# Examining Gender and Power on Wikipedia Through Face and Politeness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.02798 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02798/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Aug 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [A Rank Stabilization Scaling Factor for Fine-Tuning with LoRA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03732/) (2023)
- [A Computational Approach to Politeness with Application to Social Factors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.6078/) (2013)
- [ConvoKit: A Toolkit for the Analysis of Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04246/) (2020)
- [Keeping Up Appearances: Computational Modeling of Face Acts in Persuasion Oriented Discussions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10815/) (2020)
- [Dialog Structure Through the Lens of Gender, Gender Environment, and Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03441/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a framework for analyzing discourse by combining two interdependent concepts from sociolinguistic theory: face acts and politeness. While politeness has robust existing tools and data, face acts are less resourced. We introduce a new corpus created by annotating Wikipedia talk pages with face acts and we use this to train a face act tagger. We then employ our framework to study how face and politeness interact with gender and power in discussions between Wikipedia editors. Among other findings, we observe that female Wikipedians are not only more polite, which is consistent with prior studies, but that this difference corresponds with significantly more language directed at humbling aspects of their own face. Interestingly, the distinction nearly vanishes once limiting to editors with administrative power.