Hello all,
The July Research Showcase will take place on July 21, 16:30 UTC (9:30am
PT/ 12:30pm ET/ 18:30pm CEST). The theme is the effects of campaigns to
close content gaps on Wikipedia, and speakers will be Kai Zhu from McGill
University and Isabelle Langrock from the University of Pennsylvania.
Livestream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otN3H-hIImQ
Talk 1
Speaker: Kai Zhu (McGill University, Canada)
Title: Addressing Information Poverty on Wikipedia
Abstract: Open collaboration platforms have fundamentally changed the way
that knowledge is produced, disseminated, and consumed. In these systems,
contributions arise organically with little to no central governance.
Although such decentralization provides many benefits, a lack of broad
oversight and coordination can leave questions of information poverty and
skewness to the mercy of the system’s natural dynamics. Unfortunately, we
still lack a basic understanding of the dynamics at play in these systems
and specifically, how contribution and attention interact and propagate
through information networks. We leverage a large-scale natural experiment
to study how exogenous content contributions to Wikipedia articles affect
the attention that they attract and how that attention spills over to other
articles in the network. Results reveal that exogenously added content
leads to significant, substantial, and long-term increases in both content
consumption and subsequent contributions. Furthermore, we find significant
attention spillover to downstream hyperlinked articles. Through both
analytical estimation and empirically informed simulation, we evaluate
policies to harness this attention contagion to address the problem of
information poverty and skewness. We find that harnessing attention
contagion can lead to as much as a twofold increase in the total attention
flow to clusters of disadvantaged articles. Our findings have important
policy implications for open collaboration platforms and information
networks.
Talk 2
Speaker: Isabelle Langrock (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
Title: Quantifying and Assessing the Impact of Two Feminist Interventions
Abstract: Wikipedia has a well-known gender divide affecting its
biographical content. This bias not only shapes social perceptions of
knowledge, but it can also propagate beyond the platform as its contents
are leveraged to correct misinformation, train machine-learning tools, and
enhance search engine results. What happens when feminist movements
intervene to try to close existing gaps? In this talk, we present a recent
study of two popular feminist interventions designed to counteract digital
knowledge inequality. Our findings show that the interventions are
successful at adding content about women that would otherwise be missing,
but they are less successful at addressing several structural biases that
limit the visibility of women within Wikipedia. We argue for more granular
and cumulative analysis of gender divides in collaborative environments and
identify key areas of support that can further aid the feminist movements
in closing Wikipedia’s gender gaps.
--
Janna Layton (she/her)
Administrative Associate - Product & Technology
Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>