New subject: gender balance of Wikipedia citations

27 Aug 2019

      Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts, Jane. I did not know this
was happening--I'm hardly an expert, so that's not surprising, and yet it's
still very troubling to hear. I'm not sure what you mean by setting up a
Wikiproject. Do you mean of ways for how to study this gap--i.e., the ideas
that have been floated in this thread to this point? Or are you thinking of
something else?
Greg
On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 5:00 AM wiki-research-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org
wrote:
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Today's Topics:

Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (WereSpielChequers)
Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Greg)
Re: sockpuppets and how to find them sooner (Federico Leva (Nemo))
Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Jane Darnell)
Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Federico Leva (Nemo))

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 14:28:25 +0100
From: WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@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:
        <CAAanWP3qJnMpLB4tr9Eqt4EJLg2kCihkb50UY-d8=
ShNONhSAA@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
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

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 21:16:25 -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:
        <CAOO9DNvGyfvJkzyRq60cSQi-T80mAkUa=
vCPkzFbEysfGQqnVg@mail.gmail.com>
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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
...

Message: 3
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:59:07 +0300
From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
        wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org, Aaron Halfaker
        ahalfaker@wikimedia.org, Kerry Raymond kerry.raymond@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] sockpuppets and how to find them sooner
Message-ID: cf2734ff-d2cf-3108-691f-8ecf46125ed7@gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Please everyone avoid using jargon specific to the English Wikipedia on
this cross-language and cross-wiki mailing list.
Aaron Halfaker, 23/08/19 17:36:
...
I think embeddings[1] would be a nice way to create a signature.
There is some discussion of acceptable user fingerprinting (presumably
to be available to CheckUsers only), other than the usual over-reliance
on IP addresses, in particular at
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:IP_Editing:_Privacy_Enhancement_and_Abu...
...
.
Federico

Message: 4
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:17:46 +0200
From: Jane Darnell jane023@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
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        <CAFVcA-G87k26nBMr=-e-+C8o6eG0KQvVihH=
f4M40faVNbKkqw@mail.gmail.com>
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Greg,
Thanks for worrying. This is a known problem and yes, Wikipedia contributes
to the Gendergap in citations and no, it's not an easy fix, since it is the
fault of systemic bias in academia. So fewer women are head author on
scientific publications, and it is generally only the head author that gets
cited on Wikipedia. This is not just a problem with written works in the
field of politics.  I spend most of my time working on paintings and their
documented catalogs, so generally I only notice and fix this problem in art
catalogs. Women rarely appear as lead author mentioned. I will always add
them in to descriptions when I add items for their works on Wikidata, but I
can not always find them! Sometimes I can't even create items for them
because all I have is a name and a work and nothing else available online
anywhere. You see this most often with women who spent entire careers
working at a single institution and the institution doesn't bother to
promote their work or even list them in exhibition catalogs. With luck
there might be a local obituary, but not always. If you have suggestions
how to set up a Wikiproject to tackle this it would be a good idea. In my
onwiki experience the Women-in-Red community can be very positive in their
response to gendergap-related issues for women writers.
Jane
On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 6:17 AM Greg thenatureprogram@gmail.com wrote:
...
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
...

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Message: 5
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 11:45:09 +0300
From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
        wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org, Greg
        thenatureprogram@gmail.com
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
Message-ID: 835202af-4653-641e-782e-c619458bdd7f@gmail.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Greg, 22/08/19 06:19:
...
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.
If I see correctly, you still did not receive an answer on the data
available.
It's true that the Figshare item for
<
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Scholarly_article_citations_in_Wiki...
was deleted (I've asked about it on the talk page), but it's trivial to
run https://pypi.org/project/mwcites/ and extract the data yourself, at
least for citations which use an identifier.
Some example datasets produced this way:
https://zenodo.org/record/15871
https://zenodo.org/record/55004
https://zenodo.org/record/54799
Once you extract the list of works, the fun begins. You'll need to
intersect with other data sources (Wikidata, ORCID, other?) and account
for a number of factors until you manage to find a subset of the data
which has a sufficiently high signal:noise ratio. For instance you might
need to filter or normalise by

year of publication (some year recent enough to have good data but old

enough to allow the work to be cited elsewhere, be archived after
embargos);

country or institution (some probably have better ORCID coverage);
field/discipline and language;
open access status (per Unpaywall);
number of expected pageviews and clicks (for instance using

https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Pageviews and
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_clickstream#Releases;
a link from 10k articles on asteroids or proteins is not the same as
being the lone link from a popular article which is not the same as a
link buried among a thousand others on a big article);

time or duration of the addition (with one of the various diff

extraction libraries, content persistence data or possibly historical
eventstream if such a thing is available).
To avoid having to invent everything yourself, maybe you can reuse the
method of some similar study, for instance the one on the open access
citation advantage or one of the many which studied the gender imbalance
of citations and peer review in journals.
However, it's very possible that the noise is just too much for a
general computational method. You might consider a more manual approach
on a sample of relevant events, for instance the *removal* of citations,
which is in my opinion more significant than the addition.* You might
extract all the diffs which removed a citation from an article in the
last N years (probably they'll be in the order of 10^5 rather than
10^6), remove some massive events or outliers, sample 500-1000 of them
randomly and verify the required data manually.
As usual it will be impossible to have an objective assessment of
whether that citation was really (in)appropriate in that context
according to the (English or whatever) Wikipedia guidelines. To test
that too, you should replicate one of the various studies of the gender
imbalance of peer review, perhaps one of those which tried to assess the
impact of a double blind peer review system on the gender imbalance.
However, because the sources are already published, you'd need to
provide the agendered information yourself and make sure the
participants perform their assessment in some controlled environment
where they don't have access to any gendered information (i.e. where you
cut them off the internet).
How many years do you have to work on this project? :-)
Federico
(*) I might add a citation just because it's the first result a popular
search engine gives me, after glancing at the abstract and maybe the
journal home page; but if I remove an existing citation, hopefully I've
at least assessed its content and made a judgement about it, apart from
cases of mass removals for specific problems with certain articles or
publication venues.

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