Gender bias on Wikipedia

[10] The visibility and reachability of women on Wikipedia is limited, with a 2015 report finding that female pages generally "tend to be more linked to men".

Factors the article cited as possibly discouraging women from editing included the "obsessive fact-loving realm", associations with the "hard-driving hacker crowd", and the necessity to be "open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists".

He said, "the ideology and rhetoric of freedom and openness can then be used (a) to suppress concerns about inappropriate or offensive speech as 'censorship' and (b) to rationalize low female participation as simply a matter of their personal preference and choice".

[22] However, an October 2011 paper at the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration found evidence that suggested that Wikipedia may have "a culture that may be resistant to female participation".

[24] During 2010–14, women made up 61% of participants of the college courses arranged by the Wiki Education Foundation program that included editing Wikipedia as part of the curriculum.

[25] In 2015, Katherine Maher, Gardner's successor as the director of the Wikimedia Foundation, argued that Wikipedia's gender bias "reflects society as a whole".

[30] In March 2018, mathematician Marie A. Vitulli wrote in Notices of the American Mathematical Society, "The percentage of women editors on Wikipedia remains dismally low".

The "androcentric and heteronormative discourses" of Wikipedia editing insufficiently allow "marginalized gender and sexual identities to take part in language use and the construction of knowledge".

[33] Some gender research literature suggests that the difference in contribution rates could be due to three factors: (1) the high levels of conflict in discussions, (2) dislike of critical environments, and (3) lack of confidence in editing other contributors' work.

[44] In 2019, Schlomit Aharoni Lir described "the vicious circle" model, displaying how the five layers of negative reputation, anonymity, fear, alienation and rejection – enhance each other, in a manner that deters women from contributing to the website.

In order for more women to join Wikipedia, the researcher offers the implantation of a "Virtuous Circle" that consists of nonymity, connection to social media, inclusionist policy, soft deletion and red-flagging harassments.

[46] In Wikimedia's Gender Equity Report in 2018, 14% of interviewees identified poor community health as a significant challenge in being an editor on Wikipedia.

The authors suggested that "If a community tolerates a culture of conflict that males perceived to be simply 'competitive' or witty and sarcastic they are likely to find themselves losing the many benefits female contributors can bring to the table".

[45] Wikipedia's free to edit policy gives users an open platform, but researchers have suggested that its competitive and critical environment can limit women's incentives to participate.

[50] Further, in examining Wikipedia's detailed policy system, the researchers conclude that its complexity and legal underpinnings grant some users substantial influence in content debates.

[58] The International Journal of Communication published research by Reagle and Lauren Rhue that examined the coverage, gender representation, and article length of thousands of biographical subjects on the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopædia Britannica (as at June 2010).

[63][64] In October 2018, when Donna Strickland won a Nobel Prize in Physics, numerous write-ups mentioned that she did not previously have a Wikipedia page.

[72] While most attention falls on the gap between biographies of men and women on Wikipedia, some research also focuses on linguistics and differences in topics covered.

The study concluded that overall gender bias is decreasing for science and family oriented articles, while increasing for artistic and creative content.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, "We don't fully know why, but it's likely a multitude of factors, including the widespread tendency throughout history to describe the lives of women through their relationships with men".

Writing for Slate in 2011, conservative political commentator Heather Mac Donald called Wikipedia's gender imbalance a "non-problem in search of a misguided solution".

[87] VisualEditor, a project funded by the Wikimedia Foundation that allows for WYSIWYG-style editing on Wikipedia, is said to be aimed in part at closing the gender gap.

[88] Thanks to a Wikimedia Foundation grant, in March 2021 an alpha version of Humaniki was released, providing a wide variety of gender gap statistics based on Wikidata.

[98] Expanding beyond the male/female gender binary, Wikiproject LGBT creates a space for "re/writing the inclusion and representation of LGBTQ culture into Wikipedia mainspace".

[33] In 2018, one edit-a-thon organizer named Sarah Osborne Bender explained to The Guardian how men remove Wikipedia pages about women leaders.

"I wrote a Wikipedia article about a woman gallerist and the next day, I got a message saying it was deleted because she is not a 'noteworthy person', but someone in our community gave me advice on how to edit it to make the page stay".

[110] The op-ed emphasized the power of social media like Twitter and collaborative information repositories like Wikipedia for crediting women's scientific contributions.

As an example of insufficient coverage in the English-language Wikipedia of women in science, the article points to the deletion of the biography of Clarice Phelps.

[114] Katrina Krämer wrote in Chemistry World:[115] In Phelps' case, her name didn’t appear in the articles announcing tennessine's discovery.

[115] In 2013, FemTechNet launched "Wikistorming" as a project that offers feminist scholarship and encourages Wikipedia editing as part of school and college teaching.