who may be interested.
> >
> > * The notes from our meet-up are now posted in the bottom of the
> > page
> [0].
> >
> > * I was tasked to see if space.wmflabs.org is the place for us to
> > continue conversations about this topic. The answer is yes. Thanks
> > to the help of Elena Lappen, we now have a dedicated subcategory for
> > disinformation:
> > https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/c/research/disinformation . Feel
> > free to subscribe, watch, and/or post new topics if you're involved
> > in this space.
> >
> > * If you are new to this conversation, please read the purpose of
> > the subcategory at
> >
> https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/about-the-disinformation-category/
> 949
> > and welcome! :)
> >
> > Best,
> > Leila
> >
> > [0] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Meetups/Disinformation
> > [1] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Program
> >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 4
> > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 22:43:53 +0000 (UTC)
> > From: Mohammed Sadat Abdulai <masssly(a)ymail.com>
> > To: Research Into Wikimedia Content and Communities
> > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Upcoming Research Newsletter (special issue
> > on gender gap research): New papers open for review
> > Message-ID: <1625269943.668598.1566513833343(a)mail.yahoo.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> >
> > Hi everyone,
> > We’re preparing for the August 2019 research newsletter and looking
> > for contributors. Please take a look at
> > https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN201908 and add your name next to
> > any paper you are interested in covering. Our target publication
> > date is on
> 31
> > August 11:59 UTC. As usual, short notes and one-paragraph reviews
> > are
> most
> > welcome.
> > For the August edition, we are planning a special issue focusing
> > mainly on recent gender gap/gender bias research. (Upcoming special
> > issues
> topics
> > may include health and education.) There are about 20 papers from
> > this
> area
> > on our todo list which will all be covered in the August issue,
> > either
> as a
> > mere list item or - with your help - in form of a more informative
> writeup
> > or review. They include:
> > - Analyzing Gender Stereotyping in Bollywood Movies
> >
> > - Breaking the glass ceiling on Wikipedia| journal
> >
> > - Breastfeeding, Authority, and Genre: Women's Ethos in Wikipedia
> > and Blogs
> >
> > - Cyberfeminism on Wikipedia: Visibility and deliberation in
> > feminist Wikiprojects
> >
> > - Gender and deletion on Wikipedia
> >
> > - Gender imbalance and Wikipedia
> >
> > - Gender Markers in Wikipedia Usernames
> >
> > - How do students trust Wikipedia? An examination across genders
> >
> > - Investigating the Gender Pronoun Gap in Wikipedia
> >
> > - It’s Not What You Think: Gender Bias in Information about
> > Fortune
> > 1000 CEOs on Wikipedia
> >
> > - Mapping and Bridging the Gender Gap: An Ethnographic Study of
> > Indian Wikipedians and Their Motivations to Contribute
> >
> > - People Who Can Take It: How Women Wikipedians Negotiate and
> > Navigate Safety
> >
> > - Redressing Gender Inequities on Wikipedia Through an Editathon
> >
> > - Similar Gaps, Different Origins? Women Readers and Editors at
> > Greek Wikipedia
> >
> > - Simulation Experiments on (the Absence of) Ratings Bias in
> Reputation
> > Systems
> >
> > - The Gendered Presentation of Professions on Wikipedia
> >
> > - Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race,
> > and the “Professor Test”
> >
> > - Who Wants to Read This?: A Method for Measuring Topical
> > Representativeness in User Generated Content Systems
> >
> > - Women and Wikipedia. Diversifying Editors and Enhancing Content
> > through Library Edit-a-Thons
> >
> > Masssly and Tilman Bayer
> >
> > [1] Research:Newsletter - Meta[2] WikiResearch (@WikiResearch) on
> > Twitter
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > 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 12
> > ************************************************
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 14:41:09 +1000
> From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID: <001001d5596c$fe22a100$fa67e300$(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
>
> Yes, that was my thought. It would be difficult to know the sex (or
> the
> gender) of an author name on a paper. There would inevitably be a lot
> that you could not determine. And certainly in the sciences
> multi-author pages are the norm and even where you did know the
> sex/gender of all, do you assign some part-score? E.g. 0 for all male,
> 1 for all female, 0.6 for 3 women and 2 men.
>
> But I am curious why you are asking the question? That the
> writing/research of women is under-represented in Wikipedia citations?
> If so, without conducting any research, I'd say "yes it is under-represented".
> But my reason would be because women are under-represented as
> writers/researchers in the first place. And certainly the older the
> source, the more likely it is to be written by a man. So to
> investigate gender bias in citations in Wikipedia, you would have to
> estimate the proportion of men/women (or at least their outputs) over
> time in a given discipline and then ask the question, "taking into
> account of the time of publication of a citation and the proportion of
> men/women active in this discipline at that time, do Wikipedia citations show a sex/gender basis?".
> Hmm ... very tricky.
>
> I'd be inclined to suggest starting with a much simpler task. Pick a
> discipline (preferably one with a professional society who can tell
> your their estimate of current male/female ratio over (say) the past 5
> years), limit the Wikipedia articles to topics in that discipline, and
> limit the citations to those published within the last 5 years.
> Indeed, perhaps limiting it to publications that are principally from
> the same country(s) as the professional society from which you get the
> data (as clearly men/women's participation in any discipline can vary
> with different countries for cultural reasons). Then you have some way
> to gauge whether Wikipedia is showing more or less gender bias in its
> citations than the discipline itself exhibits through publication. Quite a challenge!
>
> And of course, it is not Wikipedia that adds citations. It is
> individual contributor who add citations. Does the sex/gender of the
> contributor have any correlation to any observed bias? Again, the task
> is made more difficult because a lot of Wikipedians don't identify their sex/gender.
>
> The other thing to be alert to is the difference in how (I believe)
> Wikipedians cite compared to researchers. As a researcher, I will of
> course be reading papers in my field all the time and what I read will
> influence my subsequent work. Therefore when I write about my
> research, my citations are referring to papers that I have already
> read and whose authors may be familiar to me from their other work,
> having met them at a conferences, private correspondence, etc. However
> as a Wikipedian, I am only partially operating that way (mostly when I
> write new articles or significantly expand them, that is, when I am
> doing the research). A lot of the time I am adding citations relating
> to content other people (often new users) have added/changed without citation. These come up on my watchlist all the time.
> What do I do? Of course I could revert saying "no citation provided",
> but that's not the way to encourage new contributors nor to grow the
> encyclopedia, so if the information seems plausible (not obviously
> vandalism), I will attempt to find a citation for it (using tools like
> Google and other topic-specialise search tools). This is what I call
> "lucky dip" mode of citing as obviously I have no idea what the source
> was for the original contributor. The sources I find from my search
> may not already be known to me (frequently they are not). Or to
> summarise, IMHO, researchers (or Wikipedians in "new content mode")
> cite a source already known to them and whose authors may be known to
> them and could consciously or unconsciously engage in some
> discrimination in citation based on sex/gender or other criteria,
> whereas Wikipedians in "updating mode" are likely to be citing a
> source not previously known to them and may be happy just to have
> found a source and are unlikely to be spending a lot of their time
> researching the authors of that source to be extent they could then
> consciously or unconsciously exercise discrimination on sex/gender. If
> I invest any extra effort in such a situations, it's probably because
> the wording of the source is a close match to the Wikipedia article
> which begs the question of copyright violation (which needs to be
> dealt with by deletion or rewriting) or being a Wikipedia mirror (which is obviously not an acceptable citation).
>
> So I suspect whether a citation was added by the same contributor as
> the content it supports or a subsequent contributor probably makes a
> difference to the likelihood of conscious/unconscious discrimination.
>
> Also, finally, often Wikipedia cites web pages and other sources that
> do not have any individual authorship, e.g. government websites.
> Remember that Wikipedia prefers open citations over paywalled
> citations and a lot of the publications behind paywalls are individually authored.
>
> Your proposed research has a lot of interesting challenges and a
> number of limitations. I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying
> start very small and see if you can find any evidence to support your
> hypothesis before embarking on a larger study. Because contributor
> behaviour is what you are trying to study, you probably need to do
> both quantitative and qualitative experiments. E.g. I have described
> the two modes of citation I do, but I cannot say how typical my behaviour is.
>
> Kerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wiki-research-l
> [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
> On Behalf Of Leila Zia
> Sent: Friday, 23 August 2019 3:44 AM
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
> wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
>
> Hi Greg,
>
> A few comments if you're going to go with "proportion of male vs
> female authors of the source material used as citations in arbitrary
> articles":
>
> * Please differentiate between sex (female, male, ...) and gender
> (woman, man, ...). My understanding from your initial email is that
> you want to stay focused on gender, not sex.
>
> * Unless you have reliable sources about the gender of an author, I
> would not recommend trying to predict what the gender is. (As you may
> know, this is not uncommon in social media studies, for example, to
> predict the gender of the author based on their image or their name.
> These approaches introduce biases and social challenges.)
>
> * Re your question about whether WMF has resources to look into this
> question in-house: I can't speak for the whole of WMF, however, I can
> share more about the Research team's direction. As part of our future
> work, we would like to "help contributors monitor violations of core
> content policies and assess information reliability and bias both
> granularly and at scale". [1] The question you proposed can fall under
> assessing bias in content (considering citations as part of the
> content). I expect us to focus first on the piece about violations of
> core content policies and information reliability and come back to the
> bias question later. As a result, we won't have bandwidth to do your proposal in-house at the moment.
> Sorry about that.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> Best,
> Leila
>
> [1] Section 2 of our Knowledge Integrity whitepaper:
>
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Knowledge_Integrit
> y_-_Wikimedia_Research_2030.pdf
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:57 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Kerry,
> > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking
> > mostly along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be
> > interested in research in any of those areas.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Greg
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM
> > <wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > >
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more
> > > specific than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > >
> > >
> > > Today's Topics:
> > >
> > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > --
> > > --
> > >
> > > Message: 1
> > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <
> > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com
> > > CAOO9DNtY+>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Greetings!
> > >
> > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > this topic. Do
> you?
> > >
> > > I think this is an important question.
> > >
> > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > >
> > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > There is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated
> > > structured repository (wikicite). I do not know the current status
> > > of wikicite or if/when this could be used for this inquiry--either
> > > to examine all, or a sensible subset of the citations.
> > >
> > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > necessary and urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or
> > > worse than the citation balances we already know, and the scale of
> > > the
> effect is quite large.
> > >
> > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > > Does the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this
> > > matter
> inhouse?
> > >
> > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > >
> > > Greg
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 2
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia
> > > citations
> > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender
> > > balance of citations?
> > >
> > > Are you talking about:
> > >
> > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used
> > > as citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men
> > > vs
> women?
> > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered
> > > by some other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs
> > > action
> film)?
> > >
> > > Kerry
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Wiki-research-l
> > > [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > >
> > > Greetings!
> > >
> > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of
> > > Wikipedia citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on
> > > this topic. Do
> you?
> > >
> > > I think this is an important question.
> > >
> > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > >
> > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> > > There is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated
> > > structured repository (wikicite). I do not know the current status
> > > of wikicite or if/when this could be used for this inquiry--either
> > > to examine all, or a sensible subset of the citations.
> > >
> > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > necessary and urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or
> > > worse than the citation balances we already know, and the scale of
> > > the
> effect is quite large.
> > >
> > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > > Does the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this
> > > matter
> inhouse?
> > >
> > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > >
> > > Greg
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
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> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > End of Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 11
> > > ************************************************
> > >
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Hi all-
One more thing: on twitter, I was advised that this list and the wikicite
google group were the best places to discuss research around citations.
Although I would like to post about this line of inquiry to the wikicite
group, it appears to be a private group. As an outsider, I have not been
able to access/view the group content/or even see who owns the group and is
the correct person to contact. I have mentioned that I can not access the
group to the wikicite twitter handle, and received a 'like' (?) but no
response, and nothing has changed.
If you are a member of both lists, would you be willing to point to this
thread from the wikicite group? If the group is not open to the public, at
least the ideas will be there.
Many thanks,
Greg
On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 12:01 AM <
wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
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> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
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> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. sockpuppets and how to find them sooner (Kerry Raymond)
> 2. Re: sockpuppets and how to find them sooner (Kerry Raymond)
> 3. Re: sockpuppets and how to find them sooner (RhinosF1)
> 4. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 15:57:15 +1000
> From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] sockpuppets and how to find them sooner
> Message-ID: <001b01d55977$9f51dbe0$ddf593a0$(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Currently, to open a sockpuppet investigation, you must name the two (or
> more) accounts that you believe to be sockpuppets with "clear, behavioural
> evidence of sock puppetry" which is typically in the form of pairs of edits
> that demonstrate similar edit behaviours that are unlikely to naturally
> occur. Now if you spend enough time on-wiki, you develop an intuition about
> behaviours you see on your watchlist and in article edit histories. Often I
> am highly suspicious that an account is a sockpuppet, but I cannot report
> them because I don't know which other account is involved.
>
>
>
> As a example, I recently encounted User:Shelati an account about 1 day old
> at that time with nearly 100 edits in that day all about 1-2 minutes apart,
> mostly making a similar change to a large number of Australian place
> infoboxes.
>
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati
> <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&of
> fset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&of…>
> >
> &offset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati
>
>
>
> Genuine new users do not edit that quickly, do not use templates and do not
> mess structurally with infoboxes (at most they try to change the values).
