Abstract
Wikipedia’s significant gender bias is widely acknowledged. In this paper we analyze the Spanish Wikipedia with the aim of estimating the percentage of women editors and measuring their engagement and editing practices with respect to their men counterparts. To identify the gender of Wikipedia registered users, we analyzed both the information contained in their user profile and the information provided by users about themselves on their personal user pages. Using our own coding procedure, it is possible to identify a greater number of women than by relying only on the gender reported in their user profile. Combining both methods, our results show that the percentage of women is small, a meagre 11.6% of all analyzed editors, though there is still a significant percentage of users whose gender cannot be determined by either method. Men outnumber women in all Wikipedia namespaces in a ratio that is always equal to or greater than 3:1. This fact can be partially explained by the lesser persistence of women editors, who tend to leave Wikipedia much more quickly. There is, however, a small group of veteran women editors who, in some cases, surpass men editors in terms of their editing practices and participation in different Wikipedia namespaces.
Highlights
Wikipedia is without a doubt one of the largest human collaborative efforts ever undertaken
Taking into account these corrected weights, and assuming a maximum error of 1.5%, our first estimation of the editors’ gender allows us to conclude that, among the editors of the Spanish Wikipedia, 6.1% are identified as women and 41.1% are identified as men, while the gender of the remaining 52.8% is unknown
Our analysis provides a detailed view of the editing gender gap in the Spanish Wikipedia by focusing on the number of men and women editors, and on the number and type of their editing practices
Summary
Wikipedia is without a doubt one of the largest human collaborative efforts ever undertaken. With the aim of becoming “the sum of all knowledge”, as stated in Wikipedia’s vision [1], it was launched on January 15, 2001, and today contains more than 40 million articles in 301 different languages [2]. It is ranked by Alexa as the fifth most popular website, usually appearing in the first page of results generated by search engines. The Spanish Wikipedia, the focus of this paper, is the ninth largest Wikipedia, with more than 1,580,000 pages, and the fourth according to number of registered editors, about 17,000 [3].
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