Librarians in action: Detecting and preventing the Wikipedia Gender bias

Abstract

Wikipedia has a well documented gender gap in content and content creation (Collier & Bear, 2012; Hill & Shaw, 2013). One of the policies and guidelines that affect the content creation in Wikipedia is the notability guideline (Schneider et al., 2012). In this presentation, we are going to analyze how the library field can understand the criteria of notability to improve gender diversity on Wikipedia and to create content on Wikidata and Commons Wikimedia. We propose a methodology to study the gender gap in the English Wikipedia, that could be generalized to other languages as well.

We are going to present cases to understand the role of digital preservation, the incorporation of reliable sources on biographies' development, the problem of under-representation of women in the media, and the possibility of using local information services from libraries. To do so, we are going to present cases from a community of practice dedicated to write biographies of female librarians in 4 different languages, in which librarians from 5 different countries and 2 different continents are involved. To test library tools in action for digital preservation and the discourse analysis, we are going to present the use of the Internet Archive, a successful debate to keep an article in the category Articles for Deletion, and a failed debate. We are going to think about our challenges to include biographies from a wide range of genders. This perspective will help us to promote a diverse ecosystem of information, due to the current lack of representation in the media.

We are working on a PhD thesis on Wikipedia and gender, focused on analyzing how the bias is produced. This presentation is going to present preliminary results.