The Gender Bias Tug-of-War in a Co-creation Community: Core-Periphery Tension on Wikipedia

ABSTRACT

Commitment to a neutral point of view is a pillar of Wikipedia culture. Despite a strong culture, the open nature of the community presents challenges for cultural assimilation. Central contributors who make up the community’s core engage in activism to combat traditional forms of bias. However, peripheral contributors may not adopt or adhere to the community’s cultural values and may reflect the very bias the community attempts to combat. These differences create tensions between central and peripheral contributors. Peripheral contributors are likely to contribute traditional types of information bias (e.g., bias against women). In response, central contributors may overcorrect in ways that reverse traditional biases. We compare gender bias on female and male CEO profiles and find evidence of bias that advantages women and disadvantages men. While peripheral contributors may dominate early in the life cycle of core-periphery structured open collaboration communities—due to the volume of contributions—the core dominates in the long term through sustained, systematic activism. Our results suggest that a balance of activity from central and peripheral contributors results in content with the most neutral point of view.

KEYWORDS:

• Online collaboration communities
• digital co-production
• core-periphery structure
• digital collaboration
• knowledge co-creation
• gender bias
• Wikipedia
• CEO
• online engagement
• Wikipedia neutrality

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Notes on contributors

Amber G. Young

Amber G. Young ([email protected]) is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas. She received her Ph.D. from University of Oklahoma. Her research interests include societal and organizational impacts of digitization. Dr. Young’s work has been published in MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Journal, Information & Organization, London School of Economics Business Review, and various conference proceedings. Dr. Young is on the Editorial Board of Information & Organization.

Ariel D. Wigdor

Ariel D. Wigdor ([email protected]) is a Ph.D. candidate in Information Systems at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research interests include online communities, knowledge management, and bias in digital information. His work has been published in Communications of the Association for Information Systems and in the proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems and Americas Conference on Information Systems.

Gerald C. Kane

Gerald C. Kane ([email protected]; corresponding author) is a Professor of Information Systems at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management and the Faculty Director of the Edmund H. Shea, Jr. Center for Entrepreneurship. He received his Ph.D. from the Goizueta Business School of Emory University. Dr. Kane’s research interests center on exploring the role of digital technologies in business strategy, organizational culture, and talent development. His work has appeared in such journals as, Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Organization Science, Management Science, Marketing Science, Harvard Business Review, and MIT-Sloan Management Review, among others. He is the author of The Technology Fallacy: How People Are the Real Key to Digital Transformation published by MIT Press.