4.2.4: Power and Privilege in Information Creation

Who Creates Information?

Anyone with internet access and a computer, tablet, or smartphone can create information and publish it online through social media, or even through a platform for self-publishing entire books. You might also create and share information offline. For example, if you go on a hike, notice that the trail is overgrown with a lot of poison oak right now, and then warn a friend about the status of that trail as they plan a hike for tomorrow, you have turned your own observation into useful information for your friend.

Access to other forms of information creation and publishing is more restricted. For example, journalistic credentials and the oversight of an editor are generally required to publish an article in a well-respected newspaper, and specific academic and/or professional credentials are required to publish an article in a medical journal. In other words, some types of information creation require specific kinds of expertise.

Who Do We Consider Experts?

Creators of information may have different types of expertise and authority, such as a high level of education in a particular field, professional experience with a topic, or personally witnessing or participating in a historic event. Individuals without advanced education or professional experience may have developed personal expertise through participating in formal or informal information ecosystems or communities, such as through playing a sport or pursuing a hobby or craft. While it is useful to consider the value of expertise in the form of education or professional experience, it is also important to consider the ways in which other forms of expertise may be devalued.

We will examine different types of information sources, and their characteristics and creation processes, in more detail in Chapter 7. We will examine different types of expertise and authority in more detail in Chapter 9. For now, we will explore some examples of how bias affects whose voices are heard, and how even expert voices can be marginalized.

Whose Voices and Perspectives are Heard and Who Gets Credit?

Some experts are more likely to be able publish and share information, while others are more likely to encounter barriers to publishing and sharing their expertise. The publishing process, the published sources available, and the voices represented in those sources, reflect the biases of the society that produces the sources. For example, many researchers have noted a gender bias in academic publishing (Lundine et al, 2018, Yong, 2019) that results in women being underrepresented as editors, reviewers, and authors of scholarly journal articles. And "studies authored by women tend to be cited less frequently than those authored by men" (Yong, 2019). For example, research conducted by Dung et al (2019) found that female "acknowledged programmers" who were instrumental in the field of theoretical population genetics were mentioned by authors of research studies, but were not named as authors themselves. As the field of computer programming became more male dominated, programmers were more likely to be credited as authors (Dung et al, 2019). In another infamous example, "James Watson and Francis Crick’s hypothesis about the structure of DNA was based on key evidence collected by Rosalind Franklin. Franklin was not given credit for that evidence when Watson and Crick published their hypothesis" (Understanding science).

"Black women have been producing knowledge since we blessed this earth. We theorize, we innovate, we revolutionize the world. We do not need mediators. We do not need interpreters. It is time to disrupt the canon. It is time to upturn the erasures of history. Cite Black Women."

--Dr. Christen A. Smith, Dr. Erica L. Williams, Dr. Imani A. Wadud, Dr. Whitney N.L. Pirtle, & The Cite Black Women Collective (Smith et al, 2021)

Asare (2021) provides many examples of the contributions of Black women being ignored or credited to someone else, including the important contributions of Black women to movements such as women's suffrage, civil rights, LGBTQIA liberation, Black Lives Matter, and Me Too. In one recent example of media bias, the TV news show 60 Minutes ran a story in 2021 about research on racial bias in facial recognition software but failed to even mention "the three Black women, Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Inioluwa Deborah Raji, who spearheaded the most seminal research in the field" (Asare, 2021). Movements such as Cite Black Women seek to "reconfigure the politics of knowledge production" (Our principles, n.d.) by acknowledging the intellectual contributions of those whose work has been dismissed or exploited historically.

Representation and Misrepresentation

"If you want the history of a white man, you go to the library" (Bowers et al, 2017).

In addition to marginalizing of the work of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color), women, LGBTQIA+ people, people with disabilities, and members of other minoritized groups, systems of information creation have also spoken for them, often misrepresenting their ideas, knowledge, and experience. Historically, the information sources included in library collections have reflected dominant perspectives about marginalized groups rather than the voices, experiences, and perspectives of those groups themselves. While many librarians are working to correct these omissions and distortions, they are still pervasive, especially when it comes to the nature of information in libraries about Indigenous peoples and the lack of materials by Indigenous peoples.

