7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

WikiSym 2011

Mountain View, California
October 3-5, 2011


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Gender Differences in Wikipedia Editing

Authors: Judd Antin, Raymond Yee, Coye Cheshire and Oded Nov.

Abstract: As Wikipedia has become an indispensable source of online information, concerns about who writes, edits, and maintains it have come to the forefront. In particular, the 2010 UNU-MERIT survey found evidence of a signi cant gender skew: fewer than 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women. However, the number of contributors is just one way to examine gender diferences in contribution. In this paper we take a more ne-grained perspective by examining how much and what types of Wiki-work men and women tend to do. First, we nd that the so-called “Gender Gap” in number of editors may not be as wide as prior studies have suggested. Second, although more than 80% of editors in our sample were men, among the bottom 75% of editors by activity- level, we fi nd that men and women made similar numbers of revisions. However, among the most active Wikipedians men tended to make many more revisions than women. Finally, we fi nd that the most active women in our sample tended to make larger revisions than the most active men. We conclude by discussing directions for future research.

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