Blogs

Filling the gender gap in Wikipedia on #WikipediaDay

Wikipedia is increasingly becoming one of the primary sources of knowledge for both humans and machines (see for instance, the recent María de Maeztu talk by Rakesh Agrawal on data-driven design of study plans) since its creation on January 15th 2001. Over the years, however, Wikipedia has been showing worrying gender biases, as shown by a number of studies, some of them from our department. For instance, the article "First Women, Second Sex: Gender Bias in Wikipedia", including the participation of our Web Research Group, shows that the gender bias is not only about participation and representation (16% among editors, for instance), the gender bias is also about their characterization.  

In the context of the María de Maeztu program on Gender and ICT, a specific action line is derived from this work. DTIC-UPF started to support the group ViquidonesUPF, a regular space aligned with Wikimujeres Spain, where men and women can learn how to edit Wikipedia (in any language), adding the gender perspective to these contributions. This group meets every Tuesday at the UPF Campus, and follows the activities intially started by the group in Madrid at MediaLab Prado.

On January 17th, we will join the celebration of the #WikipediaDay with a Gender & Wikipedia event, jointly organised in the context of the Gender & Tech series with Civic Lab Barcelona on the one hand, and the ViquidonesUPF group on the other. In this event, participants will get to know recent results in Wikipedia and Gender research and will have the chance to take direct action to contribute to fill this gender gap with a wikimarathon organised by ViquidonesUPF (no previous knowledge is required, but the willingness to contribute!). As part of this event, the finalists of the Wisibilizalas contest will be announced. Wisibilizalas is an action also promoted by the María de Maeztu programs to increase the visibility of female ICT professionals in spanish schools

Do not miss it, free registration here. If you cannot make it that day, join the group any other Tuesday (check dates here).