Bachelor Thesis: Gender and discussion climate on Wikipedia, a small explorative study

Abstract
Wikipedia is a collection of digital encyclopedia that anyone can write and edit. The writers, however, are a male dominated group, despite the fact that Wikipedia is trying to get a writer base that could be seen as representative of society. To investigate why this is a small-scale exploratory study of Swedish Wikipedia's discussion climate has been implemented. A small group of students at KTH have been studied. The interviewees have read excerpts from discussions taken from Swedish Wikipedia and answered questions about how they perceive them and how their motivation to participate in the discussion is affected by their climate. The result shows that the women that have answered the interviews have felt unmotivated to partake in discussions they feel are being conducted poorly to a greater extent than the men who have answered. The study provides ideas for future studies on the discussion climate of Swedish Wikipedia.

Keywords
Wikipedia, Overrepresentation of men, Discussion, Discussion environment, Perception, Interviews, IT-students, KTH

Bachelor Thesis Report (In Swedish by Jonathan Kindfält and Alex Wennberg)