Background

As the largest reference website, Wikipedia has a significant impact on how people find and retrieve information about notable people. Even beyond inclusion on Wikipedia, Google relies on Wikipedia data to populate prominent “knowledge panels” that contain information about notable people and typically includes Wikipedia entries in the top ten search engine results. Even as generative AI grows in popularity, having a presence on Wikipedia plays a vital role in visibility as its data is used to train these systems. Despite its vital role in knowledge construction, myriad studies have documented an extensive “gender gap.”

The project

To learn more about the relationship between Wikipedia presence, searchability, and visibility and the pros and cons of having an image appear in Wikipedia, CAT Lab is collaborating with colleagues at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill to survey academics—a group that both benefits and faces risks from visibility—who have (or could have) Wikipedia pages to understand how they think about the benefits and risks of increased exposure.

This project is supported by the Templeton World Charity Foundation and the Knight Foundation.

Our Team

This project is a collaboration with team members from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Dr. Francesca Tripodi is sociologist and information scholar. She is currently an Associate Professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and has twice testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee. In 2023, Dr. Tripodi received the Award for Impact and Excellence from the Center for an Informed Public at the University of Washington in recognition of her research on fostering an informed society and was featured on NBC Meet the Press Reports on the dangers of PragerU in higher education.  Her research has been covered in the United States by NPR, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, Slate as well as other prestigious international publications (e.g., BBC, the Financial Times, Sábado, Libération).

Viviane Ito is a PhD student in Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research interests are disinformation, misinformation, and gender bias within information and language. In the past, she developed research on women’s experiences with chronic pain at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and on gender biases in Olympic athletes’ discourses at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Ady Weng is a PhD student in Information Science at UNC-Chapel Hill. Combining her information science and government & politics backgrounds, her research interests lie in misinformation and disinformation; how the public finds information via search engines and social media; and how government institutions might exploit such mechanisms to communicate with different publics.

Documents and findings:

  • Survey preregistration on the Open Science Framework
    • https://osf.io/nm8z6/files/n6ysa
  • We shared preliminary survey results at Wiki Workshop 2026
    • https://wikiworkshop.org/2026/paper/wikiworkshop_2026_26_the_role_of_online_risks_in_scholars_willingness_to_appear_on_wikipedia_in_writing_and_images