Overlapping with Art+Feminism session presenting research on almost the
same topic :-/

Again - calendar synchronization and wikimedia are not at level needed :-(

Best Z. Blace


On Wednesday, July 21, 2021, Janna Layton <jlayton@wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The Research Showcase will be starting in about 30 minutes.
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 4:59 PM Janna Layton <jlayton@wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>
>> 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/>
>>
>
>
> --
> Janna Layton (she/her)
> Administrative Associate - Product & Technology
> Wikimedia Foundation <https://wikimediafoundation.org/>
>
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