[Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica

[Ryan Kaldari]

Thanks for the article link, Joseph. I haven't yet finished the article, 
but I do have a couple of preliminary questions:

* Do you know what the ratio of male to female contributors is at 
Encyclopedia Britannica?
* Why the emphasis on female biographies? It seems like a weak indicator 
of gender bias (as reflected by the WikiSym study). Do we really know 
that women are significantly more likely to write about women than men 
are? If so, how much more likely?

Ryan Kaldari


On 9/2/11 6:54 AM, Joseph Reagle wrote:
>
> http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/gender-bias-in-wp-eb
>
> Abstract: Is there a bias in the against women's representation in 
> Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six 
> sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the 
> online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender 
> representation, and article length. We conclude that Wikipedia 
> provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically 
> has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but 
> Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than 
> articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, 
> article length did not consistently differ by gender.
>
>
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