FWIW, I think there would be pushback against a quality tag that highlighted
little/no citation of women's work (whether we are talking first author or not)
in an article. There's two reasons for this. One is the misogyny that really
does exist within the English Wikipedia "community" (those who do most of the
shouting and hence decision making); they will argue that firstly gender
balance of citations doesn't matter, secondly it is a reflection of the real
world and thirdly that Wikipedia has a policy that it is not there to Right
Great Wrongs.
More practically, we know that whole-of-article quality tagging doesn't tend to
have a lot of impact in terms getting people to fix anything, compared to more
specific tags like "citation needed", "dubious", "says who" and so on placed on
specific pieces of text. People are much more likely to fix a specific problem
and then remove the specific tag. Even when a person does respond to a generic
tag like "more references needed" and add in some more references, they rarely
remove the generic tag thinking "well, there's still plenty of scope here to
add more references". Who among us is willing to declare "that article is 100%
fully referenced by reliable sources"? Nobody it seems, it's a tag that lingers
forever ...
So I think a specific tag to encourage the expansion of "Bloggs et al"
citations to full author listings might work. It's a somewhat boring and
mechanical task to expand "et al" but we do have people who are happy to
contribute in that way. It might even be possible to build a tool to assist
them which looks up the paper in WikiCite or Google Scholar etc to extract the
full author list as published (just as we have tools to make it easier to typo
and spelling fixes, disambiguate links and so forth). That would address the
problem of women authors not being first cited and lost in the mists of "et
al". However, as it is unlikely to be obvious to the average contributor that
the paper with the full author list of A.B. Brown, C.D. Jones, E.F. Smith and
G.H. Walker does or doesn't have any female authors, so I can't see that it's
going to be easy to motivate people to try to find additional citations which
do have more female authors.
And, as much as gender equity is a wrong I'd like to see rightened, I don't
want to see campaigns just to "add in more female authored citations" (I call
this "citation sprinkling") on Wikipedia. A citation has to be there because it
verifies the information in the article and not to meet a gender quota.
Remember that for a lot of Wikipedia contributors, academic literature is
mostly behind a paywall so they can't actually read more than the title and
abstract at best. A "sprinkling" campaign is likely to see citations based only
on title and abstract ("well, it sounds like this paper which includes a woman
author is talking about this topic") but the paper may not support the specific
claim made in the text (indeed, it might say the exact opposite). A sprinkling
campaign should only target the Further Reading section whose role is:
"The Further reading section of an article contains a bulleted list of a
reasonable number of works which a reader may consult for additional and more
detailed coverage of the subject of the article. In articles with numerous
footnotes, it probably is not obvious which ones are suitable for further
reading. The "Further reading" section can help the readers by listing selected
titles without worrying about duplications."
which would avoid the risk of adding a citation that doesn't support the
specific claims being made in the article. So maybe it would be possible to add
a "skewed gender balance" tag onto the Further reading section and/or External
links section whose role is
"Some acceptable links include those that contain further research that is
accurate and on-topic, information that could not be added to the article for
reasons such as copyright or amount of detail, or other meaningful, relevant
content that is not suitable for inclusion in an article for reasons unrelated
to its accuracy."
The downside is this idea for adding female authors to the Further Reading and
External Links sections is whether anyone ever looks at them. Currently over
50% of Wikipedia hits are now via mobile device. The mobile render of a
Wikipedia article is not the whole article as you see on desktop and laptop but
rather you select the sections you want to read, so for mobile readers we do
know precisely what sections they are opening from which we have learned that
people in developed countries are not generally reading whole articles but
specific sections (suggesting seeking answers to a specific need rather than a
desire to fully appreciate the topic), and they don't tend to open anything
after the References as a rule, so they aren't looking at Further Reading and
External links anyway. Are desktop/laptop readers looking at them either? We
don't really know as they get the whole article rendered as a single result and
it would really only be eye-tracking studies (an expensive type of experiment)
that would give us this insight with the same accuracy as our mobile data.
Aside, in less developed countries, readers are more likely to read whole
articles on a mobile device. While the reasons for this different are not
proven, I'd be prepared to guess at two interlinked hypotheses. Firstly, such
countries have poorer standards of education so people may be using Wikipedia
to supplement their limited formal education. Also such countries are more
likely to be using rote learning in their education system (valuing the ability
to memorise and reproduce) rather than the more problem-solving learning
approaches increasingly in use in the education systems of more developed
countries. That would also explain whole-of-article viewing rather than
selecting specific sub-sections.
