Sociology seminar – Thursdays

Time: 11:00 am – 12:00 pm 
Date: 3rd April 2024
Place: room 2007

Isabelle Langrock (Sciences Po) – The Gender Divide In Wikipedia : Evaluating Feminist Interventions on Knowledge Gaps

Abstract:

Of the 1.98 million biographies on the English version of Wikipedia, only 20% are about women. This content gap shapes social perceptions of knowledge around whose work deserves to be recognized and whose life stories are worth telling. Furthermore, as new machine learning tools leverage Wikipedia content to produce generative AI and enhanced search engine results, this bias propagates across the Internet. What happens when feminist movements intervene on the peer production platform to try to close existing gaps? Through a quantitative analysis of over 11,000 Wikipedia articles, we provide an evaluation of two popular feminist interventions designed to counteract gender inequality. We find that the interventions are successful at adding content about women that would otherwise be missing, but they are less successful at addressing structural biases that limit the visibility of that content. This leads us to argue for a more granular and cumulative analysis of gender gaps in collaborative environments. We also discuss the implications for future scholarship on knowledge activism and digital inequalities.

Organizers: Annina Cleasson, Paola Tubaro, Patrick Präg (CREST Sociology unit)

Sponsors: CREST