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Feminist theory has been calling for a critically situated perspective on knowledge thanks to Donna Haraway. Wikipedia has also claimed to be “the sum of all knowledge”, an apparently objective point of view.
This project analyses this tension: How is feminist knowledge constructed and treated differently in various language versions?
research question
data
The starting point of the project is a dataset I created from about eight thousand Wikipedia articles from the Wikipedia category "Feminism" and its subcategories. For each topic, I automatically retrieved all existing articles in the 30 most popular language versions. The basis for this task was the MediaWiki API.
For comparison I also created an dataset, similar in size, but with random Wikipedia articles.
This resulted in standardized metadata for each article in all languages:
quantitative analysis
I used Python, including tools like pandas, scipy, and numpy, to analyze the following metrics:
For visualization I used libraries like matplotlib and plotly.
feminism article coverage mapped on world map
The map shows that, as expected, English-speaking countries have by far the highest coverage of articles in their own language. What stands out, is that after English, French and Spanish, Arabic has the highest coverage of articles. However, in terms of the number of articles in Wikipedia as a whole, Arabic is only in 17th place. It is also surprising that German, for example, is only in 5th place for feminist articles, although it is in 2nd place in Wikipedia as a whole if you exclude Cebuanu, which consists largely of bot-generated articles.
article length
You can see that the length of articles differs significantly in different languages. This is mainly due to linguistic characteristics, such as grammatical complexity. It is therefore quite difficult to identify differences in content between the languages. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that the articles from the feminist dataset are much longer than the articles from the random dataset.
number of internal links
The number of links in an article also tells very little, as there are different guidelines for editing, creating and linking articles in each language.
number of edits
The number of edits often indicates the intensity of discussions and differences of opinion about articles. it can be seen that in the feminist dataset, English, German and Italian are noticeable for their relatively high number of edits. In the random dataset, only English stands out the most. The graphs probably also simply reflect the size of the Wikipedia communities. However, it is also noticeable that articles in the feminism category are more "fought over", as the number of edits is significantly higher compared to the random data set.
history of article creation in years per language
When comparing the time of creation of feminist and random articles, some trends can be identified. In many languages, there was a peak in both data sets between 2005 and 2010. However, in the feminist data set, it can be seen that there were also new rises around 2017/18 and later. In some languages, there was even only the last peak that stood out.
conclusion
Based on the data collected, it is clear that Wikipedia's apparently "global" knowledge is still heavily centred on the English-language edition. In many other language versions, a significant proportion of feminist articles are missing completely. In addition, feminist entries, where they exist, are edited much more frequently than articles from the random dataset, which indicates more intense discussion processes. Growth peaks in individual languages do not occur in isolation, but are linked to each other over time and appear to spread across language boundaries.
However, these findings only provide selective insights into the complex structures of Wikipedia and are no alternative to a comprehensive evaluation. Instead, they mark starting points for further analysis.