Social biases on Wikipedia, a widely-read global platform, could greatly influence public opinion. While prior research has examined man/woman gender bias in biography articles, possible influences of confounding variables limit conclusions. In this work, we present a methodology for reducing the effects of confounding variables in analyses of Wikipedia biography pages. Given a target corpus for analysis (e.g. biography pages about women), we present a method for constructing a comparison corpus that matches the target corpus in as many attributes as possible, except the target attribute (e.g. the gender of the subject). We evaluate our methodology by developing metrics to measure how well the comparison corpus aligns with the target corpus. We then examine how articles about gender and racial minorities (cisgender women, non-binary people, transgender women, and transgender men; African American, Asian American, and Hispanic/Latinx American people) differ from other articles, including analyses driven by social theories like intersectionality. In addition to identifying suspect social biases, our results show that failing to control for confounding variables can result in different conclusions and mask biases. Our contributions include methodology that facilitates further analyses of bias in Wikipedia articles, findings that can aid Wikipedia editors in reducing biases, and framework and evaluation metrics to guide future work in this area.

本文介绍了一种分析Wikipedia页面的方法，以研究社会偏见对公众舆论的可能影响，结果表明社会偏见具有可疑性，不为协变量控制可能导致不同的结论和偏见。

维基百科传记中社会偏见的受控分析