In some ways, I think a better solution might be to try to get Google scholar
interested in the issue of gender. What if articles listed on Google scholar
came with a little gender balance score (a bit like hotel ratings). One blue
star (or some other symbol) for one male author, two blue stars (two male
authors), one pink and one blue star (first author female, second author male),
etc. Why I like the idea is that it is a simple-to-understand visual aid to
draw attention to gender imbalance more widely but without a specific call to
action (which as I outline above may backfire if citations get added for gender
balance rather than content). It potentially helps address the real world
problem which would hopefully flow through to Wikipedia. Also Google Scholar is
probably a lot better resourced to build the tools to do the legwork of
determining gender (I guess a white star is used when it can't). The risks
though that Leia has previously mentioned is that automated tools don't do a
great job of getting gender correct particularly as the tools are often trained
on limited data sets such as mostly white people making the automated gender
guessing of non-white people more likely to be incorrect. However, as authors
can establish their own Google Scholar profile (if the author's name is
underlined, it's a link to their profile, that's a place where they could
disclose their gender if they desired or correct Google Scholar's mistaken
guess or demand that Google Scholar not show their gender (whatever should be
their choice). Hmm, might it lead to catfishing? Authors passing themselves off
as a different gender? Hmm ...
Another place we might explore is marking gender in some easily visible way is
in WikiCite but frankly I know little about that project so cannot comment on
it nor the merits of doing it there rather than on Google scholar. I don't
think traditional journal publishers are likely to be keen to show gender
balance on their own websites as I think they would realise it would enable
webscraping to reveal their overall gender balance profile, leading to some
adverse headlines about "Brandname journals worst for gender equity". But
Google Scholar has less to fear unless it was demonstrated that they exhibited
stronger gender bias than the journals themselves but I would think that Google
Scholar aggregates papers without any regard to the gender of the authors, but
I guess it might not aggregate all topic areas equally. For example, if they
didn't make much effort to include (say) nursing publications (a more female
academic discipline) but went hard on engineering publications (a more male
academic discipline), I guess it would skew their author gender balance towards
men.
Kerry
-----Original Message-----
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Greg
Sent: Thursday, 29 August 2019 4:06 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
<[email protected]>; [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations
Hi Jane,
Thanks for the link. It's clear that there is a lot of work being done, and
even more left to do.
I've been thinking about what you said about second authors and was wondering
if instead of fixing it (or in addition to fixing it), it would make sense to
put some sort of tag on the page itself (like the ones I see questioning
notability or requests for additional citations). Something along the lines of
authors missing from a particular citation and how to fix that, or no work by
women cited in this article (if this is the case).
It strikes me that by fixing it yourself, you are doing great work, but that
maybe it also makes sense to spread awareness about these issues to the broader
editing community so more people are thinking about it/doing it. At any rate, I
thought I'd float the idea. Such a tag/the response (if any), could also be
interesting to study, though perhaps something like this already exists and I'm
just not aware of it, or perhaps there is good reason not to do it.
All best,
Greg
On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 5:00 AM <[email protected]>
wrote:
> Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
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>
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>
> Today's Topics:
>
> 1. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Greg)
> 2. Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Jane Darnell)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 18:56:12 -0700
> From: Greg <[email protected]>
> To: Isaac Johnson <[email protected]>
> Cc: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> Message-ID:
> <
> caoo9dnv92bvr2cot2xmphdu5kjovd0yd3bahg+6fkuma+hy...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Thanks, Isaac and Federico. These notes and links are very
> helpful--and will require some time to process. As for how many years
> I have to work on this, I'm retired! In truth, I keep hoping that
> someone on this list will express interest in working on these
> matters. The questions are all very interesting and quite relevant.
> The idea of studying removed citations is both complex and compelling.
>
> Greg
>
> On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 6:49 AM Isaac Johnson <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Regarding data, I have not been a part of these projects but I think
> > that I can help a bit with working links:
> > * The (I believe) original dataset can also be found here:
> >
> https://analytics.wikimedia.org/datasets/archive/public-datasets/all/m
> wrefs/
> > * A newer version of this dataset was produced that also included
> > information about whether the source was openly available and its topic:
> > ** Meta page:
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Towards_Modeling_Citation_Qua
> lity
> > ** Figshare:
> >
> https://figshare.com/articles/Accessibility_and_topics_of_citations_wi
> th_identifiers_in_Wikipedia/6819710
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 3:53 AM Federico Leva (Nemo)
> > <[email protected]
> >
> > wrote:
> >
> >> Greg, 22/08/19 06:19:
> >> > I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when this
> >> > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a
> >> > sensible
> >> subset
> >> > of the citations.
