IIT-M centre project to reduce gender data gap in Wikipedia

Indian Institute of Technology - Madras’ Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (RBC-DSAI) and SuperBloom Studios were launching an initiative called ‘Hidden Voices’ to reduce the Gender Data Gap in Digital Sources.

A release from IIT-M said the initiative aims at auto-generating biographies of several notable women by next International Women’s Day, making a positive impact in gender representation among digital sources. The release noted that SuperBloom Studios was co-founded by three IIT Madras alumnae, and aims at building this practice across three continents. Those interested in volunteering for the initiative can register at http://hiddenvoices.xyz/.

Natural language models are increasingly forming the basis of various consumer interaction services and the models depend on open web datasets, including Wikipedia. Independently, most people use digital-first tools such as Wikipedia to initiate their worldview formation on many subjects. While there are multiple layers of complexity to resolve the nature of equitable representation across all digital platforms, it is noted that there is significant value in increasing women’s representation in Wikipedia.

The collaborators will encourage more women contributors to participate in the open-source project, thereby enabling them to build their profile among open-source software communities, the release added.