Initial Evaluation of Potential Bias in Coverage of Humans in Wikidata
Authors: Clair Kronk
Organizations: Institute for Health Equity Research (IHER), Department of Population Health Science & Policy (PHSP), Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), New York, NY, USA · Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health (AIHH), Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), New York, NY, USA
Introduction. Open collaborative knowledge graphs such as Wikidata increasingly ground agentic artificial intelligence, information retrieval, and language modeling systems, making systematic auditing of their demographic representation and overall equity a research imperative. Methods. Herein, we present an open-source auditing platform that ingests over 10 million statement bindings representing over 6 million humans on Wikidata via QLever, and evaluates representation of gender, sexual orientation, geography, birthplace urbanicity, ethnicity, multilingual coverage of labels, descriptions, and aliases, occupation, and select intersectional pairs of these entities. It does so by making use of Chi-square goodness-of-fit tests, 95% Wilson-score confidence intervals, and disparity ratios, in light of Rubin's missingness taxonomy. Results. Women accounted for 28.71% (CI +/-0.04) of all humans in Wikidata with a stated gender. 38.26% of humans had a citizenship statement, with Western Europe and North America (WENA) representing approximately 53% of such statements. Among 1.8 million birthplaces that could be classified, rural birthplaces were observed in 2.48% of cases (in comparison to 27.4% global baseline). Fewer than 1.2% of entities carried an ethnicity statement, and non-English Wikidata descriptions covered 18.2% of items. Discussion. Our findings reveal significant missingness across the evaluated axes. Ethnicity and sexual orientation were the most critically under-documented (missing statements) while rural birthplaces and non-WENA citizenship were the most underrepresented.
Existing datasets on cultural knowledge have been typically created by human annotators familiar with each culture. However, the process requires considerable human effort, presenting a significant challenge to scalability. To address this challenge, we introduce WikiOriginQA, a QA dataset automatically constructed by objectively representing the origins of knowledge through the creation dates of different Wikipedia language editions. Experimental results with the created dataset confirm that LLM performance tends to be biased toward Anglophone cultures. Furthermore, the results suggest the importance of knowledge propagation into the Anglosphere. These findings demonstrate the validity of our automated approach, enabling cultural bias evaluations with superior scalability across diverse languages without extensive manual annotation.
Wikidata is a large, heterogeneous knowledge graph and applying data quality metrics requires context-specific approaches. The "richness" quality metric is currently under-researched and typically restricted to the ontology level, which fails to capture entity-specific structural depth. To address this gap, we introduce SQuIREL, a method that measures richness directly at the entity level using six dimensions: Semantic Specificity, Qualifier Density, Internal Connectivity, Reference Provenance, External Network Connectivity, and Linguistic Accessibility. These dimensions are kept disaggregated to preserve actionability for targeted editorial intervention. We apply this metric to two case studies of oil paintings (Brazilian vs. French) and writers (grouped by citizenship and gender) to demonstrate how it surfaces representational inequalities that may indicate systemic bias. Our metric successfully distinguishes between highly tailored and basic entity profiles, revealing nuances that raw counts and existing aggregate scores obscure. Specifically, it identifies structural imbalances, such as 48% of Brazilian paintings clustering as low-richness stubs against 0% in the French cohort, as well as intersectional patterns, including contrasting gender gaps between UK and Nigerian writers.
Michelle Nwachukwu, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Martim Brandão
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit inequalities with respect to various cultural contexts. Most prominent open-weights models are trained on Global North data and show prejudicial behavior towards other cultures. Moreover, there is a notable lack of resources to detect biases in non-English languages, especially from Latin America (Latam), a continent containing various cultures, even though they share a common cultural ground. We propose to leverage the content of Wikipedia, the structure of the Wikidata knowledge graph, and expert knowledge from social science in order to create a dataset of question/answer (Q/As) pairs, based on the different popular and social cultures of various Latin American countries. We create the LatamQA database of over 26k questions and associated answers extracted from 26k Wikipedia articles, and transformed into multiple-choice questions (MCQ) in Spanish and Portuguese, in turn translated to English. We use this MCQ to quantify the degree of knowledge of various LLMs and find out (i) a discrepancy in performances between the Latam countries, ones being easier than others for the majority of the models, (ii) that the models perform better in their original language, and (iii) that Iberian Spanish culture is better known than Latam one.
Yannis Karmim, Renato Pino, Hernan Contreras +6
ALMAnaCH · ALMAnaCH team, Inria Paris Center · Dept. of Computer Science, Universidad de Chile +8