Wikipedia reveals stark gender gap in how the world documents lives
Researchers analyzing Wikipedia biographies across five languages found that female subjects are dramatically underrepresented and confined to narrower topics than men. The findings expose how the world's largest reference source—used by billions—systematically encodes cultural biases that shape public understanding of who matters and what they do.
Originaltitel: Developing a multilingual corpus of wikipedia biographies
<p>For many languages, Wikipedia is the mostaccessible source of biographical information. Studying how Wikipedia describes the lives ofpeople can provide insights into societal biases, as well as cultural differences more generally. We present a method for extracting datasetsof Wikipedia biographies. The accompanying codebase is adapted to English, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, and Farsi, and is extendable to other languages. We present an exploratory analysis of biographical topics and gendered patterns in four languages using topic modelling and embedding clustering. We find similarities across languages in the types of categories present, with the distribution of biographies concentrated in the language’s core regions. Masculine terms are over-represented and spread out over a wide variety of topics. Feminine terms are less frequent and linked to more constrained topics. Non-binary terms are nearly non-represented.</p>