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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
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Times may be changing on our project. This recent publication highlights how representation of female tenure-track biologist has surpassed their malecounter parts.[1]
Using a recently generated census of 2104 female and 3721 male tenured and tenure-eligible faculty members affiliated with the biology departments of all United States R1 universities, we examined the extent to which biology faculty are covered on Wikipedia. Women in the census were significantly less likely to be featured on the platform than their male peers until 2018. However, the trend reversed in 2022, and women were 25% more likely than men to have a Wikipedia biography in 2024. In addition, women's biographies tend to be longer than those of men.
As we have noted here at various times before (not just regarding gender biases, but also e.g. regarding political biases), gaps in coverage are not necessarily due to biases on behalf of Wikipedia itself (in the sense of editors "putting the thumb on the scale"). In this case though, while trying to understand "the causes of this reversal", the authors plausibly point to changes on Wikipedia itself, namely the activities of the WikiProject Women in Red, which began counteracting the article gap in 2015, and related efforts:
Among the 163 women’s biographies created since 2015, 78 were created by Wikipedia editors that were affiliated with the Women in Red project (figure 5 [reproduced below]), 16 were created by editors affiliated with the Women Scientists project (however, 14 of these were created by individuals that were also part of the Women in Red project), and 13 were created by users registered as students enrolled in university courses that require/encourage contributing to Wikipedia.
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The researchers also obtained various other variables as part of their census of professors, and analyzed their relation to the likelihood of having a Wikipedia biography:
Among faculty with Wikipedia biographies, women had significantly fewer publications and citations, lower h-indexes and shorter careers (i.e. they started publishing more recently [...]), suggesting that the research output required to be covered on Wikipedia is higher for men than for women. The university ranking was not significantly different between women and men with Wikipedia biographies
A few further statistical analyses controlling for these academic metrics indicated that
[...] gender has no effect on the number of views (p = 0.600), the number of edits (p = 0.488) or the number of edits per year (p = 0.485), indicating that women’s Wikipedia biographies are viewed and edited as often as those of men with the same academic rank and a similar affiliation, seniority and research output. However, gender does have an effect on biographies’ lengths (p = 2.66 × 10−5), and a separate linear regression analysis for women’s and men’s biographies indicates that, given any h-index, women’s biographies tend to be longer than those of men [...].
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Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
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