> It
> "smelled" like a sockpuppet. However, as I did not recognise that pattern
> of
> edit behaviour as being that of any other user I was familiar with, it
> wasn't something I could report for sockpuppet investigation. Anyhow after
> about 2 weeks, the user was blocked as a sockpuppet. Someone must have
> noticed and figured out the other account:
>
>
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Meganesia/
> Archive
>
>
>
> Two weeks and 1,279 edits later . that's over 1000 possibly problematic
> edits after I first suspected them. But that's nothing compared with
> another
> ongoing situation in which a very large number of different IPs are engaged
> in a pattern of problem edits on mostly Australian articles (a few
> different
> types of edits but an obvious "quack like a duck" situation). The IP number
> changes frequently (and one assumes deliberately). The edits potentially go
> back to 2013 but appear to have intensified in 2018/2019. Here's one user's
> summary of all the IP addresses involved, and the extent to which they have
> been cleaned up, given many thousands of edits are involved, see:
>
>
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup
>
>
>
> As well as the damage done to the content (which harms the readers), these
> IP sockpuppets are consuming enormous amounts of effort to track them down
> and revert them, which could be more productively used to improve the
> content. We need better tools to foil these pests. So I want to put that
> challenge out to this list.
>
>
>
> Kerry
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 16:26:43 +1000
> From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] sockpuppets and how to find them sooner
> Message-ID: <002001d5597b$bd1f6b20$375e4160$(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> To reply to my own question .
>
>
>
> Can we find a way to create a "signature" of an account's pattern of
> editing? Perhaps it might be a set of signatures, maybe one for the
> categories that the account appears to be active in, another for the type
> of
> edit, etc. Then if these signatures were calculated for all banned accounts
> or currently blocked accounts (or at least ones with a long enough
> contribution history to make it worthwhile - we're not interested in
> one-edit vandals), then we could have a tool that could be run to quickly
> compare one account against the signatures of banned/blocked accounts as
> well as the cumulative edits of a set of known sockpuppets (i.e. treat them
> as a single account) to determine if this may be a sockpuppet case meriting
> further investigation. I imagine that it would be too expensive
> computationally to actually run comparisons of the contribution histories
> of
> all "bad guy" accounts against the suspicious account which is why I
> propose
> a "signature" approach (but I'm happy to be told otherwise).
>
>
>
> If we had such a tool and it proves reasonably reliable in identifying
> likely sockpuppets (not asking for guarantees but close enough not to be a
> waste of time to investigate), then we could routinely use it on new
> accounts or reactivating accounts (i.e. possible sleeper accounts) once
> they
> have a long enough editing history to enable the tool to operate
> effectively
> to provide automated early warning of new/reactivating accounts appearing
> suspiciously similar to "bad guy" accounts.
>
>
>
> But this is a hard problem, both technically and socially (Assume Good
> Faith, Privacy, etc), so I welcome the thoughts of others.
>
>
>
> Kerry
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 07:43:29 +0100
> From: RhinosF1 <rhinosf1(a)gmail.com>
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] sockpuppets and how to find them sooner
> Message-ID:
> <CAK3HvEMj8VCPu+uVUmPW+RepJ6E-OULaLPA15ALv9C=
> N9-jCEA(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Just a note that you can still go through warnings for vandalism etc. and
> report to AIV.
>
> Or at that edit speed, you may have a chance at AN at reporting for
> bot-like edits which will draw attention to the account.
>
> If you ever need help, things like #wikipedia-en-help on Freenode IRC exist
> so you can ask other users.
>
> RhinosF1
> Miraheze Volunteer
>
> On Fri, 23 Aug 2019 at 06:57, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Currently, to open a sockpuppet investigation, you must name the two (or
> > more) accounts that you believe to be sockpuppets with "clear,
> behavioural
> > evidence of sock puppetry" which is typically in the form of pairs of
> edits
> > that demonstrate similar edit behaviours that are unlikely to naturally
> > occur. Now if you spend enough time on-wiki, you develop an intuition
> about
> > behaviours you see on your watchlist and in article edit histories.
> Often I
> > am highly suspicious that an account is a sockpuppet, but I cannot report
> > them because I don't know which other account is involved.
> >
> >
> >
> > As a example, I recently encounted User:Shelati an account about 1 day
> old
> > at that time with nearly 100 edits in that day all about 1-2 minutes
> apart,
> > mostly making a similar change to a large number of Australian place
> > infoboxes.
> >
> >
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati
> > <
> >
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&of
> > fset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati
> > <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Shelati&of…
> >
> > >
> > &offset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati
> >
> >
> >
> > Genuine new users do not edit that quickly, do not use templates and do
> not
> > mess structurally with infoboxes (at most they try to change the values).
> > It
> > "smelled" like a sockpuppet. However, as I did not recognise that pattern
> > of
> > edit behaviour as being that of any other user I was familiar with, it
> > wasn't something I could report for sockpuppet investigation. Anyhow
> after
> > about 2 weeks, the user was blocked as a sockpuppet. Someone must have
> > noticed and figured out the other account:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_investigations/Meganesia/
> > Archive
> >
> >
> >
> > Two weeks and 1,279 edits later . that's over 1000 possibly problematic
> > edits after I first suspected them. But that's nothing compared with
> > another
> > ongoing situation in which a very large number of different IPs are
> engaged
> > in a pattern of problem edits on mostly Australian articles (a few
> > different
> > types of edits but an obvious "quack like a duck" situation). The IP
> number
> > changes frequently (and one assumes deliberately). The edits potentially
> go
> > back to 2013 but appear to have intensified in 2018/2019. Here's one
> user's
> > summary of all the IP addresses involved, and the extent to which they
> have
> > been cleaned up, given many thousands of edits are involved, see:
> >
> >
> >
> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:IamNotU/History_cleanup
> >
> >
> >
> > As well as the damage done to the content (which harms the readers),
> these
> > IP sockpuppets are consuming enormous amounts of effort to track them
> down
> > and revert them, which could be more productively used to improve the
> > content. We need better tools to foil these pests. So I want to put that
> > challenge out to this list.
> >
> >
> >
> > Kerry
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >
> --
> RhinosF1
> Miraheze Volunteer
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 00:01:15 -0700
> From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID:
> <
> CAOO9DNsEdTiZQFuv3zKdYEudpW76iCo_qpq1cYFBM8AHO4gArw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Wow, Kerry! Thank you for taking the time to write all these thoughts out.
>
> I'm asking the question because I'm concerned that the gender balance of
> the authors being cited on wikipedia is different from the already quite
> bad patterns in academia. My fear is that the citation gender imbalance on
> Wikipedia is more pronounced. If so, it is not just perpetuating the
> problem, but making it worse by surfacing certain authors and ideas even
> more frequently, or hardly at all. I would like to know if this is the
> case, and if so, how big the effect is.
