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@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: sockpuppets and how to find them sooner (Timothy Wood)
- Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
Message: 1 Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 17:51:41 -0400 From: Timothy Wood timothyjosephwood@gmail.com To: Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com Cc: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] sockpuppets and how to find them sooner Message-ID: <CAMy3BEJ8=E1FgifdqgY+= vygN3ULqOmJghKm_29qWuY3P-Fd+g@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@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@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@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@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&...
fset=20190728053057&limit=100&target=Shelati <
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/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
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Message: 2 Date: Sat, 24 Aug 2019 18:29:36 +1000 From: "Kerry Raymond" kerry.raymond@gmail.com To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations Message-ID: 004801d55a56$11f4a270$35dde750$@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@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@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
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- Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
- Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
Message: 1 Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 18:47:48 -0700 From: Greg thenatureprogram@gmail.com To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: < CAOO9DNvBrw_aLkRUp5kYFLdaLJUEK+ddiz-A09MZwiotAdAmUw@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@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
- Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Leila Zia)
- Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup follow-up (Leila Zia)
- 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@gmail.com To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: <CAOO9DNuSYzzaVwcdqiWA7pj671z3N43XOSwv6DtW0SxWg= L8GQ@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@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
- Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
Message: 1 Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700 From: Greg thenatureprogram@gmail.com To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: < CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q@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@gmail.com To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: 00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$@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@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@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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Message: 2 Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 10:43:51 -0700 From: Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: <CAK0Oe2uCo70_=ma2b=2d+fvr4GseEVxOP0sh= ELNOpKdCuUfqA@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@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@lists.wikimedia.org>
wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
- Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Kerry Raymond)
Message: 1 Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700 From: Greg thenatureprogram@gmail.com To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: < CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q@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@gmail.com To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: 00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$@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@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@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Subject: Digest Footer
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Message: 3 Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2019 13:36:17 -0700 From: Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Wikimania 2019 disinformation meetup follow-up Message-ID: <CAK0Oe2sodYJpkuhSqgo3dtfDr= NQ5EK1TdH16F6BOkTyFho9Rg@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@ymail.com To: Research Into Wikimedia Content and Communities wiki-research-l@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@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
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Message: 2 Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 14:41:09 +1000 From: "Kerry Raymond" kerry.raymond@gmail.com To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: 001001d5596c$fe22a100$fa67e300$@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@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@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@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
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Message: 1 Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2019 20:19:18 -0700 From: Greg thenatureprogram@gmail.com To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: < CAOO9DNtY+oDO5oQrMZeG1NZE-kYNYLWnTD6acHeYTbYeGk8k2Q@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@gmail.com To: "'Research into Wikimedia content and communities'" wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations Message-ID: 00ed01d5589d$33e31ed0$9ba95c70$@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@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@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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Hi Greg,
One of the major step changes in the early growth of the English Wikipedia was when a bot called RamBot created stub articles on US places. I think they were cited to the census. Others have created articles on rivers in countries and various other topics by similar programmatic means. Nowadays such article creation is unlikely to get consensus on the English Wikipedia, but there are some languages which are very open to such creations and have them by the million.
I'm not sure if the fastest updating of existing articles is automated or just semiautomated. But looking at the bot requests page, it certainly looks like some people are running such maintenance bots "updating GDP by country" is a current bot request. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_requests.
I'm not sure how "the ease of a source for purposes of converting into a table and generating a separate article for each row" relates to gender. But i suspect "number of times cited in wikipedia" deserves less kudos than "number of times cited in academia".
WSC
On Sun, 25 Aug 2019 at 05:22, Greg thenatureprogram@gmail.com wrote:
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:
- 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
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