TRACES OF UNEQUAL ENTRY REQUIREMENT FOR ILLUSTRIOUS PEOPLE ON WIKIPEDIA BASED ON THEIR GENDER

Abstract

Wikipedia is a widely used tool people use to gather knowledge about the world, causing it to have a vast impact on the way individuals perceive the reality they live in. It is then of paramount importance that the picture of the world Wikipedia provides is accurate. We cannot afford such an important tool to eschew inclusiveness or a fair representation of reality: an inaccurate picture of the world in such a tool can be used to claim unjust and unfair positions — such as that women are inferior to men — as if they were facts, because they are enshrined on an encyclopedia. In this paper, we study issues of fair gender representations for people in history noted by multiple language editions of Wikipedia: are women underrepresented on Wikipedia? We do so via a combination of natural language processing and network science. Our results indicate that there is indeed a higher bar for women to have their own biographical page on Wikipedia: women are only included when they have more significant connections than men to the rest of the network. There are visible effects of the initiatives Wikipedia is taking to fix this issue, showing that the gap is narrowing, which validates our interpretation of the data.