TY - JOUR TI - The history of women in engineering on Wikipedia AU -Alice White PY - 2018 VL - IS - Autumn 2018 KW - encyclopaedia KW - gender gap KW - history of engineering KW - systemic bias KW - Wikimedia Commons KW - Wikipedia KW - Women engineers KW - women in STEM AB - This paper explores the representation of the history of women in engineering as it appears on the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia. Using biography pages on women engineers for a high-level quantitative overview, and the ‘History of women in engineering’ page as a specific example for qualitative examination, this research highlights inequalities in how women engineers are represented compared with men engineers. There are significantly fewer Wikipedia biography articles on women engineers compared with men engineers, and those articles are far less central and findable, with fewer incoming links. The article page on the ‘History of women in engineering’ is of poor quality and is flagged as such to readers. Here, the under-representation of women engineers on Wikipedia is set in the specific context of Wikipedia. The context of societal differences beyond the internet is also explored. The paper concludes by discussing practical attempts to redress the imbalance, and challenges to consider in planning future efforts. N1 - For further discussions of these see: Mark Graham, Bernie Hogan, Ralph Straumann and Ahmen Medhat (2014) ‘Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 104.4, pp 746–764; Alex Hern (2015) ‘Wikipedia’s View of the World Is Written by the West’, the Guardian, 15 September; and Mark Graham, Ralph Straumann and Bernie Hogan (2015) ‘Digital Divisions of Labor and Informational Magnetism: Mapping participation in Wikipedia,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers 105.6, pp 1158–1178. N1 - For more information on how teachers and students use Wikipedia see: Marte Blikstad-Balas, ‘“You Get What You Need”: A Study of Students’ Attitudes towards Using Wikipedia When Doing School Assignments’, Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 60.6 (2016), pp 594–608 https://doi.org/10.1080/00313831.2015.1066428 and Kristen Purcell and others, ‘How Teachers Are Using Technology at Home and in Their Classrooms’, Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech, 2013 http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/02/28/how-teachers-are-using-technology-at-home-and-in-their-classrooms/ [accessed 5 June 2018] N1 - ‘Wikipedia: Prime Objective’, Wikipedia, 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Prime_objective&oldid=804044130 N1 - Other groups are also significantly under-represented on Wikipedia. See: ‘Wikipedia: Systemic Bias’, Wikipedia, 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Systemic_bias&oldid=833738243 N1 - For the male bias of Wikipedia see Wagner, C, Graells-Garrido, E, Garcia, D and Menczer, F, 2016, ‘Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia’, EPJ Data Science 5.1 N1 - There are a number of articles that discuss the gender bias implicit in the notability criteria. For example, see Michelle Moravec, ‘The Endless Night of Wikipedia’s Notable Woman Problem’, boundary2, 2018 https://www.boundary2.org/2018/08/moravec/ [accessed 1 August 2018] N1 - This article uses an analysis based on the PetScan tool created by Magnus Manske to help Wikimedians to better understand Wikipedia and its sister sites. The data returned will change, reflecting Wikipedia’s changing contents over time; the figures included in this article were based on those returned at the time of writing. For the basic numbers, a Category depth of 3 was used to ensure that articles within subcategories are included in the tally. The category Engineers had negative categories of Women engineers and Women scientists applied to remove these women and leave a list of male engineers: https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=5770640. The category Women engineers was combined with the Subset of the categories Engineer and Women scientists in order to produce a list of pages about women engineers: https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=5770641 and https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=5770643 N1 - When including fictional characters in the list, a significant number of the highest-linked pages were characters from British soap opera Coronation Street who worked as machinists in a textiles factory. Fictional characters were excluded to check whether this television show might be skewing the data. N1 - See Appendix for the Sparql queries written to ascertain the numbers on Wikidata. N1 - There is no category for dead people: where it is known that the subject of a biography page is alive, their biography is tagged as being a Biography of a Living Person (BLP). For the purposes of analysis, this article considers all those not tagged as potentially deceased. N1 - ‘An idea of the debate around notability can be found on the Wikipedia talk page ‘Wikipedia Talk: Notability’, Wikipedia, 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Notability&oldid=843814740 [accessed 31 May 2018]. N1 - See, for example, Jill S Tietjen, 2016, Engineering Women: Re-Visioning Women’s Scientific Achievements and Impacts, (Springer); Monique Frize, 2010, The Bold and the Brave: A History of Women in Science and Engineering (University of Ottawa Press); Margaret E Layne, 2009, Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers (ASCE Publications) N1 - ‘History of Engineering’, Wikipedia, 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_engineering [accessed 5 June 2018] N1 - ‘History of Women in Engineering’, Wikipedia, 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_women_in_engineering&oldid=840058278 [accessed 5 June 2018] N1 - The page has been edited 103 times by 58 editors in total, compared with the broader history page which has 148 edits by 97 editors. N1 - ‘Talk: History of Engineering’, Wikipedia, 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:History_of_engineering&oldid=814743526 [accessed 5 June 2018]; ‘Talk: History of Women in Engineering’, Wikipedia, 2017 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:History_of_women_in_engineering&oldid=808829944 [accessed 5 June 2018] N1 - ‘Wikipedia – History of Women in Engineering’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_women_in_engineering N1 - Specifically, they thought that the context for why many women in the USA entered engineering in the 1970s and 80s was lacking from the page, as was an explanation for the decline in women taking a degree in computer science from 1985 onward. N1 - ‘Wikipedia: Five Pillars’, Wikipedia, 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Five_pillars&oldid=834330089 [accessed 5 June 2018] N1 - ‘See the Wikipedia talk page for ‘History of Women in Engineering’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_of_women_in_engineering [accessed 5 June 2018] N1 - On the implicit ‘neutrality’ of the male, see the section 'Why does “Queen-Empress” redirect to “King-Emperor”’? In Sati Houston and Chris Schilling, ‘Inspire Campaign’s Final Report Shows Achievements in Gender Diversity and Representation within the Wikimedia Movement – Wikimedia Blog’, Wikimedia Foundation Blog https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/01/12/inspire-campaign-final-report/ [accessed 5 May 2018] N1 - ‘Wikipedia ‘completely failed’ to fix gender imbalance’, BBC News, 2014 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-28701772/wikipedia-completely-failed-to-fix-gender-imbalance [accessed 5 June 2018] N1 - See ‘Wikiproject Women in Red’, Wikipedia, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red [accessed 17 September 2018]. See also Samir Elsharbaty ‘Community digest: Women in Red’s impact on Wikipedia’s gender gap’, Wikimedia Foundation Blog, 2017, https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/05/02/digest-women-in-red/ [accessed 5 June 2018] N1 - ‘YouTube Will Link Directly to Wikipedia to Fight Conspiracy Theories’, WIRED https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-will-link-directly-to-wikipedia-to-fight-conspiracies/ [accessed 5 June 2018]; Ben Lovejoy, ‘Senior Wikipedia Exec Implies That Apple “Exploits” the Service without Giving Back’, 9to5Mac, 2018 https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/26/siri-wikipedia/ [accessed 5 June 2018] PB - The Science Museum Group SN - 2054-5770 LA - eng DO - 10.15180/181008 UR - https://journal.sciencemuseum.ac.uk/article/women-in-engineering-on-wikipedia/ T2 - Science Museum Group Journal