A Diachronic Analysis of Gender-Neutral Language on wikiHow

AbstractAs a large how-to website, wikiHow’s mission is to empower every person on the planet to learn how to do anything. An important part of including everyone also linguistically is the use of gender-neutral language. In this short paper, we study in how far articles from wikiHow fulfill this criterion based on manual annotation and automatic classification. In particular, we employ a classifier to analyze how the use of gender-neutral language has developed over time. Our results show that although about 75% of all articles on wikiHow were written in a gender-neutral way from the outset, revisions have a higher tendency to add gender-specific language than to change it to inclusive wording.