Examining Gender and Power on Wikipedia Through Face and Politeness
This work addresses sociolinguistic analysis in online communities, providing incremental insights into gender and power interactions on Wikipedia.
The researchers tackled the problem of analyzing discourse on Wikipedia by combining face acts and politeness to study gender and power dynamics, finding that female editors are more polite and use more humbling language, but this difference nearly disappears among those with administrative power.
We propose a framework for analyzing discourse by combining two interdependent concepts from sociolinguistic theory: face acts and politeness. While politeness has robust existing tools and data, face acts are less resourced. We introduce a new corpus created by annotating Wikipedia talk pages with face acts and we use this to train a face act tagger. We then employ our framework to study how face and politeness interact with gender and power in discussions between Wikipedia editors. Among other findings, we observe that female Wikipedians are not only more polite, which is consistent with prior studies, but that this difference corresponds with significantly more language directed at humbling aspects of their own face. Interestingly, the distinction nearly vanishes once limiting to editors with administrative power.