Dear Greg,
The Wikimedia foundation and various chapters have microgrant programs and
an online library. In part this is to counter the projects known bias
towards free online sources. If you can come up with software that
identifies sources that we aren't using but should then that would make for
some interesting reports on Wikiprojects, or an interesting opportunity for
the wiki library.
I'd particularly like to see something along the lines of a bot that sends
messages to active Wikipedia editors "As an editor who has been active in
topic zzzzzz we would like to send you a free copy of the new book xxxxxx
by yyyyy. Click here to arrange your free copy"
There might be a little grumbling if there was something in the algorithm
that meant that half of such gifts happened to have female authors, but I
suspect only a little as long as the books were being offered to currently
active editors who actually write content, and there was an option for them
to say "actually that's not relevant to my current interests, can I have a
copy of x instead?" even the more cynical and jaded members of the
community would accept that as the foundation trying to do something useful
for once.
My experience is that Wiikipedians are most likely to grumble about gender
balancing that reduces their personal chances, either through a gender
balanced recruitment of staff from a predominately male pool of
volunteers, or gender balanced trips to Wikimania from that same
predominately male pool of volunteers. But gender balancing by author of
purchase of reference books, that doesn't disadvantage many Wikipedians.
Though a skew towards more academic topics and away from military history
might get a few grumbles.
WSC
On Fri, 23 Aug 2019 at 08:01, Greg <thenatureprogram(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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
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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:
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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 (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
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------------------------------
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
>
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>
>
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
>
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>
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>
>
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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
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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:
> >
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> > > 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
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