> >>
> >> If I see correctly, you still did not receive an answer on the data
> >> available.
> >>
> >> It's true that the Figshare item for <
> >>
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Scholarly_article_citations_i
> n_Wikipedia
> >
> >>
> >> was deleted (I've asked about it on the talk page), but it's
> >> trivial to run https://pypi.org/project/mwcites/ and extract the
> >> data yourself, at least for citations which use an identifier.
> >>
> >> Some example datasets produced this way:
> >> https://zenodo.org/record/15871
> >> https://zenodo.org/record/55004
> >> https://zenodo.org/record/54799
> >>
> >> Once you extract the list of works, the fun begins. You'll need to
> >> intersect with other data sources (Wikidata, ORCID, other?) and
> >> account for a number of factors until you manage to find a subset
> >> of the data which has a sufficiently high signal:noise ratio. For
> >> instance you might need to filter or normalise by
> >> * year of publication (some year recent enough to have good data
> >> but old enough to allow the work to be cited elsewhere, be archived
> >> after embargos);
> >> * country or institution (some probably have better ORCID
> >> coverage);
> >> * field/discipline and language;
> >> * open access status (per Unpaywall);
> >> * number of expected pageviews and clicks (for instance using
> >> <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Pageviews> and <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_clickstream#Release
> s>;
> >>
> >> a link from 10k articles on asteroids or proteins is not the same
> >> as being the lone link from a popular article which is not the same
> >> as a link buried among a thousand others on a big article);
> >> * time or duration of the addition (with one of the various diff
> >> extraction libraries, content persistence data or possibly
> >> historical eventstream if such a thing is available).
> >>
> >> To avoid having to invent everything yourself, maybe you can reuse
> >> the method of some similar study, for instance the one on the open
> >> access citation advantage or one of the many which studied the
> >> gender imbalance of citations and peer review in journals.
> >>
> >> However, it's very possible that the noise is just too much for a
> >> general computational method. You might consider a more manual
> >> approach on a sample of relevant events, for instance the *removal*
> >> of citations, which is in my opinion more significant than the
> >> addition.* You might extract all the diffs which removed a citation
> >> from an article in the last N years (probably they'll be in the
> >> order of 10^5 rather than 10^6), remove some massive events or
> >> outliers, sample 500-1000 of them randomly and verify the required data
> >> manually.
> >>
> >> As usual it will be impossible to have an objective assessment of
> >> whether that citation was really (in)appropriate in that context
> >> according to the (English or whatever) Wikipedia guidelines. To
> >> test that too, you should replicate one of the various studies of
> >> the gender imbalance of peer review, perhaps one of those which
> >> tried to assess the impact of a double blind peer review system on the
> >> gender imbalance.
> >> However, because the sources are already published, you'd need to
> >> provide the agendered information yourself and make sure the
> >> participants perform their assessment in some controlled
> >> environment where they don't have access to any gendered
> >> information (i.e. where you cut them off the internet).
> >>
> >> How many years do you have to work on this project? :-)
> >>
> >> Federico
> >>
> >> (*) I might add a citation just because it's the first result a
> >> popular search engine gives me, after glancing at the abstract and
> >> maybe the journal home page; but if I remove an existing citation,
> >> hopefully I've at least assessed its content and made a judgement
> >> about it, apart from cases of mass removals for specific problems
> >> with certain articles or publication venues.
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Wiki-research-l mailing list
> >> [email protected]
> >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> >>
> >
> >
> > --
> > Isaac Johnson -- Research Scientist -- Wikimedia Foundation
> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Tue, 27 Aug 2019 08:00:45 +0200
> From: Jane Darnell <[email protected]>
> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations
> Message-ID:
> <CAFVcA-HqVicR0k65J4iox0PD=
> [email protected]>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
>
> Greg,
> Yes that's what I meant. On Wikipedia you get what you measure, so
> many Wikipedians are page-creators and page-hit junkies because we can
> measure that. The trick to motivating editors is giving them other
> measurements for progress. Here is the link to the Women writers
> Wikiproject and as you scroll down you can see what is measured.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_writers
> Jane
>
> On Tue, Aug 27, 2019 at 3:39 AM Greg <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > Thanks for sharing your experience and thoughts, Jane. I did not
> > know
> this
> > was happening--I'm hardly an expert, so that's not surprising, and
> > yet
> it's
> > still very troubling to hear. I'm not sure what you mean by setting
> > up a Wikiproject. Do you mean of ways for how to study this
> > gap--i.e., the
> ideas
> > that have been floated in this thread to this point? Or are you
> > thinking
> of
> > something else?
> >
> > Greg
> >
> > On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 5:00 AM <
> > [email protected]>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to
> > > [email protected]
> > >
> > > To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
> > >
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
> > > [email protected]
> > >
> > > You can reach the person managing the list at
> > > [email protected]
> > >
> > > When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more
> > > specific than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..."
> > >
> > >
> > > Today's Topics:
> > >
> > > 1. Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (WereSpielChequers)
> > > 2. Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Greg)
> > > 3. Re: sockpuppets and how to find them sooner (Federico Leva
> (Nemo))
> > > 4. Re: gender balance of Wikipedia citations (Jane Darnell)
> > > 5. Re: gender balance of wikipedia citations (Federico Leva
> > > (Nemo))
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------------
> > > ----
> > >
> > > Message: 1
> > > Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 14:28:25 +0100
> > > From: WereSpielChequers <[email protected]>
> > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > > <[email protected]>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAAanWP3qJnMpLB4tr9Eqt4EJLg2kCihkb50UY-d8=
> > > [email protected]>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Hi Greg,
> > >
> > > One of the major step changes in the early growth of the English
> > Wikipedia
> > > was when a bot called RamBot created stub articles on US places. I
> think
> > > they were cited to the census. Others have created articles on
> > > rivers
> in
> > > countries and various other topics by similar programmatic means.
> > Nowadays
> > > such article creation is unlikely to get consensus on the English
> > > Wikipedia, but there are some languages which are very open to
> > > such creations and have them by the million.
> > >
> > > I'm not sure if the fastest updating of existing articles is
> > > automated
> or
> > > just semiautomated. But looking at the bot requests page, it
> > > certainly looks like some people are running such maintenance bots
> > > "updating GDP
> by
> > > country" is a current bot request.
> > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Bot_requests.
> > >
> > > I'm not sure how "the ease of a source for purposes of converting
> > > into
> a
> > > table and generating a separate article for each row" relates to
> gender.
> > > But i suspect "number of times cited in wikipedia" deserves less
> > > kudos
> > than
> > > "number of times cited in academia".
> > >
> > > WSC
> > >
> > > On Sun, 25 Aug 2019 at 05:22, Greg <[email protected]> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Thanks again, Kerry. I am hoping that someone with access to
> > > > more
> > > resources
> > > > (knowledge, support, etc) than I have will look into this.
> > > >
> > > > A few more thoughts/questions:
> > > >
> > > > 1. The link to the citation dataset from the Medium article
> > > > ("What
> are
> > > the
> > > > ten most cited sources on Wikipedia? Let’s ask the data.") is broken.
> > > > 2. As far as I can tell, every named author in the top ten most
> > > > cited sources on Wikipedia is male. One piece is by a working
> > > > group 3. This line from the Medium piece struck me: "Many of
> > > > these
> > publications
> > > > have been cited by Wikipedians across large series of articles
> > > > using powerful bots and automated tools."
> > > >
> > > > Are citations being added by bots? I'm not sure that I
> > > > understand
> that
> > > line
> > > > correctly.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 2
> > > Date: Sun, 25 Aug 2019 21:16:25 -0700
> > > From: Greg <[email protected]>
> > > To: [email protected]
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia
> > > citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAOO9DNvGyfvJkzyRq60cSQi-T80mAkUa=
> > > [email protected]>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Thanks, WSC. All very interesting.
> > >
> > > I've been thinking about Wiklpedia citations less in terms of
> > > kudos and more in terms of a feedback loop. The cited sources get
> > > a significant amount of attention (1 click per 200 pageviews is
> > > the number I saw recently). When I imagine total Wikipedia
> > > traffic, that's huge. How
> many
> > > students are finding sources this way? How many academics? And how
> > > many
> > of
> > > these citations are finding their way back into academic
> > > publications
> via
> > > this mechanism?
