Exploring Imbalances on Wikipedia Through Archival Creation Theories

This paper addresses gender imbalances in Wikipedia concerning both article content and contributor demographics. A small fraction of the world’s population writes and vets the majority of the digital encyclopedia’s entries, resulting in many subjects and groups being under- or unrepresented. This issue is examined through the lens of archival creation theory, which brings forward different types of creators and contributors and their impact on the record. This paper starts with an overview of Wikipedia’s structure, its mission and values, and the process of creating and approving articles. These structures enable imbalances and gaps between which articles get published and which do not. This paper then presents edit-a-thons as a form of archival creation that can redress existing imbalances and gaps. These elements are used as a segue to understand how imbalances and gaps are manifested in the articles that are and are not published.