>
> In my last message, I mention a study about a set of award-winning
> political science books (the researchers study the citation gender
> imbalance for that set). I just saw this study today, but I began to think
> that it/the set of works--or some similar set of titles--could possibly be
> a good place to begin, especially if the original researchers were willing
> to share the list of titles/authors/gender/etc that they put
> together/worked with. Then it seems it would mostly be a matter of figuring
> out how to understand how those titles are cited on Wikipedia--through
> either the citation dataset or wikicite--to see if/how the citation
> patterns differ (i.e., if the works by women/men are cited more
> frequently/at the same rate/less frequently on Wikipedia than what the
> researchers found in the original study).
>
> This seems like it would be easier to do than what you propose, but perhaps
> the idea is not sound. Until very recently, I thought I could find the
> answer in an existing paper! I honestly don't know the best way to get the
> answer, but I would like to know the answer and think it's important to
> look at.
>
> All of the things you bring up--from the gender of the editor, to the type
> of editing being done, to the issues around multiple authors/paywalls/year
> of publication/field--complicate the inquiry, and in particular a larger
> one. I agree with what you say about doing something small first to see
> what's there.
>
> Thanks again for all your thoughts.
> Greg
>
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:41 PM <
> wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> >
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> > 1. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 18:47:48 -0700
> > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > Message-ID:
> > <
> > CAOO9DNvBrw_aLkRUp5kYFLdaLJUEK+ddiz-A09MZwiotAdAmUw(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > Hi Leila,
> >
> > Thanks for your thoughts.
> >
> > Having just read Troy Vettese's very powerful essay, Sexism in the
> Academy
> > (
> > https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/sexism-in-the-academy/), I wish
> > this were a top priority.
> >
> > I stumbled upon a study today--it came up in the Washington Post's
> > excellent series on gender bias in political science. The authors look
> at a
> > set of award winning political science books and the gender imbalance in
> > the citations drawn from google scholar. I'm linking the piece here in
> > case anyone on this list is interested now, or in the future, in how the
> > patterns on Wikipedia compare.
> >
> > Washington Post piece: "There’s a gender gap in who wins political
> science
> > book awards – and in how widely they’re cited"
> >
> >
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/22/theres-gender-gap-who-wi…
> > "Just as significantly, women’s award-winning books receive fewer
> scholarly
> > citations than men’s award-winning volumes — and this disparity has
> grown,
> > rather than shrunk, in recent years. Over the entire period, APSA
> > award-winning volumes by women averaged 43 percent fewer citations per
> year
> > than those by male authors."
> >
> > Paper: "Winning awards and gaining recognition: An impact analysis of
> APSA
> > section book prizes"
> > https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0362331918300867
> >
> >
> > Best,
> > Greg
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 3:44 PM <
> > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > >
> > >
> > > Today's Topics:
> > >
> > > 1. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Leila Zia)
> > > 3. Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup follow-up (Leila Zia)
> > > 4. Upcoming Research Newsletter (special issue on gender gap
> > > research): New papers open for review (Mohammed Sadat Abdulai)
> > >
> > >
> > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 1
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 09:57:15 -0700
> > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAOO9DNuSYzzaVwcdqiWA7pj671z3N43XOSwv6DtW0SxWg=
> > > L8GQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Hi Kerry,
> > > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking
> > mostly
> > > along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested in
> > > research in any of those areas.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Greg
> > >
> > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > > > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Today's Topics:
> > > >
> > > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > Message: 1
> > > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > Message-ID:
> > > > <
> > > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There
> is
> > > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > > repository
> > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when
> > this
> > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible
> > > subset
> > > > of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary
> > and
> > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > citation
> > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > Does
> > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > Message: 2
> > > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender balance
> > of
> > > > citations?
> > > >
> > > > Are you talking about:
> > > >
> > > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used as
> > > > citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men vs
> > > women?
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered by
> > some
> > > > other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action
> film)?
> > > >
> > > > Kerry
> > > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> > > wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There
> is
> > > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > > repository
> > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when
> > this
> > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible
> > > subset
> > > > of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary
> > and
> > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > citation
> > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > Does
> > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > 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 11
> > > > ************************************************
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 2
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:43:51 -0700
> > > From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
> > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAK0Oe2uCo70_=ma2b=2d+fvr4GseEVxOP0sh=
> > > ELNOpKdCuUfqA(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Hi Greg,
> > >
> > > A few comments if you're going to go with "proportion of male vs
> > > female authors of the source material used as citations in arbitrary
> > > articles":
> > >
> > > * Please differentiate between sex (female, male, ...) and gender
> > > (woman, man, ...). My understanding from your initial email is that
> > > you want to stay focused on gender, not sex.
> > >
> > > * Unless you have reliable sources about the gender of an author, I
> > > would not recommend trying to predict what the gender is. (As you may
> > > know, this is not uncommon in social media studies, for example, to
> > > predict the gender of the author based on their image or their name.
> > > These approaches introduce biases and social challenges.)
> > >
> > > * Re your question about whether WMF has resources to look into this
> > > question in-house: I can't speak for the whole of WMF, however, I can
> > > share more about the Research team's direction. As part of our future
> > > work, we would like to "help contributors monitor violations of core
> > > content policies and assess information reliability and bias both
> > > granularly and at scale". [1] The question you proposed can fall under
> > > assessing bias in content (considering citations as part of the
> > > content). I expect us to focus first on the piece about violations of
> > > core content policies and information reliability and come back to the
> > > bias question later. As a result, we won't have bandwidth to do your
> > > proposal in-house at the moment. Sorry about that.
> > >
> > > I hope this helps.
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Leila
> > >
> > > [1] Section 2 of our Knowledge Integrity whitepaper:
> > >
> > >
> >
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Knowledge_Integrity_-_W…
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:57 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Hi Kerry,
> > > > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking
> > > mostly
> > > > along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested in
> > > > research in any of those areas.
> > > >
> > > > Thanks,
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > >
> > > > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > > >
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > >
> > > > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > >
> > > > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > > > > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Today's Topics:
> > > > >
> > > > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > > >
> > > > > Message: 1
> > > > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > > Message-ID:
> > > > > <
> > > > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com
> >
> > > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > > >
> > > > > Greetings!
> > > > >
> > > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > > > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do
> > > you?
> > > > >
> > > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > > >
> > > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > > >
> > > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> There
> > is
> > > > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > > repository
> > > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when
> > > this
> > > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> sensible
> > > subset
> > > > > of the citations.
> > > > >
> > > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> necessary
> > > and
> > > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > > citation
> > > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite
> large.
> > > > >
> > > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > > Does
> > > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > > inhouse?
> > > > >
> > > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > > >
> > > > > Greg
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > ------------------------------
> > > > >
> > > > > Message: 2
> > > > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia
> citations
> > > > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > > >
> > > > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender
> balance
> > > of
> > > > > citations?
> > > > >
> > > > > Are you talking about:
> > > > >
> > > > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used
> as
> > > > > citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men
> vs
> > > women?
> > > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered
> by
> > > some
> > > > > other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action
> > film)?
> > > > >
> > > > > Kerry
> > > > >
> > > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> > > wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > >
> > > > > Greetings!
> > > > >
> > > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > > > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do
> > > you?
> > > > >
> > > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > > >
> > > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > > >
> > > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings.
> There
> > is
> > > > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > > repository
> > > > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when
> > > this
> > > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> sensible
> > > subset
> > > > > of the citations.
> > > > >
> > > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> necessary
> > > and
> > > > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> > > citation
> > > > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite
> large.
> > > > >
> > > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > > Does
> > > > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > > inhouse?
> > > > >
> > > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > > >
> > > > > Greg
> > > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > > 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 11
> > > > > ************************************************
> > > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > > > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 3
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:36:17 -0700
> > > From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
> > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup
> > > follow-up
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAK0Oe2sodYJpkuhSqgo3dtfDr=
> > > NQ5EK1TdH16F6BOkTyFho9Rg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > This message is for those of you who attended the disinformation
> > > meet-up [0] in Wikimania 2019 [1] or others who may be interested.
> > >
> > > * The notes from our meet-up are now posted in the bottom of the page
> > [0].
> > >
> > > * I was tasked to see if space.wmflabs.org is the place for us to
> > > continue conversations about this topic. The answer is yes. Thanks to
> > > the help of Elena Lappen, we now have a dedicated subcategory for
> > > disinformation:
> > > https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/c/research/disinformation . Feel
> > > free to subscribe, watch, and/or post new topics if you're involved in
> > > this space.
> > >
> > > * If you are new to this conversation, please read the purpose of the
> > > subcategory at
> > >
> >
> https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/about-the-disinformation-category/949
> > > and welcome! :)
> > >
> > > Best,
> > > Leila
> > >
> > > [0] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Meetups/Disinformation
> > > [1] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Program
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 4
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 22:43:53 +0000 (UTC)
> > > From: Mohammed Sadat Abdulai <masssly(a)ymail.com>
> > > To: Research Into Wikimedia Content and Communities
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Upcoming Research Newsletter (special issue
> > > on gender gap research): New papers open for review
> > > Message-ID: <1625269943.668598.1566513833343(a)mail.yahoo.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> > >
> > > Hi everyone,
> > > We’re preparing for the August 2019 research newsletter and looking for
> > > contributors. Please take a look at
> > > https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN201908 and add your name next to
> any
> > > paper you are interested in covering. Our target publication date is on
> > 31
> > > August 11:59 UTC. As usual, short notes and one-paragraph reviews are
> > most
> > > welcome.
> > > For the August edition, we are planning a special issue focusing
> mainly
> > > on recent gender gap/gender bias research. (Upcoming special issues
> > topics
> > > may include health and education.) There are about 20 papers from this
> > area
> > > on our todo list which will all be covered in the August issue, either
> > as a
> > > mere list item or - with your help - in form of a more informative
> > writeup
> > > or review. They include:
> > > - Analyzing Gender Stereotyping in Bollywood Movies
> > >
> > > - Breaking the glass ceiling on Wikipedia| journal
> > >
> > > - Breastfeeding, Authority, and Genre: Women's Ethos in Wikipedia
> and
> > > Blogs
> > >
> > > - Cyberfeminism on Wikipedia: Visibility and deliberation in
> feminist
> > > Wikiprojects
> > >
> > > - Gender and deletion on Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Gender imbalance and Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Gender Markers in Wikipedia Usernames
> > >
> > > - How do students trust Wikipedia? An examination across genders
> > >
> > > - Investigating the Gender Pronoun Gap in Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - It’s Not What You Think: Gender Bias in Information about Fortune
> > > 1000 CEOs on Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Mapping and Bridging the Gender Gap: An Ethnographic Study of
> Indian
> > > Wikipedians and Their Motivations to Contribute
> > >
> > > - People Who Can Take It: How Women Wikipedians Negotiate and
> Navigate
> > > Safety
> > >
> > > - Redressing Gender Inequities on Wikipedia Through an Editathon
> > >
> > > - Similar Gaps, Different Origins? Women Readers and Editors at
> Greek
> > > Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Simulation Experiments on (the Absence of) Ratings Bias in
> > Reputation
> > > Systems
> > >
> > > - The Gendered Presentation of Professions on Wikipedia
> > >
> > > - Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race,
> and
> > > the “Professor Test”
> > >
> > > - Who Wants to Read This?: A Method for Measuring Topical
> > > Representativeness in User Generated Content Systems
> > >
> > > - Women and Wikipedia. Diversifying Editors and Enhancing Content
> > > through Library Edit-a-Thons
> > >
> > > Masssly and Tilman Bayer
> > >
> > > [1] Research:Newsletter - Meta[2] WikiResearch (@WikiResearch) on
> Twitter
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > 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 12
> > > ************************************************
> > >
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 14:41:09 +1000
> > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > Message-ID: <001001d5596c$fe22a100$fa67e300$(a)gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> >
> > Yes, that was my thought. It would be difficult to know the sex (or the
> > gender) of an author name on a paper. There would inevitably be a lot
> that
> > you could not determine. And certainly in the sciences multi-author pages
> > are the norm and even where you did know the sex/gender of all, do you
> > assign some part-score? E.g. 0 for all male, 1 for all female, 0.6 for 3
> > women and 2 men.
> >
> > But I am curious why you are asking the question? That the
> > writing/research of women is under-represented in Wikipedia citations? If
> > so, without conducting any research, I'd say "yes it is
> under-represented".
> > But my reason would be because women are under-represented as
> > writers/researchers in the first place. And certainly the older the
> > source, the more likely it is to be written by a man. So to investigate
> > gender bias in citations in Wikipedia, you would have to estimate the
> > proportion of men/women (or at least their outputs) over time in a given
> > discipline and then ask the question, "taking into account of the time of
> > publication of a citation and the proportion of men/women active in this
> > discipline at that time, do Wikipedia citations show a sex/gender
> basis?".
> > Hmm ... very tricky.
> >
> > I'd be inclined to suggest starting with a much simpler task. Pick a
> > discipline (preferably one with a professional society who can tell your
> > their estimate of current male/female ratio over (say) the past 5 years),
> > limit the Wikipedia articles to topics in that discipline, and limit the
> > citations to those published within the last 5 years. Indeed, perhaps
> > limiting it to publications that are principally from the same country(s)
> > as the professional society from which you get the data (as clearly
> > men/women's participation in any discipline can vary with different
> > countries for cultural reasons). Then you have some way to gauge whether
> > Wikipedia is showing more or less gender bias in its citations than the
> > discipline itself exhibits through publication. Quite a challenge!