> > >
> > > Assuming this is happening to some degree, the gender imbalance of
> > > the citations is also reflected. If the Wikipedia imbalance is the
> > > same as
> > the
> > > one in academia, that's one thing; if it is better on Wikipedia
> > > than it
> > is
> > > in academia, that's reason to celebrate; if the balance is worse,
> that's
> > > concerning. In fact, if the gender imbalance conforms to my fears
> instead
> > > of my hopes, and is magnified by the massive website traffic, I
> > > imagine
> > it
> > > could even explain the growth in the citation disparity
> > > researchers
> note
> > in
> > > their study of political science texts. (I link to that study in a
> > previous
> > > post; it was mentioned in the Washington Post recently)
> > >
> > > There is a very real possibility that Wikipedia is making the
> > > citation gender gap worse. I think we need to understand what is
> > > happening and
> > take
> > > immediate action if the news is not good.
> > >
> > > Greg
> > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 3
> > > Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:59:07 +0300
> > > From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <[email protected]>
> > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > > <[email protected]>, Aaron Halfaker
> > > <[email protected]>, Kerry Raymond <
> > [email protected]>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] sockpuppets and how to find them
> > > sooner
> > > Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> > >
> > > Please everyone avoid using jargon specific to the English
> > > Wikipedia on this cross-language and cross-wiki mailing list.
> > >
> > > Aaron Halfaker, 23/08/19 17:36:
> > > > I think embeddings[1] would be a nice way to create a signature.
> > >
> > > There is some discussion of acceptable user fingerprinting
> > > (presumably to be available to CheckUsers only), other than the
> > > usual over-reliance on IP addresses, in particular at <
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:IP_Editing:_Privacy_Enhancement_and_Abuse_Mitigation
> > > >.
> > >
> > > Federico
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 4
> > > Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 10:17:46 +0200
> > > From: Jane Darnell <[email protected]>
> > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > > <[email protected]>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of Wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID:
> > > <CAFVcA-G87k26nBMr=-e-+C8o6eG0KQvVihH=
> > > [email protected]>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"
> > >
> > > Greg,
> > > Thanks for worrying. This is a known problem and yes, Wikipedia
> > contributes
> > > to the Gendergap in citations and no, it's not an easy fix, since it is
> > the
> > > fault of systemic bias in academia. So fewer women are head author on
> > > scientific publications, and it is generally only the head author that
> > gets
> > > cited on Wikipedia. This is not just a problem with written works in
> the
> > > field of politics. I spend most of my time working on paintings and
> > their
> > > documented catalogs, so generally I only notice and fix this problem in
> > art
> > > catalogs. Women rarely appear as lead author mentioned. I will always
> add
> > > them in to descriptions when I add items for their works on Wikidata,
> > but I
> > > can not always find them! Sometimes I can't even create items for them
> > > because all I have is a name and a work and nothing else available
> online
> > > anywhere. You see this most often with women who spent entire careers
> > > working at a single institution and the institution doesn't bother to
> > > promote their work or even list them in exhibition catalogs. With luck
> > > there might be a local obituary, but not always. If you have
> suggestions
> > > how to set up a Wikiproject to tackle this it would be a good idea. In
> my
> > > onwiki experience the Women-in-Red community can be very positive in
> > their
> > > response to gendergap-related issues for women writers.
> > > Jane
> > >
> > > On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 6:17 AM Greg <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Thanks, WSC. All very interesting.
> > > >
> > > > I've been thinking about Wiklpedia citations less in terms of kudos
> and
> > > > more in terms of a feedback loop. The cited sources get a significant
> > > > amount of attention (1 click per 200 pageviews is the number I saw
> > > > recently). When I imagine total Wikipedia traffic, that's huge. How
> > many
> > > > students are finding sources this way? How many academics? And how
> many
> > > of
> > > > these citations are finding their way back into academic publications
> > via
> > > > this mechanism?
> > > >
> > > > Assuming this is happening to some degree, the gender imbalance of
> the
> > > > citations is also reflected. If the Wikipedia imbalance is the same
> as
> > > the
> > > > one in academia, that's one thing; if it is better on Wikipedia than
> it
> > > is
> > > > in academia, that's reason to celebrate; if the balance is worse,
> > that's
> > > > concerning. In fact, if the gender imbalance conforms to my fears
> > instead
> > > > of my hopes, and is magnified by the massive website traffic, I
> imagine
> > > it
> > > > could even explain the growth in the citation disparity researchers
> > note
> > > in
> > > > their study of political science texts. (I link to that study in a
> > > previous
> > > > post; it was mentioned in the Washington Post recently)
> > > >
> > > > There is a very real possibility that Wikipedia is making the
> citation
> > > > gender gap worse. I think we need to understand what is happening and
> > > take
> > > > immediate action if the news is not good.
