Abstract
Despite the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding online cultural production, profound gender inequalities remain in who contributes to one of the most visited Web sites worldwide, Wikipedia. In analyzing this persistent disparity, previous research has focused on aspects of current contributors and the existing Wikipedia community. We draw on unique panel survey data of young adults with information about both Wikipedia contributors and non-contributors. We examine the role of people's background attributes and Internet skills in participation on the site. We find that the gender gap in editing is exacerbated by a similarly significant Internet skills gap. Our results show that the most likely contributors are high-skilled males and that among low-skilled Internet users no gender gap in Wikipedia contributions exists. Our findings suggest that efforts to understand the gender gap must also take Internet skills into account.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 424-442 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Information Communication and Society |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 3 2015 |
Funding
The authors greatly appreciate the generous support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Robert and Kaye Hiatt Fund that made this project possible. The authors thank Benjamin Mako Hill and members of the audience at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University for their helpful input as well as the undergraduate and graduate research assistants in the Web Use Project group during the 2009–2012 academic years for their assistance with data collection and data entry. The authors are grateful for support from the Northwestern University Communication Studies Department as well as Nokia Research Center.
Keywords
- Internet skills
- Wikipedia
- digital inequality
- gender
- participation
- peer production
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Communication
- Library and Information Sciences
