Wikipedia: Sign(s) Say “Keep Out”

• In Event: 3551 - Section on Sociology of Culture Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 6. Culture Section Network: Feminist Political Culture

Abstract

For the last five decades sociologists have argued that gender is one of the most pervasive and insidious forms of inequality. Nonetheless, a blatant example of gender discrimination is visible on English language Wikipedia - arguably the largest encyclopedic reference in existence. English language Wikipedia contains more than 1.5 million biographies about notable writers, inventors, and academics - but only 17.67 percent of these biographies are about women. As a way to improve these statistics, activists aiming to improve the visibility of notable women have begun hosting daylong “edit-a-thons.” Despite the marginal success of increasing the number of biographies about women on Wikipedia, the strategy of improving and adding new content fails to address a more inconspicuous form of gendered inequality. Drawing on ethnographic, interview, and quantitative analysis of web-scraped metadata I show how gendered interactional mechanisms, even those disentangled from in-person interactions, perpetuate institutional gender biases. As a result, the normative scripts Wikipedia relies on to established legitimacy more frequently classify women who satisfy Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion as “non-notable.”

Author

• Francesca Tripodi, James Madison University