The missing women of wikpedia
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Presentation for Making an Impact - short talks to celebrate International Women's Day 2017
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The missing women of wikpedia
- 1. The Missing Women of Wikpedia Dr Sharon Flynn Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching @sharonlflynn Wikimedia Community Ireland User:Sharonlflynn By Bmcsharry - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56322627
- 6. By Subhashish Panigrahi - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27451852
- 8. “…women’s lack of skills, confidence, fear of criticism and conflict”
- 9. By User:Xvlun [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons Neutral point of view (NPOV) No original research (NOR) Verifiability
- 14. Melissa Highton is Assistant Principal and Director of Learning, Teaching and Web Services (LTW) at the University of Edinburgh.
- 16. Ford, Heather and Wajcman, Judy (2016) ‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia and the gender gap. Social Studies of Science. ISSN 0306-3127 (In Press)
Editor's Notes
- Cover slide – missing women image Include twitter & wiki username
- Wikipedia image – ask who knows what Wikipedia is? Who uses? Who edits? Who supports students to edit?
- In numbers. Wikipedia is 16 years old, is the 6th most popular website in the world. It is available in 275 languages and has 365 million readers worldwide. In November 2014, just 15% of biographies on Wikipedia were about women. The Women in Red project was founded in July 2015. In February 2017, figure had risen to 16.85% Of the 1,447,214 biographies, just 243,875 were for women. Less than 10% of Wikipedia editors self-identify as women.
- Male v female subjects: topics associated with girls are just a few paragraphs long, while those associated with boys have multi page entries, complete catalogues etc. New Statesman (Kleeman, 2015) compares “List of pornographic actresses” to the “List of Female Poets”. The former is meticulously referenced, clear sections according to decade, the latter is a “Sprawling dumping ground”. List of poets edited 600 times by 300 editors, list of female porn stars (newer) edited 2,500 times by more than 1,000 editors.
- Articles about women frequently use gendered language, articles about men rarely use these words
- Why? Anyone can edit. Encyclopedia Britannica (11th ed) had just 2% women contributors, and no women listed among 49 editorial advisors. Wikipedia does have more biogs of women, but there is still a gender issue. Invisibility of missing women means that women are being written out of history again.
- Is it down to fewer women editors? Focus on missing women has lead to remedial actions – events and movements aimed at improving women’s coverage on Wikipedia.
- Evidence that men are more confident than women about their knowledge and expertise, women put off due to high levels of conflict involved in the editing, debating and defending process. Women prefer to share and collaborate. Frames the issue as a deficiency in women themselves. New research shifts the focus from women to the culture of Wikipedia itself.
- Three core principles. Sum of all human knowledge – whose knowledge? Verifiability draws from citation practices. Wikipedia editors are positioned as merely passive aggregators of information already published by external sources. In situations where knowledge is not verifiable, or not easily verifiable, it remains outside the corpus. When writing about women on Wikipedia, it is often the case that there are fewer published sources in the cannon about women than men. Wikipedia’s infrastructure extends and reinforces the biases of its installed base in its own logic and principles.
- Layer above editing – Wikipedia is governed by lists & lists of policies. Argument is that these are inherently gendered. Navigating the policies requires a level of expertise associated with long standing editors – mostly male. These policies can be used against new editors – who aren’t aware of the norms. This can result in speedy deletions etc. New editors aren’t fluent enough with the policies in order to defend their work. Change is resisted by experienced editors.
- What can we do? Learn to edit.
- A picture of you.
- Get your students editing
- Be bold!