Wikipedia’s goal is to democratize the consumption and creation of knowledge. But dig into just who is creating content on Wikipedia—not to mention what kind of content they’re creating—and you’ll find Wikipedia is far from the egalitarian ideal it set out to be.
About 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are men, an issue so well documented it has its own Wikipedia page. The issue has roiled the Wikimedia Foundation for years. It's studied the problem and set goals for bridging the gap, goals even Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says the Foundation has “completely failed” to meet. The lack of diversity is so deeply rooted that the National Science Foundation commissioned two studies of why this bias exists.
The problem is, because Wikipedia is run—in theory at least—by and for the people, only the people can correct the imbalance. A growing group of socially minded Wikipedia editors are taking up the cause with a slew of "edit-a-thons" that aim to enhance the coverage of women, minorities, the LGBTQ community, and other underrepresented groups on Wikipedia.
Case in point: on Saturday, to coincide with International Women’s Day, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will host the second annual Art+Feminism edit-a-thon promoting the representation of women in the arts on Wikipedia. Last month, to commemorate Black History Month, the White House held an edit-a-thon to crowdsource entries on African Americans in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Last summer, the Wiki Loves Pride edit-a-thon convened editors to cover prominent members of the LGBTQ communities. And those are just a few examples.
“I think it’s been fascinating how many edit-a-thons there have been,” says Katherine Maher, chief communications officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. You might think that the nonprofit behind Wikipedia would try to distance itself from the site's critics and events that call attention to its shortcomings. But the organization appears to be getting behind the edit-a-thon movement."It’s something we definitely support and encourage," Maher says.
Last year’s Art+Feminism event, she says, was one of the most successful, attracting some 600 people in 31 locations around the world. Its founders, including Wikipedia editors Michael Mandiberg and Dorothy Howard, launched the edit-a-thon in part because of the outrage over the categorization of American women novelists on Wikipedia, in which editors gradually removed female novelists from the overall American Novelists category and dumped them in their own subcategory. As Mandiberg remembers it, conversations spiraled out of control on social media, with people furiously wondering why Wikipedia would do such a thing.
“I was like, ‘Wikipedia isn’t just one thing,’” he remembers. So Mandiberg and his co-founders decided to launch an event that would help raise awareness of some of the glaring holes on Wikipedia, and the need for people with diverse backgrounds and knowledge to fill them. “This is a consciousness-raising effort,” he says. “We don’t expect to solve the gender gap in one day of editing.”
Theories abound for why Wikipedia’s diversity problem exists. For starters, Maher says, Wikipedia grew out of the open source technology community, which, has long been predominantly male. She also points out that content on Wikipedia has to be backed up by secondary sources, sources that she says throughout history have contained a bias toward white men.
“Wikipedia reflects society as a whole, and historically, women and people of color have not been represented in mainstream knowledge creation or inclusion in that knowledge,” she says, noting that encyclopedias of old were mostly written by European men. The more that mainstream media content originates from diverse communities, she says, the easier it is to include in Wikipedia.
Art+Feminism’s Howard points to so-called “leisure inequality,” the phenomenon of women tending to have less downtime than men to, say, edit Wikipedia pages. That, coupled with the often abusive relationships between editors, evidenced by the recent controversy over the Gamergate Wikipedia page, can make Wikipedia a less than welcoming place for women and other minority groups looking to get involved.
By launching edit-a-thons, organizers hope to create safe spaces for people to learn how to edit, and to raise awareness that Wikipedia belongs to them, too. Even if these events put only a tiny dent in what has become a pervasive problem, Howard hopes participants will at least “become more conscious consumers” of online information.
Meanwhile, the Wikimedia Foundation is increasingly doling out grants to close the gaps not only between genders, but between races and nationalities as well. Over the last year, 124 of the 236 grants the foundation made went to the so-called “Global South,” which includes areas like Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. This week, the foundation also launched its Women’s Campaign, which will donate $250,000 to projects that seek to address the gender gap. The foundation takes pains to point out it doesn’t directly edit Wikipedia itself. But it’s willing to put up the money to see that Wikipedia more accurately represents the whole world, and everyone in it.
