Communities on the web rely on open conversation forums for a number of tasks, including governance, information sharing, and decision making. However these forms of collective deliberation can often result in biased outcomes. A prime example are Articles for Deletion (AfD) discussions on Wikipedia, which allow editors to gauge the notability of existing articles, and that, as prior work has suggested, may play a role in perpetuating the notorious gender gap of Wikipedia. Prior attempts to address this question have been hampered by access to narrow observation windows, reliance on limited subsets of both biographies and editorial outcomes, and by potential confounding factors. To address these limitations, here we adopt a competing risk survival framework to fully situate biographical AfD discussions within the full editorial cycle of Wikipedia content. We find that biographies of women are nominated for deletion faster than those of men, despite editors taking longer to reach a consensus for deletion of women, even after controlling for the size of the discussion. Furthermore, we find that AfDs about historical figures show a strong tendency to result into the redirecting or merging of the biography under discussion into other encyclopedic entries, and that there is a striking gender asymmetry: biographies of women are redirected or merged into biographies of men more often than the other way round. Our study provides a more complete picture of the role of AfD in the gender gap of Wikipedia, with implications for the governance of the open knowledge infrastructure of the web.

翻译：网络社区依赖开放对话论坛执行多项任务，包括治理、信息共享和决策制定。然而，这类集体审议形式常导致有偏的结果。一个典型例子是维基百科上的"删除条目讨论"，该机制允许编辑者评估现有条目的显著性，而先前研究指出，这可能对维基百科臭名昭著的性别差距问题起到延续作用。以往研究受限于狭窄的观察窗口、依赖有限范围的传记样本与编辑结果子集，以及潜在混杂因素，难以深入探讨此问题。为突破这些局限，本研究采用竞争风险生存分析框架，将传记类删除讨论完整置于维基百科内容的编辑周期中进行考察。研究发现：即使控制讨论规模后，女性传记被提删的速度仍快于男性传记，且编辑者对女性传记达成删除共识所需时间更长。此外，历史人物相关删除讨论呈现出强烈倾向——将被讨论传记重定向或合并至其他百科条目，且存在显著的性别不对称现象：女性传记被重定向或合并至男性传记的频率远高于反向情况。本研究为理解删除讨论在维基百科性别差距中的作用提供了更完整的图景，对网络开放知识基础设施的治理具有重要启示。