Survival of the Notable: Gender Asymmetry in Wikipedia Collective Deliberations

TL;DR

A competing risk survival framework is adopted to fully situate biographical AfD discussions within the full editorial cycle of Wikipedia content, and finds that biographies of women are nominated for deletion faster than those of men, despite editors taking longer to reach a consensus for deletion of women, even after controlling for the size of the discussion.

Abstract

Communities on the web rely on open conversation forums for a number of tasks, including governance, information sharing, and decision making. However these forms of collective deliberation can often result in biased outcomes. A prime example are Articles for Deletion (AfD) discussions on Wikipedia, which allow editors to gauge the notability of existing articles, and that, as prior work has suggested, may play a role in perpetuating the notorious gender gap of Wikipedia. Prior attempts to address this question have been hampered by access to narrow observation windows, reliance on limited subsets of both biographies and editorial outcomes, and by potential confounding factors. To address these limitations, here we adopt a competing risk survival framework to fully situate biographical AfD discussions within the full editorial cycle of Wikipedia content. We find that biographies of women are nominated for deletion faster than those of men, despite editors taking longer to reach a consensus for deletion of women, even after controlling for the size of the discussion. Furthermore, we find that AfDs about historical figures show a strong tendency to result into the redirecting or merging of the biography under discussion into other encyclopedic entries, and that there is a striking gender asymmetry: biographies of women are redirected or merged into biographies of men more often than the other way round. Our study provides a more complete picture of the role of AfD in the gender gap of Wikipedia, with implications for the governance of the open knowledge infrastructure of the web.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Multi-state model depicting competing risks of nomination and each outcome of the deliberation
• Figure 2: Probability of survival from nomination for deletion. The shaded area corresponds to the 95% c.i.
• Figure 3: Cox regression analysis. Left: Baseline model; Right: the model with interaction terms between gender and status. Error bars represent robust standard errors and are all smaller than the data points.
• Figure 4: Marginal effects of gender and status. Left: Baseline model; Right: the model with interaction terms between gender and living status.
• Figure 5: Survival analysis with competing risks. The 'multi-state' models correspond to the full diagram in Fig. \ref{['fig:diagram']}, while the 'single-state' models correspond only to the final transition in the diagram (i.e. without the 'Created' state). The error bars show the 95% confidence intervals.