Why might it be in the national or global interest to better understand how Wikipedia represents academics and academic knowledge? Since its launch in 2001, Wikipedia has become the world’s single most important reference tool and information clearinghouse. It is one of the most visited websites worldwide, and as of November 2017 includes over 40 million articles in 293 languages. It is widely used in American and other countries’ secondary schools and universities. It is an important go-to site for many students learning about topics new to them. In addition, Wikipedia's crowd-sourcing approach to gathering and publishing encyclopedic knowledge is becoming increasingly important as technology. In contrast to traditional encyclopedias, this technology allows at least in principle for a democratization of knowledge, because everyone can contribute and deliberate.

With respect to how it represents women and their contributions to society, however, the encyclopedia has long been controversial. If Wikipedia reproduces or amplifies gender inequity present in the real world (one of the questions the researchers are examining), it also presents a rich opportunity for improvement. Adams and Brückner’s research focuses on how Wikipedia represents the academic enterprise as a window into the shaping of knowledge more generally. The research is meticulously comparing the structure and demography of scientific, humanities and social scientific disciplines with their Wikipedia entries to better understand the development of the online encyclopedia. 

In this initial stage of the broader study of crowd-sourced digital enterprises representing new forms of knowledge, Adams and Bruckner have systematically gathered data on Wikipedia's representation of women in the academic disciplines of sociology, philosophy and computer science. The data links the information on the on-line encyclopedia itself with external markers of notability, including those that Wikipedia itself putatively recognizes. The main focus is on R1 universities. Patterns for entries about women and men, and by race/ethnicity as well as other key variables, are identified and analyzed. Women scholars are relatively underrepresented across disciplines. As one example, for philosophy, gender diversity is quite low, with women making up only 22% of the R1 faculty; only 10% of the Wikipedia entries for American philosophers belong to women scholars. In sociology, across 106 R1 universities in 2014 and 2016, living women sociologists are less likely than comparable men to have a biographic page. Their pages tend to be shorter than men's and less integrated via linking to other content. In addition, the pages devoted to historically earlier women sociologists, based partially on canonical disciplinary histories, introduce additional gaps and distortions into the digital record (Luo, Adams & Brueckner 2017). 

The project also examined whether pages pertaining to women scholars are more likely to be deleted by using data from Wikipedia's archive of ‘deletion discussions related to academics’. An analysis of 6,114 page deletion discussions showed no gender differences in the length of the discussion or in the outcome (about 56% of these discussions result in page deletions; the remainder are kept). However only 17% of these discussions were related to female scholars. Compared to the demography of US academia, where women hold half of all faculty positions and close to 40% of tenured faculty are female, we would expect this percentage to be much higher. The underrepresentation of women scholars on Wikipedia is likely more related to omission of women in both the canonical scholarly record and the initial Wikipedia entries, rather than to the active deletion of references to their contributions. 

Our data also showed that there are at least some concrete cases in which a notable scholar who has been forgotten or erased from more conventional compendia of academic knowledge has been introduced on Wikipedia. Similarly, the underrepresentation of notable female sociologists on Wikipedia declined between 2014 and 2016. Such tendencies are good for scholarship, the academy, primary and secondary school students and teachers, and indeed citizens and the global public sphere. There is some explicit resistance to these efforts, both externally and within the Wikipedia hierarchy, and Wikipedia’s institutionalized dismissal of “original research” makes it challenging for scholars to weigh in (Adams 2016). Yet it is still possible for informed participants in the digital public sphere to have an impact. Whether their efforts will aggregate in any meaningful way, deepening and democratizing the expert knowledge on Wikipedia and other like sites, remain open questions.

References: 

Julia Adams (2016). “Can Crowdsourcing Capture Academic Knowledge? The Wikipedia Experiment,” Parameters: Knowledge under Digital Conditions, the Social Science Research Council. October 5. http://parameters.ssrc.org/2016/10/can-crowdsourcing-capture-academic-knowledge-the-wikipedia-experiment/

Wei Luo, Julia Adams, Hannah Bruckner (2017). The Ladies Vanish: Academic Sociology and its Missing Women on Wikipedia. Manuscript. 

Julia Adams & Hannah Bruckner (2015). Wikipedia, Sociology, and the Promise and Pitfalls of Big Data.  Big Data and Society. 2 (2)

Last Modified: 11/13/2017
Modified by: Hannah Brueckner