Research
Problem
A fair body of academic
work has been carried out on subjects related to the gender gap and
women editors on Wikipedia, including research on the content and
style differences between female and male editors, but only a handful
of studies have actually attempted to address the causal mechanisms
of the gap. The majority
of the research that has investigated the barriers and challenges
that women face to their participation in Wikipedia
are non-academic,
and these works tend to suffer from the usual sampling complications
of any electronic opt-in survey, namely that the self-selection
aspect is liable to produce unrepresentative and possibly unreliable
results and,
in these cases, predominately represent the majority voice on
Wikipedia: English-speaking, formally educated, from a developed
nation in the North Hemisphere (UNU,
2011).
No
research investigating the barriers that women face to their
participation in Wikipedia has been done on a specific region or
sub-population within the larger Wikipedia
contributor
population, and
therefore there is no research that would allow for a comparison
between those barriers faced by Western women and those faced by
women belonging to different societal contexts. This
is not to say, however, that relevant, useful research has not been
performed on
this topic,
but
simply that much of it may
not be applicable to women who do not belong to the Wikipedian status
quo.
Academic
Research
In
a conference paper for
the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 2012,
Benjamin Collier and Julia Bear performed
a statistical analysis of an international
sample of 176,192 readers, contributors and former contributors to
Wikipedia in
order to investigate the factors that hinder women from transitioning
from readers to contributors. In their sample, they found that the
amount of women who reported conflict or fear of conflict on
Wikipedia, lack of expertise or discomfort with editing other
people's work as being factors that discouraged them from editing
Wikipedia was statistically significant. Their fourth hypothesis,
however, that women have less free time to edit, was not supported by
their findings. This is curious, as it is contrary to both the
findings of similar
research projects as
well as research that examines the amount of free time that men have
in comparison to women1.
While
the authors themselves present various limitations of the study
associated with over-representation of contributors in the responses
and the inability of their empirical methodology to allow for the
inclusion of other potentially significant survey questions, the
study itself was limited by its set hypotheses, which allowed the
researchers to test the significance of those factors that they felt
were most hindering to women's participation within their sample size
without allowing for any exploration of other factors influencing
women's participation in Wikipedia.
Stine
and Steiner argue in their conference paper for the Annual Meeting of
the International Communication Association that women are more
put-off by Wikipedia's editing culture and editor community than men,
discouraged by a lack of positive feedback, intimidated by the
Wikipedia interface, and/or lacked the free time or expertise to
contribute (or both). They base these arguments on their findings of
53 e-mail interviews with Wikipedia editors and contributors, which
is, they admit, a small and unrepresentative sample size. Indeed,
their editor sample size consisted of eight women and twelve men,
which underscores the limited legitimacy of these research findings
as accurate portrayals of the experiences of women editors as a
whole. Furthermore, they approached their potential editor
respondents through three mailing lists for technology-related
researchers, which has lead to a substantial skew towards respondents
employed and/or heavily involved in educational or academic
environments, meaning that the majority of respondents were most
likely highly educated, technologically-literate and had consistent
access to a computer and the Internet—the typical demographic
make-up of the majority of Wikipedia editors (UNU, 2011). It is
therefore difficult to determine whether these research findings
would be consistent with those experiences of women belonging to the
minority sub-populations of Wikipedia.
Using
an empirical study of 113,848 Wikipedia Users, Lam et al. found that
there is a distinct male-skewed gender imbalance on English
Wikipedia. Statistically speaking, women editors edit less, are more
liable to leave Wikipedia, more likely to have their first seven
edits reverted/deleted, more likely to have their edits reversed for
vandalization and are significantly more likely to be blocked
indefinitely. As the authors themselves point out, the study is
limited to those Wikipedians who explicitly identify as either male
or female, which requires the assumption that these Users are honest
in reporting their gender. Further, in order for these findings to be
representative, one must assume that editors who choose to display
their gender behave in similar ways to those that choose not to
display their gender. Again, it is difficult to comment on the
representativeness of these findings, particularly for women in the
Indian context, so it will be interesting to see whether or not these
findings are qualitatively reproduced in my research.
Non-academic
Research
- “9 reasons why women don't edit”
- Women and Wikimedia Survey: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Women_and_Wikimedia_Survey_2011
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias#cite_note-2
The
purpose of this research is to explore
the real and perceived barriers that both female editors and
non-editors face to contributing to Wikipedia in order to determine
whether these obstacles and challenges are contextually
situated in the experiences and lived realities of women in India.
1 For
example, see this study by Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst available
here: http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/122/3/969.short,
as well as this article on The Economist which presents the results
of an OECD study on the topic of leisure time in 18 countries:
http://www.economist.com/node/13717514?story_id=13717514
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