Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Gender gap task force/research

Below is a list of research studies about the gender gap and Wikimedia projects.

Also see:

Wikimedia Foundation-sponsored studies edit

Foundation editor survey 2009

Foundation editor survey 2010

  • Ruediger Glott, Philipp Schmidt, Rishab Ghosh, Wikipedia survey overview, UNU-MERIT (with Wikimedia Foundation), Maastricht, Netherlands, March 2010. Over 58,000 self-selected Wikipedians from 22 language editions in 231 countries responded; contributors reported as about 87% men and 13% women); (Archived original), accessed August 14, 2014.

Foundation editor survey 2011-#1

Foundation editor survey 2011-#2

Foundation editor survey 2012

Other Wikimedia studies

About Wikimedia Foundation funding of Gender Gap research edit

Outside studies edit

  • Tanja Carstensen, Gender Trouble in Web 2.0: Gender Relations in Social Network Sites, Wikis and Weblogs, International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, 2009, Vol. 1, No.1
  • Laura Hale, Writing styles of women, on Wikimedia, 2011
  • Reagle, Joseph; Rhue, Lauren (2011). "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica". International Journal of Communication. 5. Joseph Reagle & Lauren Rhue: 1138-1158.
  • Judd Antin, Raymond Yee, Coye Cheshire, Oded Nov, "Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing", WikiSym’11, October 3-5, 2011, study funded by Research Fund at UC Berkeley. Perhaps the most significant finding is that male editors tend to make an edit followed by revisions to that edit, whereas women tend to make single, larger edits and less revisions.
  • H. T. Welser, D. Cosley, G. Kossinets, A. Lin, F. Dokshin, G. Gay, and M. Smith, Finding social roles in Wikipedia, Proceedings of the 2011 iConference, page 122-129, 2011. (Provides interesting context.)
  • Lam, S.; Uduwage, A.; Dong, Z.; Sen, S.; Musicant, D.; Terveen, L.; Reidl, J. (October 2011). "WP:Clubhouse? An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance" (PDF). WikiSym '11. ACM. Quote: "culture that may be resistant to female participation." (Notes that contributions of users who identified as women are significantly more likely to be challenged or undone by fellow editors, according to a 2011 report by the University of Minnesota.)
  • Collier, B., & Bear, J. (2012). “Conflict, criticism, or confidence”. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work- CSCW ’12 (p. 383). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. DOI
  • Sook Lim; Nahyun Kwon (2010). "Gender differences in information behavior concerning Wikipedia, an unorthodox information source?". Library and Information Science Research. 32 (3): 212–220.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) DOI
  • "Gender gap coverage in media and blogs" section of a December 5, 2013 Wikimedia blog entry summarizes article. In short: based on a qualitative analysis of 42 articles from US news media and blogs, and 1,336 comments from online readers authors see a “broader backlash against women, and particularly feminism” in the U.S. news media and blogs. They question whether the Wikimedia Foundation is properly addressing the issue.

In progress

  • Julia Adams, Hannah Brueckner, “Wikipedia and the Democratization of Academic Knowledge”, a two-year National Science Foundation grant for exploring gender-specific patterns of representation of scholars and scholarship. One of the project’s goals is to contribute to improving quality and reducing bias on academic – and more general – Wikipedia."