Gender gap in Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia in the world. Most of our research / investigation starts from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a facinating enviornment because its a knowledge repository manage and constructed by people like you and me. Therefore we should be concern if user demographics has an impact on the content of wikipedia articles. New York Times publish an article claiming that there exist a Gender Gap in wikipedia content providers.

At GroupLens we are bunch of cuirios people. Plus we thought New York times didn’t do the justice and made stereo typical arguments. We decided to carry out a scientific exploration to study if New York times got it right. So with the guidance of Professor John Riedl, Tony Lam and I carried out a research project to answer few research questions and published a paper. The paper was nominated as the best student paper at 2011 ACM WikiSym Conference.

Here are some of our findings:

Wikipedia has relatively few female editors, and they leave Wikipedia sooner than males The gender gap has not been shrinking over time Females and males focus on different broad content areas Coverage of “female” topics is inferior to coverage of “male” topics

To find out more by Read our paper.