Platforms for creative commons have a pathological orientation towards black women

Wikipedia attempts to present information from a neutral point of view and requires its content to be verifiable with citations from reliable, published sources. It also maintains a transparent editing process, in which the edit history of each article is publicly visible. Each article also has an associated, public “talk page” where editors can debate what to put in the article. Talk pages also maintain permanent histories of all such conversations over time. Interactions among editors on Wikipedia exist across a spectrum from collaborative to hostile, with trolling, vandalism (damage to an article through content deletion or addition of inappropriate text, including hate speech), and edit wars (antagonistic edits to text that change the text back and forth between two opposing opinions, often without discussion or explanation, rather than seeking consensus through gradual, explained text edits) occurring with some regularity (Jemielniak 2014; Clark et al. 2019). Wikipedia’s organizational policy is to revert edits and ban editors who are blatantly in bad faith and/or libelous and to restore article text to how it was before they made their edits.

These practices, and a host of other internal rules and enforcement norms, help Wikipedia to prevent, or catch and fix, “fake news,” disinformation campaigns, hoaxes, and vandalism (Borak 2022). Jemielniak writes that “In general, any purposeful, long-term universal bias on Wikipedia, detouring from the dominant beliefs of the general academic and para-academic community, does not prevail,” though this is more likely to be true for articles that attract the attention of large numbers of editors as compared to less popular articles (2018, 5). However, our experience suggests that overall, Wikipedia content should be described not as free from long-term bias but rather as broadly supportive of (1) the interests and perspectives of the largely male, white, Global North editors who volunteer on the site, as well as (2) the long-term biases of academia, government, and the press that create most of Wikipedia’s source materials. These knowledge distortions are pervasive and deeply entrenched, as they occur along multiple axes of power: language, geography, colonial history, race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, and more (Bear and Collier 2016; Berson, Sengul-Jones, and Tamani 2021; Jemielniak 2014; Ramjohn 2022a; Reagle and Koerner 2020; Salam 2019; Tripodi 2021; van der Velden 2013). Of these, information inequality related to sexism is the best documented. The fact that only 19.70 percent of biographies on Wikipedia are of women is one frequently cited example (Anon., n.d.-q; Konieczny and Klein 2018). Wikipedia’s “featured articles,” the ones deemed to be of highest quality by Wikipedians and thus preferentially featured on the site, also align with subjects that tend to be disproportionately of interest to men, with warfare, sports, and video games forming three of the top four categories (Mathewson and Ramirez 2018).

When we started this project in 2018, there was little press coverage and academic publishing on racism in Wikipedia. Since then, such coverage has grown from an almost deafening silence into a small trickle. For example, Adams, Brückner, and Naslund (2019) show that American sociologists who are women and/or people of color are underrepresented in Wikipedia biographies. Our paper builds on existing scholarship by exploring knowledge inequality within Wikipedia’s content and knowledge sharing practices, with an emphasis on racism and sexism