> >
> > And of course, it is not Wikipedia that adds citations. It is individual
> > contributor who add citations. Does the sex/gender of the contributor
> have
> > any correlation to any observed bias? Again, the task is made more
> > difficult because a lot of Wikipedians don't identify their sex/gender.
> >
> > The other thing to be alert to is the difference in how (I believe)
> > Wikipedians cite compared to researchers. As a researcher, I will of
> course
> > be reading papers in my field all the time and what I read will influence
> > my subsequent work. Therefore when I write about my research, my
> citations
> > are referring to papers that I have already read and whose authors may be
> > familiar to me from their other work, having met them at a conferences,
> > private correspondence, etc. However as a Wikipedian, I am only partially
> > operating that way (mostly when I write new articles or significantly
> > expand them, that is, when I am doing the research). A lot of the time I
> am
> > adding citations relating to content other people (often new users) have
> > added/changed without citation. These come up on my watchlist all the
> time.
> > What do I do? Of course I could revert saying "no citation provided", but
> > that's not the way to encourage new contributors nor to grow the
> > encyclopedia, so if the information seems plausible (not obviously
> > vandalism), I will attempt to find a citation for it (using tools like
> > Google and other topic-specialise search tools). This is what I call
> "lucky
> > dip" mode of citing as obviously I have no idea what the source was for
> the
> > original contributor. The sources I find from my search may not already
> be
> > known to me (frequently they are not). Or to summarise, IMHO, researchers
> > (or Wikipedians in "new content mode") cite a source already known to
> them
> > and whose authors may be known to them and could consciously or
> > unconsciously engage in some discrimination in citation based on
> sex/gender
> > or other criteria, whereas Wikipedians in "updating mode" are likely to
> be
> > citing a source not previously known to them and may be happy just to
> have
> > found a source and are unlikely to be spending a lot of their time
> > researching the authors of that source to be extent they could then
> > consciously or unconsciously exercise discrimination on sex/gender. If I
> > invest any extra effort in such a situations, it's probably because the
> > wording of the source is a close match to the Wikipedia article which
> begs
> > the question of copyright violation (which needs to be dealt with by
> > deletion or rewriting) or being a Wikipedia mirror (which is obviously
> not
> > an acceptable citation).
> >
> > So I suspect whether a citation was added by the same contributor as the
> > content it supports or a subsequent contributor probably makes a
> difference
> > to the likelihood of conscious/unconscious discrimination.
> >
> > Also, finally, often Wikipedia cites web pages and other sources that do
> > not have any individual authorship, e.g. government websites. Remember
> that
> > Wikipedia prefers open citations over paywalled citations and a lot of
> the
> > publications behind paywalls are individually authored.
> >
> > Your proposed research has a lot of interesting challenges and a number
> of
> > limitations. I'm not saying don't do it, but I am saying start very small
> > and see if you can find any evidence to support your hypothesis before
> > embarking on a larger study. Because contributor behaviour is what you
> are
> > trying to study, you probably need to do both quantitative and
> qualitative
> > experiments. E.g. I have described the two modes of citation I do, but I
> > cannot say how typical my behaviour is.
> >
> > Kerry
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > On Behalf Of Leila Zia
> > Sent: Friday, 23 August 2019 3:44 AM
> > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <
> > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> >
> > Hi Greg,
> >
> > A few comments if you're going to go with "proportion of male vs female
> > authors of the source material used as citations in arbitrary
> > articles":
> >
> > * Please differentiate between sex (female, male, ...) and gender (woman,
> > man, ...). My understanding from your initial email is that you want to
> > stay focused on gender, not sex.
> >
> > * Unless you have reliable sources about the gender of an author, I would
> > not recommend trying to predict what the gender is. (As you may know,
> this
> > is not uncommon in social media studies, for example, to predict the
> gender
> > of the author based on their image or their name.
> > These approaches introduce biases and social challenges.)
> >
> > * Re your question about whether WMF has resources to look into this
> > question in-house: I can't speak for the whole of WMF, however, I can
> share
> > more about the Research team's direction. As part of our future work, we
> > would like to "help contributors monitor violations of core content
> > policies and assess information reliability and bias both granularly and
> at
> > scale". [1] The question you proposed can fall under assessing bias in
> > content (considering citations as part of the content). I expect us to
> > focus first on the piece about violations of core content policies and
> > information reliability and come back to the bias question later. As a
> > result, we won't have bandwidth to do your proposal in-house at the
> moment.
> > Sorry about that.
> >
> > I hope this helps.
> >
> > Best,
> > Leila
> >
> > [1] Section 2 of our Knowledge Integrity whitepaper:
> >
> >
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Knowledge_Integrity_-_W…
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:57 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi Kerry,
> > > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking
> > > mostly along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be
> > > interested in research in any of those areas.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Greg
> > >
> > > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM
> > > <wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > wrote:
> > >
> > > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > >
> > > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > > > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Today's Topics:
> > > >
> > > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > > --
> > > >
> > > > Message: 1
> > > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > Message-ID:
> > > > <
> > > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There
> > > > is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > > > repository (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite
> > > > or if/when this could be used for this inquiry--either to examine
> > > > all, or a sensible subset of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > necessary and urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or
> > > > worse than the citation balances we already know, and the scale of
> the
> > effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > > > Does the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > ------------------------------
> > > >
> > > > Message: 2
> > > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > > >
> > > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender
> > > > balance of citations?
> > > >
> > > > Are you talking about:
> > > >
> > > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used
> > > > as citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men vs
> > women?
> > > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered by
> > > > some other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action
> > film)?
> > > >
> > > > Kerry
> > > >
> > > > -----Original Message-----
> > > > From: Wiki-research-l
> > > > [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > >
> > > > Greetings!
> > > >
> > > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do
> > you?
> > > >
> > > > I think this is an important question.
> > > >
> > > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > > >
> > > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There
> > > > is also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> > > > repository (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite
> > > > or if/when this could be used for this inquiry--either to examine
> > > > all, or a sensible subset of the citations.
> > > >
> > > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is
> > > > necessary and urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or
> > > > worse than the citation balances we already know, and the scale of
> the
> > effect is quite large.
> > > >
> > > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> > > > Does the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> > inhouse?
> > > >
> > > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > 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 11
> > > > ************************************************
> > > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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 13
> > ************************************************
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> 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 14
> ************************************************
>
Hi Kerry,
Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking mostly
along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested in
research in any of those areas.
Thanks,
Greg
On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID:
> <
> CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Greetings!
>
> I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do you?
>
> I think this is an important question.
>
> Here's what I've learned so far:
>
> Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There is
> also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured repository
> (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when this
> could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible subset
> of the citations.
>
> My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary and
> urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the citation
> balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
>
> Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started? Does
> the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter inhouse?
