were faced with multiple barriers for contributing, both due to comparatively fewer technological skills and female editors’ adversarial experiences with pushback from the Wikipedia community (Ford & Wajcman, 2017).
The demographics of the editor population are another likely contributor to Wikipedia’s inherent biases. Over 85 percent of Wikipedia’s 40 million editors are white men (“Wikipedia,” 2020b). This narrow demographic comprises a large portion of the editor population, so their interests and worldviews influence what does and does not get covered (Wagner et al., 2016). The topics receiving the most coverage on Wikipedia tend to be narrow: war, sports, and video games (Carleton et al., 2017).
Empowering Learners
After spending the semester discussing inequality and issues of social justice, learners can feel helpless in the face of pervasive structural issues. However, developing skills to communicate about gender inequality for a broad audience empowers learners in a variety of ways. Some learners told us that this skill equipped them to push back against gender inequality in their lives and their activism. The assignment also allowed learners to “talk back” in a small way by helping to address the gender gap in Wikipedia. They also participated in “public anthropology” by translating anthropological research for the public, in service of the common good (Borofsky, 2008). By editing Wikipedia, learners supported diverse voices on a widely read public platform.
Advice and Recommendations
Since we found this project so rewarding, we have taught this assignment four times over three years. Each time, we solicit learner feedback and work to improve the assignment. Here, we share some of what we learned in this process as well as ideas for how to adapt this assignment for different contexts.
It is important to consider how assignment information is presented to learners. We found that it is best to provide a list of pages