> > > >
> > > > Greg
> > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > Wiki-research-l mailing list
> > > > [email protected]
> > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Message: 5
> > > Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2019 11:45:09 +0300
> > > From: "Federico Leva (Nemo)" <[email protected]>
> > > To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
> > > <[email protected]>, Greg
> > > <[email protected]>
> > > Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] gender balance of wikipedia citations
> > > Message-ID: <[email protected]>
> > > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
> > >
> > > Greg, 22/08/19 06:19:
> > > > I do not know the current status of wikicite or if/when this
> > > > could be used for this inquiry--either to examine all, or a sensible
> > > subset
> > > > of the citations.
> > >
> > > If I see correctly, you still did not receive an answer on the data
> > > available.
> > >
> > > It's true that the Figshare item for
> > > <
> > >
> >
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Scholarly_article_citations_in_Wikipedia
> > >
> > >
> > > was deleted (I've asked about it on the talk page), but it's trivial to
> > > run https://pypi.org/project/mwcites/ and extract the data yourself,
> at
> > > least for citations which use an identifier.
> > >
> > > Some example datasets produced this way:
> > > https://zenodo.org/record/15871
> > > https://zenodo.org/record/55004
> > > https://zenodo.org/record/54799
> > >
> > > Once you extract the list of works, the fun begins. You'll need to
> > > intersect with other data sources (Wikidata, ORCID, other?) and account
> > > for a number of factors until you manage to find a subset of the data
> > > which has a sufficiently high signal:noise ratio. For instance you
> might
> > > need to filter or normalise by
> > > * year of publication (some year recent enough to have good data but
> old
> > > enough to allow the work to be cited elsewhere, be archived after
> > > embargos);
> > > * country or institution (some probably have better ORCID coverage);
> > > * field/discipline and language;
> > > * open access status (per Unpaywall);
> > > * number of expected pageviews and clicks (for instance using
> > > <https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Pageviews> and
> > > <
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikipedia_clickstream#Releases
> > >;
> > >
> > > a link from 10k articles on asteroids or proteins is not the same as
> > > being the lone link from a popular article which is not the same as a
> > > link buried among a thousand others on a big article);
> > > * time or duration of the addition (with one of the various diff
> > > extraction libraries, content persistence data or possibly historical
> > > eventstream if such a thing is available).
> > >
> > > To avoid having to invent everything yourself, maybe you can reuse the
> > > method of some similar study, for instance the one on the open access
> > > citation advantage or one of the many which studied the gender
> imbalance
> > > of citations and peer review in journals.
> > >
> > > However, it's very possible that the noise is just too much for a
> > > general computational method. You might consider a more manual approach
> > > on a sample of relevant events, for instance the *removal* of
> citations,
> > > which is in my opinion more significant than the addition.* You might
> > > extract all the diffs which removed a citation from an article in the
> > > last N years (probably they'll be in the order of 10^5 rather than
> > > 10^6), remove some massive events or outliers, sample 500-1000 of them
> > > randomly and verify the required data manually.
> > >
> > > As usual it will be impossible to have an objective assessment of
> > > whether that citation was really (in)appropriate in that context
> > > according to the (English or whatever) Wikipedia guidelines. To test
> > > that too, you should replicate one of the various studies of the gender
> > > imbalance of peer review, perhaps one of those which tried to assess
> the
> > > impact of a double blind peer review system on the gender imbalance.
> > > However, because the sources are already published, you'd need to
> > > provide the agendered information yourself and make sure the
> > > participants perform their assessment in some controlled environment
> > > where they don't have access to any gendered information (i.e. where
> you
> > > cut them off the internet).
> > >
> > > How many years do you have to work on this project? :-)
> > >
> > > Federico
> > >
> > > (*) I might add a citation just because it's the first result a popular
> > > search engine gives me, after glancing at the abstract and maybe the
> > > journal home page; but if I remove an existing citation, hopefully I've
> > > at least assessed its content and made a judgement about it, apart from
> > > cases of mass removals for specific problems with certain articles or
> > > publication venues.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > Subject: Digest Footer
> > >
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> > > [email protected]
> > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
> > >
> > >
> > > ------------------------------
> > >
> > > End of Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 168, Issue 20
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> >
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Subject: Digest Footer
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