Many depictions of Indigenous peoples are written by non-Indigenous people (including some who are writing as if they are Indigenous), are stereotypical, and are influenced by "the role(s) that the concept of 'Indian' plays in European and American mythology" (Hurley et al, 2017). These misrepresentations raise "questions about who has the moral right to share a culture's stories, who is considered an authority, and what are the ethical considerations when publishing cross culturally" (Hurley et al, 2017).

Wikipedia’s Bias Problems

Societal biases, power dynamics, and inequities are reflected in less formal publishing processes as well. For example, anyone with internet access can write and/or edit Wikipedia articles. But multiple studies have shown that Wikipedia has a problem with gender, racial, and Western bias (Boboltz, 2017; Carroll & Nicosia, 2021; Noor, 2018; Paling, 2015). Research demonstrates that “Wikipedia underrepresents content on women” (Carroll & Nicosia, 2021), with women making up only 17% of the biographies of notable people (Noor, 2018). Wikipedia's concept of "notability" (Notability, n.d.) is problematic in itself, in that it can perpetuate and amplify the gender bias that led many important women to be left out of history books and other publishing in the first place. Wikipedia's editors determine notability, and women are also underrepresented among the editors, at only 16% (Noor, 2018) of that group. Furthermore, there have been several reports of male Wikipedia editors harassing female editors (Paling, 2015).

Wikipedia’s content reflects other types of bias as well. For example, European editors write most of the pages about European countries, but 84% of the entries about sub-Saharan Africa are written by people outside of that region (Noor, 2018).

Wikipedia Edit-A-Thons

One way people are working to correct the Wikipedia’s content problems is through Wikipedia edit-a-thons during which people work to create or improve content in a supportive social setting (Guo, 2018).

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Sources

Asare, J.G. (2023, May 9). The erasure of Black women's contributions: From past to present. Forbes.

Boboltz, S. (2017, Dec 6). Editors are trying to fix Wikipedia's gender and racial bias problem. Huffpost.

Bowers, J., Crowe, K., & Keeran, P. (2017). "If you want the history of a white man, you go to the library": Critiquing our legacy, addressing our library collections gaps. Collection Management, 42(3–4), 159–179. doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2017.1329104

Carroll, T. & Nicosia, L (2021, Jan 14). Wikipedia at 20: Why it often overlooks stories of women in history. The Conversation.

Dung, S.K., López, A., Barragan, E.L., Reyes, R., Thu, R., Castellanos, E., Catalan, F., Huerta-Sánchez, E. & Rohlfs, R.V. (2019). Illuminating women’s hidden contribution to historical theoretical population genetics. Genetics, 211(2), 363–366. doi.org/10.1534/genetics.118.301277

Guo, E. (2018, Jan 8). Inside the fight to change Wikipedia's gender problem. Inverse.

Hurley, D. A., Kostelecky, S. R., & Aguilar, P. (2017). Whose knowledge? Representing Indigenous realities in library and archival collections. Collection Management, 42(3–4), 124–129. doi.org/10.1080/01462679.2017.1392805

Image: A person writing on a piece of paper with a pen by Bugra Burak Akmanoglu is in the Public Domain CC0

Lundine, J., Bourgeault, I.L., Clark, J., Heidari, S. & Balabanova, D. (2018). The gendered system of academic publishing. The Lancet, 391(10132), 1754-1756.

Noor, P. (2018, July 29). Wikipedia biases: Research exposes the male-dominated, pro-western worldview of the online encyclopedia. The Guardian.

Notability. (n.d.) Wikipedia. Accessed 2 July, 2025.

Our principles. (n.d.) Cite Black Women. Retrieved July 9, 2025.

Paling, E. (2015, Oct 21). Wikipedia's hostility to women. The Atlantic.

Smith, C.A., Williams, E.L., Wadud, I.A., Pirtle, W.N.L. & The Cite Black Women Collective. (2021). Cite Black women: A critical praxis (a statement). Feminist Anthropology, 2(1), 10-17. doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12040

Understanding science 101: Human endeavor, human biases. (n.d.) UC Museum of Paleontology.

Yong, E. (2019, Feb 11). The women who contributed to science but were buried in footnotes. The Atlantic.