>
> Thanks for your thoughts.
>
> Greg
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender balance of
> citations?
>
> Are you talking about:
>
> * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used as
> citations in arbitrary articles>
> * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men vs women?
> * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered by some
> other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action film)?
>
> Kerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org]
> On Behalf Of Greg
> Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
>
> Greetings!
>
> I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do you?
>
> I think this is an important question.
>
> Here's what I've learned so far:
>
> Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There is
> also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured repository
> (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when this
> could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible subset
> of the citations.
>
> My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary and
> urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the citation
> balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
>
> Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started? Does
> the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter inhouse?
>
> Thanks for your thoughts.
>
> Greg
> _______________________________________________
> 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 11
> ************************************************
>
Hi Leila,
Thanks for your thoughts.
Having just read Troy Vettese's very powerful essay, Sexism in the Academy (
https://nplusonemag.com/issue-34/essays/sexism-in-the-academy/), I wish
this were a top priority.
I stumbled upon a study today--it came up in the Washington Post's
excellent series on gender bias in political science. The authors look at a
set of award winning political science books and the gender imbalance in
the citations drawn from google scholar. I'm linking the piece here in
case anyone on this list is interested now, or in the future, in how the
patterns on Wikipedia compare.
Washington Post piece: "There’s a gender gap in who wins political science
book awards – and in how widely they’re cited"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/22/theres-gender-gap-who-wi…
"Just as significantly, women’s award-winning books receive fewer scholarly
citations than men’s award-winning volumes — and this disparity has grown,
rather than shrunk, in recent years. Over the entire period, APSA
award-winning volumes by women averaged 43 percent fewer citations per year
than those by male authors."
Paper: "Winning awards and gaining recognition: An impact analysis of APSA
section book prizes"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0362331918300867
Best,
Greg
On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 3:44 PM <wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
wrote:
> Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> You can reach the person managing the list at
> wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
>
>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Leila Zia)
> 3. Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup follow-up (Leila Zia)
> 4. Upcoming Research Newsletter (special issue on gender gap
> research): New papers open for review (Mohammed Sadat Abdulai)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 09:57:15 -0700
> From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID:
> <CAOO9DNuSYzzaVwcdqiWA7pj671z3N43XOSwv6DtW0SxWg=
> L8GQ(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Hi Kerry,
> Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking mostly
> along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested in
> research in any of those areas.
>
> Thanks,
> Greg
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
> > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> >
> > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> >
> >
> > Today's Topics:
> >
> > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> >
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > Message-ID:
> > <
> > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > Greetings!
> >
> > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do you?
> >
> > I think this is an important question.
> >
> > Here's what I've learned so far:
> >
> > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There is
> > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> repository
> > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when this
> > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible
> subset
> > of the citations.
> >
> > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary and
> > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the citation
> > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> >
> > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started? Does
> > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter inhouse?
> >
> > Thanks for your thoughts.
> >
> > Greg
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------
> >
> > Message: 2
> > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> >
> > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender balance of
> > citations?
> >
> > Are you talking about:
> >
> > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used as
> > citations in arbitrary articles>
> > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men vs
> women?
> > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered by some
> > other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action film)?
> >
> > Kerry
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > On Behalf Of Greg
> > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> >
> > Greetings!
> >
> > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do you?
> >
> > I think this is an important question.
> >
> > Here's what I've learned so far:
> >
> > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There is
> > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> repository
> > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when this
> > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible
> subset
> > of the citations.
> >
> > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary and
> > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the citation
> > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> >
> > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started? Does
> > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter inhouse?
> >
> > Thanks for your thoughts.
> >
> > Greg
> > _______________________________________________
> > 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 11
> > ************************************************
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:43:51 -0700
> From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID:
> <CAK0Oe2uCo70_=ma2b=2d+fvr4GseEVxOP0sh=
> ELNOpKdCuUfqA(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Hi Greg,
>
> A few comments if you're going to go with "proportion of male vs
> female authors of the source material used as citations in arbitrary
> articles":
>
> * Please differentiate between sex (female, male, ...) and gender
> (woman, man, ...). My understanding from your initial email is that
> you want to stay focused on gender, not sex.
>
> * Unless you have reliable sources about the gender of an author, I
> would not recommend trying to predict what the gender is. (As you may
> know, this is not uncommon in social media studies, for example, to
> predict the gender of the author based on their image or their name.
> These approaches introduce biases and social challenges.)
>
> * Re your question about whether WMF has resources to look into this
> question in-house: I can't speak for the whole of WMF, however, I can
> share more about the Research team's direction. As part of our future
> work, we would like to "help contributors monitor violations of core
> content policies and assess information reliability and bias both
> granularly and at scale". [1] The question you proposed can fall under
> assessing bias in content (considering citations as part of the
> content). I expect us to focus first on the piece about violations of
> core content policies and information reliability and come back to the
> bias question later. As a result, we won't have bandwidth to do your
> proposal in-house at the moment. Sorry about that.
>
> I hope this helps.
>
> Best,
> Leila
>
> [1] Section 2 of our Knowledge Integrity whitepaper:
>
> https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Knowledge_Integrity_-_W…
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:57 AM Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Kerry,
> > Those are all very interesting ways to look at this. I was thinking
> mostly
> > along the lines of your first bullet point, but I'd be interested in
> > research in any of those areas.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Greg
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > >
> > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> > > than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > >
> > >
> > > Today's Topics:
> > >
> > > 1. gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > 2. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
> > >
> > >
> > > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 1
> > > Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700
> > > From: Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com>
> > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <
> > > CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q(a)mail.gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Greetings!
> > >
> > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do
> you?
> > >
> > > I think this is an important question.
> > >
> > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > >
> > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There is
> > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> repository
> > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when
> this
> > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible
> subset
> > > of the citations.
> > >
> > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary
> and
> > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> citation
> > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > >
> > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> Does
> > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> inhouse?
> > >
> > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > >
> > > Greg
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 2
> > > Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:53:45 +1000
> > > From: "Kerry Raymond" <kerry.raymond(a)gmail.com>
> > > To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'"
> > > <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID: <00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$(a)gmail.com>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Could you elaborate a bit more on what you mean by the gender balance
> of
> > > citations?
> > >
> > > Are you talking about:
> > >
> > > * proportion of male vs female authors of the source material used as
> > > citations in arbitrary articles>
> > > * the quality/quantity of citations in biography articles of men vs
> women?
> > > * the quality/quantity of citations in articles that are gendered by
> some
> > > other criteria (e.g. reader interest, romantic comedy vs action film)?
> > >
> > > Kerry
> > >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:
> wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org]
> > > On Behalf Of Greg
> > > Sent: Thursday, 22 August 2019 1:19 PM
> > > To: wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > > Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > >
> > > Greetings!
