After working on my research for the past year, I can conclude that there is indeed gender bias in Wikipedia. According to measures of shortest paths and betweenness centrality, categories that mention men in the title are 11 times more central to Wikipedia than categories that mention women. In other words, it is much easier for any user to stumble upon a men-related category by chance. At the same time, there are many more categories that explicitly mention “women” in the title, most likely because women are historically not the “norm” in many areas. Therefore, there is both an underrepresentation and an overrepresentation of women in Wikipedia, which are strong signals of bias.
Working on my research for the past year has taught me many things. By focusing my research on gender bias in Wikipedia using graph theory, I reinforced my prior understanding of network characteristics such as “shortest paths” and learned about new characteristics such as “betweenness centrality.” In addition to this, I was able to learn a bit about data science along the way, which is something that interested me but I wasn’t able to learn about in my regular classes. Working on my research definitely took my learning to a deeper level and I was able to discover that data science is something that really interests me.
Aside from gaining important knowledge, I feel that I was able to achieve a lot of things by completing this research. First and foremost, I wrote and presented my honors thesis while being part of this program which is one of my biggest academic accomplishments to date. Secondly, this research lays the groundwork for us continuing and deepening our study which may eventually lead to its publication.
Collaborating with my mentor, Professor Genc, was extremely helpful in completing this research and being able to draw the conclusions that we did. I received a lot of guidance from him in terms of which questions I should be striving to answer, what kind of network characteristics I should be looking at, and best methods for obtaining data. We met weekly to discuss progress and define next steps, and I believe this kind of consistent communication was crucial to completing our study.
I am so glad I got the chance to be part of a research study like this. I feel that it really pushed me and challenged me in the best ways possible. It was a truly amazing way to finish off my undergraduate studies.