# It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.06307 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1501.06307/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jan 2015.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [BOLD: Dataset and Metrics for Measuring Biases in Open-Ended Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.11718/) (2021)
- [Gender Bias in Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06001/) (2021)
- [Whose Language Counts as High Quality? Measuring Language Ideologies in Text Data Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.10474/) (2022)
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- [Social Bias Probing: Fairness Benchmarking for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09090/) (2023)
- [Reliability Testing for Natural Language Processing Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02590/) (2021)
- [Reusable Templates and Guides For Documenting Datasets and Models for Natural Language Processing and Generation: A Case Study of the HuggingFace and GEM Data and Model Cards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07374/) (2021)
- [Under the Morphosyntactic Lens: A Multifaceted Evaluation of Gender Bias in Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09866/) (2022)
- [SynthBio: A Case Study in Human-AI Collaborative Curation of Text Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06467/) (2021)
- [Bias in News Summarization: Measures, Pitfalls and Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08047/) (2023)
- [Quantifying Gender Bias Towards Politicians in Cross-Lingual Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07505/) (2021)
- [From Transparency to Accountability and Back: A Discussion of Access and Evidence in AI Auditing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04772/) (2024)
- [Evaluating the Fairness of Discriminative Foundation Models in Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11867/) (2023)
- [Locating Information Gaps and Narrative Inconsistencies Across Languages: A Case Study of LGBT People Portrayals on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04282/) (2024)
- [Social Norm Bias: Residual Harms of Fairness-Aware Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.11056/) (2021)
- [Quantifying Gender Biases Towards Politicians on Reddit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.12014/) (2021)
- [How Prevalent is Gender Bias in ChatGPT? -- Exploring German and English ChatGPT Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03031/) (2023)
- [How far can bias go? Tracing bias from pretraining data to alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19240/) (2024)
- [The Lifecycle of "Facts": A Survey of Social Bias in Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03353/) (2022)
- [Are Female Carpenters like Blue Bananas? A Corpus Investigation of Occupation Gender Typicality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02948/) (2024)
- [Social Biases in Knowledge Representations of Wikidata separates Global North from Global South](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02352/) (2025)
- [Diversity matters: Robustness of bias measurements in Wikidata](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14027/) (2023)
- [Is Grokipedia Right-Leaning? Comparing Political Framing in Wikipedia and Grokipedia on Controversial Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.15484/) (2026)
- [Bias in Knowledge Graphs -- an Empirical Study with Movie Recommendation and Different Language Editions of DBpedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00674/) (2021)
- [Towards Lexical Gender Inference: A Scalable Methodology using Online Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14055/) (2022)
- [Identifying gender bias in blockbuster movies through the lens of machine learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12504/) (2022)
- [Toxic comments reduce the activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13568/) (2023)
- [How-to Guides for Specific Audiences: A Corpus and Initial Findings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12117/) (2023)
- [A Dataset for Pharmacovigilance in German, French, and Japanese: Annotating Adverse Drug Reactions across Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.18336/) (2024)
- [Fair Play in the Newsroom: Actor-Based Filtering Gender Discrimination in Text Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13169/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Wikipedia is a community-created encyclopedia that contains information about notable people from different countries, epochs and disciplines and aims to document the world's knowledge from a neutral point of view. However, the narrow diversity of the Wikipedia editor community has the potential to introduce systemic biases such as gender biases into the content of Wikipedia. In this paper we aim to tackle a sub problem of this larger challenge by presenting and applying a computational method for assessing gender bias on Wikipedia along multiple dimensions. We find that while women on Wikipedia are covered and featured well in many Wikipedia language editions, the way women are portrayed starkly differs from the way men are portrayed. We hope our work contributes to increasing awareness about gender biases online, and in particular to raising attention to the different levels in which gender biases can manifest themselves on the web.