Hi Laura,
I very much like the topic and question of your research. Bravo.
The result that pops out at me I is 23.5% of gendered-content by super-users is Woman-related. The sample size of 0.4% of editors is small, too small to draw conclusions about the super users themselves, but the sample of articles, I think starts to approach being representative. Well at least it is in line with what I found, which was that looking at Biography articles only, 18% of English Wikipedia is about Women [1].
One way to scale up this kind of sentiment analysis would be Mechanical Turk[2] , to "automate" categorizing pages into gender. That would take some money, but maybe there's a research grant for it. With a statiscally significant sample, it seems like a result that would be popular in the media. One could also compare the the likelihood to write gendered articles of the super-users versus others.
The conclusion is quite punchy - finding people to write about women is not as important as convincing people who currently write, to write about women.
I would be very intrigued to collaborate and help on this research. Do you have ideas about what you want "future directions" to look like?
[1] http://hangingtogether.org/?p=2877
[2] https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Maximilian Klein Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC +17074787023 ________________________________ From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org on behalf of Kristin Dagmar Eckert keckert@umd.edu Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2014 7:24 PM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] The role of English Wikipedia's top content creators in perpetuating gender bias
Thank you very much again for this insightful article on Wikipedia, gender and content creation!! We are very happy we could post it on our blog and are looking forward to responses.
Sincerely, Stine Eckert
Stine Eckert Ph.D. Candidate Philip Merrill College of Journalism University of Maryland 2100N Knight Hall www.stineeckert.com @stineeckert
________________________________ From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] on behalf of Laura Hale [laura@fanhistory.com] Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2014 7:59 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: [Wiki-research-l] The role of English Wikipedia's top content creators in perpetuating gender bias
http://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-role-of-english-wikiped... is some research I did recently about the role of English Wikipedia's top content creators in terms of perpetuating gender bias.
Any feedback appreciated.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
-- twitter: purplepopple