Heather Ford

‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap

Feminist STS has long established that science’s provenance as a male domain continues to define what counts as knowledge and expertise. Wikipedia, arguably one of the most powerful sources of information today, was initially lauded as providing the opportunity to rebuild knowledge institutions by providing greater representation of multiple groups. However, less than ten percent of Wikipedia editors are women. At one level, this imbalance in contributions and therefore content is yet another case of the masculine culture of technoscience. This is an important argument and, in this article, we examine the empirical research that highlights these issues. Our main objective, however, is to extend current accounts by demonstrating that Wikipedia’s infrastructure introduces new and less visible sources of gender disparity. In sum, our aim here is to present a consolidated analysis of the gendering of Wikipedia.

Provenance, Power and Place: Linked Data and Opaque Digital Geographies

The ability of search engines to shape our understandings of the world by controlling what people discover when looking for information is well known. We argue that the power of search engines has become further entrenched in the wake of the current move to restructure the Web according to the logics of ‘linked data’ and the ‘semantic Web’. With the goal of sharing information according to structured formats that computers (rather than humans) can easily process and analyse, linked data engineers are abstracting information from fact sharing websites like Wikipedia into short, uniform statements that can be more efficiently shared, compared and analysed. In response to this enhanced power by search engines and the corresponding loss of agency by ordinary users, some Wikipedians have challenged the ways in which data from the encyclopedia has been used (often without credit) by search engines like Google. Using the capabilities approach first developed by Amartya Sen, we interrogate exactly what some Wikipedians believe they are losing when they complain about how Google represents facts about the world obtained from Wikipedia and other sites.

Infoboxes and cleanup tags: Artifacts of Wikipedia newsmaking

Wikipedians use a number of editorial elements, including infoboxes and cleanup tags to coordinate work in the first stage of articles related to breaking news topics. When inserted into an article, these objects are intended to simultaneously notify editors about missing or weak elements of the article and to add articles to particular categories of work. This categorization practice enables editors to collaborate iteratively with one another because each object signals work that needs to be done by others in order to fill in the gaps of the current content. In addition to this functional value, however, categorization also has a number of symbolic and political consequences. Editors are engaged in a continual practice of iterative summation that contributes to an active construction of the event as it happens rather than a mere assembling of ‘reliable sources’. The deployment and removal of cleanup tags can be seen as an act of power play between editors that affects readers’ evaluation of the article’s content. Infoboxes are similar sites of struggle whose deployment and development result in an erasure of the contradictions and debates that gave rise to them. These objects illuminate how this novel journalistic practice has important implications for the way that political events are represented.

Ten simple rules for measuring the impact of workshops.

Workshops are used to explore a specific topic, to transfer knowledge, to solve identified problems, or to create something new. In funded research projects and other research endeavours, workshops are the mechanism used to gather the wider project, community, or interested people together around a particular topic. However, natural questions arise: how do we measure the impact of these workshops? Do we know whether they are meeting the goals and objectives we set for them? What indicators should we use? In response to these questions, this paper will outline rules that will improve the measurement of the impact of workshops.

Beyond notification: Filling gaps in peer production projects

In order to counter systemic bias in peer production projects like Wikipedia, a variety of strategies have been used to fill gaps and improve the completeness of the archive. We test a number of these strategies in a project aimed at improving articles relating to South Africa’s primary school curriculum and find that many of the predominant strategies are insufficient for filling Wikipedia’s gaps. Notifications that alert users to the existence of gaps including incomplete or missing articles, in particular, are found to be ineffective at improving articles. Only through the process of trust-building and the development of negotiated boundary objects, potential allies (institutional academics in this case) can be enrolled in the task of editing the encyclopaedia. Rather than a simple process of enrolment via notification, this project demonstrated the principles of negotiation required for engaging with new editor groups in the long-term project of filling Wikipedia’s gaps