![]() Through close readings of policy debates, I present qualitative evidence of how white English Wikipedia really is. In the absence of a precise, comprehensive analysis of the gaps in content and editors, I present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these structures that prevent such an analysis. These constraints prevent determining either the numerator or the denominator necessary to calculate a percentage. 1 While these texts show evidence of a gap in a comparative analysis of a small subset of articles, none was able to make a comprehensive analysis, which would answer two questions: (1) What percentage of Wikipedia's editors are from indigenous and historically nondominant ethnic groups? (2) What percentage of Wikipedia's biographies are about people from indigenous and historically nondominant ethnic groups? I set out to try to answer these two questions, but in the process I discovered three interrelated problems that prevent such a comprehensive analysis: (a) the multitude of different cultural understandings of race, ethnicity, nationality, and caste throughout the world prevents surveying the editors about their race and ethnicity (b) Wikipedia's category structures, combined with the policies that constrain their use, limit their analytic usefulness and (c) the unverifiability of whiteness leaves the majority of articles without any race or ethnicity metadata. Among the thousands of articles about Wikipedia in academic journals and the popular press, only three recently published articles have begun to analyze this race and ethnicity gap. Though Wikipedia has a widely studied gender gap, very little research has attempted to discover if it has a comparable race and ethnicity gap in its content and its contributors. Wikipedia, Wikidata, race and ethnicity, critical whiteness studies, implicit bias, data ![]() Yet the unverifiability of whiteness is itself an undeniable verification of Wikipedia's whiteness. While the data does point toward a significant race and ethnicity gap, the data cannot definitively reveal meaning beyond its inability to reveal quantitative meaning. Turning to Wikidata, I reveal how the ontology of whiteness shifts as it enters the database, functioning differently than existing theories of whiteness account for. I examine policy discussions about categorization by race and ethnicity, demonstrating persistent anti-Black racism. In the absence of a precise analysis of the gaps in its editors or its articles, I present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these structures that prevent such an analysis. Thus, these biographies cannot be categorized as white because whiteness is unverifiable in Wikipedia's white epistemology. These sources do not exist for white people because whiteness is a social construct that has historically been treated as a transparent default. While it seems that many of these uncategorized biographies are about white people, these biographies are not categorized by ethnicity because policies require reliable sources to do so. ![]() ![]() Nor is it possible to precisely measure how many of Wikipedia's biographies are about people from indigenous and nondominant ethnic groups, because most articles lack ethnicity information. No such comprehensive analysis of Wikipedia's editors exists because legal, cultural, and social structures complicate surveying them about race and ethnicity. Although Wikipedia has a widely studied gender gap, almost no research has attempted to discover if it has a comparable race and ethnicity gap among its editors or its articles.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |