The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Faculty group edits Wikipedia for equity
NEW HAVEN — Fans of Thomas the Tank Engine looking to relive some of their favorite memories of the fictional anthropomorphized blue steam locomotive and his friends might thrill at synopses of 505 episodes to date listed on Wikipedia.
Those surfing Wikipedia with an interest in the research and bibliography of author, researcher and Sterling Professor Emeritus of English Annabel Patterson would not be so lucky.
However, Claire Bowern, professor of linguistics at Yale University and the university’s Women Faculty Forum chairwoman, is pursuing a project to make the online crowdsourced encyclopedia a better resource, with an eye for increasing its gender equity.
“If we have a default idea of who is an authority, it has a spiraling effect on making women less cited,” Bowern said.
Several times a month, the WFF hosts Wikipedia “edit-a-thons” to draw awareness to the scholarship of women, both by creating biographies for scholars — such as Patterson, who does not have a page despite reaching the highest rank for a Yale professor before her retirement — and by citing women’s research on topics that are lean on citations in Wikipedia.
“Wikipedia represents the interests of the people who make its pages,” Bowern said. “There are gaps in what is there.”
Bowern said she drew the idea for the event from linguist Gretchen McCulloch, whose focus is on the language of the internet, at a Linguistic Society of America event.
“Professors complain about their students just citing information from Wikipedia, but it’s often the first place they go before seeking other sources,” Bowern said. “It’s a small thing, but we’re going to continue to do it.”
One of WFF post-graduate associate Emily Stark’s recent edit-a-thon projects was to continue work on a biography for Patterson.
“One of our goals is to make sure all female Sterling professors are represented on Wikipedia,” she said.
Over the course of her research, Stark said, she learned Patterson was tied for first in her class with “The Handmaid’s Tale” author Margaret Atwood when receiving her degree, an interesting fact about two esteemed women writers.
Bowern said implicit bias can be a concern, as Wikipedia editors are less likely to see women professors as “persons of stature.”
WFF research fellow Najwa Mayer said it may not be apparent, but the sense that the knowledge presented in common spaces such as Wikipedia is “equal” is untrue. Mayer, a doctoral candidate at Yale in American studies with a focus on cultural history, said edits to Wikipedia can give an understanding of how power is made and maintained.
If something is not present on Wikipedia, Bowern said, it may give the impression that it’s unimportant. If there is a page for synopses of episodes for Thomas the Tank Engine, but none for a language with only 1 million speakers in rural Vietnam, she said, it might make an entire language seem irrelevant.
As Bowern looked for stubs, or short articles being considered for deletion by Wikipedia editors, to flesh out, she happened upon a page for a language native to Papua New Guinea. As she searched for work done on the language on Google Scholar to salvage the article, she said she wasn’t thinking every edit needed to be viewed through the lens of gender.
“It’s about improving the overall quality of Wikipedia,” she said.