Gender differences in Wikipedia editing

Abstract

As Wikipedia has become an indispensable source of online information, concerns about who writes, edits, and maintains it have come to the forefront. In particular, the 2010 UNU-MERIT survey found evidence of a significant gender skew: fewer than 13% of Wikipedia contributors are women. However, the number of contributors is just one way to examine gender differences in contribution. In this paper we take a more fine-grained perspective by examining how much and what types of Wiki-work men and women tend to do. First, we find that the so-called "Gender Gap" in number of editors may not be as wide as prior studies have suggested. Second, although more than 80% of editors in our sample were men, among the bottom 75% of editors by activity-level, we find that men and women made similar numbers of revisions. However, among the most active Wikipedians men tended to make many more revisions than women. Finally, we find that the most active women in our sample tended to make larger revisions than the most active men. We conclude by discussing directions for future research. © 2011 ACM.