> > >
> > > I was looking for information about the gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > citations and no one I've asked knows of any work on this topic. Do
> you?
> > >
> > > I think this is an important question.
> > >
> > > Here's what I've learned so far:
> > >
> > > Wikipedia citations are currently in the form of text strings. There is
> > > also an initiative to place citations in an annotated structured
> repository
> > > (wikicite). I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when
> this
> > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible
> subset
> > > of the citations.
> > >
> > > My perspective is that understanding the gender balance is necessary
> and
> > > urgent. The balance could be better, the same, or worse than the
> citation
> > > balances we already know, and the scale of the effect is quite large.
> > >
> > > Is this a line of inquiry that the wikimedia/wikicite community is
> > > interested in pursuing? If so, what is the best way to get started?
> Does
> > > the WMF have the resources and interest to look into this matter
> inhouse?
> > >
> > > Thanks for your thoughts.
> > >
> > > Greg
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > 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 11
> > > ************************************************
> > >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:36:17 -0700
> From: Leila Zia <leila(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup
> follow-up
> Message-ID:
> <CAK0Oe2sodYJpkuhSqgo3dtfDr=
> NQ5EK1TdH16F6BOkTyFho9Rg(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Hi,
>
> This message is for those of you who attended the disinformation
> meet-up [0] in Wikimania 2019 [1] or others who may be interested.
>
> * The notes from our meet-up are now posted in the bottom of the page [0].
>
> * I was tasked to see if space.wmflabs.org is the place for us to
> continue conversations about this topic. The answer is yes. Thanks to
> the help of Elena Lappen, we now have a dedicated subcategory for
> disinformation:
> https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/c/research/disinformation . Feel
> free to subscribe, watch, and/or post new topics if you're involved in
> this space.
>
> * If you are new to this conversation, please read the purpose of the
> subcategory at
> https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/about-the-disinformation-category/949
> and welcome! :)
>
> Best,
> Leila
>
> [0] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Meetups/Disinformation
> [1] https://wikimania.wikimedia.org/wiki/2019:Program
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 22:43:53 +0000 (UTC)
> From: Mohammed Sadat Abdulai <masssly(a)ymail.com>
> To: Research Into Wikimedia Content and Communities
> <wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Upcoming Research Newsletter (special issue
> on gender gap research): New papers open for review
> Message-ID: <1625269943.668598.1566513833343(a)mail.yahoo.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Hi everyone,
> We’re preparing for the August 2019 research newsletter and looking for
> contributors. Please take a look at
> https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN201908 and add your name next to any
> paper you are interested in covering. Our target publication date is on 31
> August 11:59 UTC. As usual, short notes and one-paragraph reviews are most
> welcome.
> For the August edition, we are planning a special issue focusing mainly
> on recent gender gap/gender bias research. (Upcoming special issues topics
> may include health and education.) There are about 20 papers from this area
> on our todo list which will all be covered in the August issue, either as a
> mere list item or - with your help - in form of a more informative writeup
> or review. They include:
> - Analyzing Gender Stereotyping in Bollywood Movies
>
> - Breaking the glass ceiling on Wikipedia| journal
>
> - Breastfeeding, Authority, and Genre: Women's Ethos in Wikipedia and
> Blogs
>
> - Cyberfeminism on Wikipedia: Visibility and deliberation in feminist
> Wikiprojects
>
> - Gender and deletion on Wikipedia
>
> - Gender imbalance and Wikipedia
>
> - Gender Markers in Wikipedia Usernames
>
> - How do students trust Wikipedia? An examination across genders
>
> - Investigating the Gender Pronoun Gap in Wikipedia
>
> - It’s Not What You Think: Gender Bias in Information about Fortune
> 1000 CEOs on Wikipedia
>
> - Mapping and Bridging the Gender Gap: An Ethnographic Study of Indian
> Wikipedians and Their Motivations to Contribute
>
> - People Who Can Take It: How Women Wikipedians Negotiate and Navigate
> Safety
>
> - Redressing Gender Inequities on Wikipedia Through an Editathon
>
> - Similar Gaps, Different Origins? Women Readers and Editors at Greek
> Wikipedia
>
> - Simulation Experiments on (the Absence of) Ratings Bias in Reputation
> Systems
>
> - The Gendered Presentation of Professions on Wikipedia
>
> - Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race, and
> the “Professor Test”
>
> - Who Wants to Read This?: A Method for Measuring Topical
> Representativeness in User Generated Content Systems
>
> - Women and Wikipedia. Diversifying Editors and Enhancing Content
> through Library Edit-a-Thons
>
> Masssly and Tilman Bayer
>
> [1] Research:Newsletter - Meta[2] WikiResearch (@WikiResearch) on Twitter
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> 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 12
> ************************************************
>
Hi everyone,
We’re preparing for the August 2019 research newsletter and looking for contributors. Please take a look at https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WRN201908 and add your name next to any paper you are interested in covering. Our target publication date is on 31 August 11:59 UTC. As usual, short notes and one-paragraph reviews are most welcome.
For the August edition, we are planning a special issue focusing mainly on recent gender gap/gender bias research. (Upcoming special issues topics may include health and education.) There are about 20 papers from this area on our todo list which will all be covered in the August issue, either as a mere list item or - with your help - in form of a more informative writeup or review. They include:
- Analyzing Gender Stereotyping in Bollywood Movies
- Breaking the glass ceiling on Wikipedia| journal
- Breastfeeding, Authority, and Genre: Women's Ethos in Wikipedia and Blogs
- Cyberfeminism on Wikipedia: Visibility and deliberation in feminist Wikiprojects
- Gender and deletion on Wikipedia
- Gender imbalance and Wikipedia
- Gender Markers in Wikipedia Usernames
- How do students trust Wikipedia? An examination across genders
- Investigating the Gender Pronoun Gap in Wikipedia
- It’s Not What You Think: Gender Bias in Information about Fortune 1000 CEOs on Wikipedia
- Mapping and Bridging the Gender Gap: An Ethnographic Study of Indian Wikipedians and Their Motivations to Contribute
- People Who Can Take It: How Women Wikipedians Negotiate and Navigate Safety
- Redressing Gender Inequities on Wikipedia Through an Editathon
- Similar Gaps, Different Origins? Women Readers and Editors at Greek Wikipedia
- Simulation Experiments on (the Absence of) Ratings Bias in Reputation Systems
- The Gendered Presentation of Professions on Wikipedia
- Who Counts as a Notable Sociologist on Wikipedia? Gender, Race, and the “Professor Test”
- Who Wants to Read This?: A Method for Measuring Topical Representativeness in User Generated Content Systems
- Women and Wikipedia. Diversifying Editors and Enhancing Content through Library Edit-a-Thons
Masssly and Tilman Bayer
[1] Research:Newsletter - Meta[2] WikiResearch (@WikiResearch) on Twitter