Joseph M. Reagle Jr.

Education

Reagle received an undergraduate degree in computer science and a minor in history from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He then enrolled in the Technology Policy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and wrote a masters thesis on trust and cryptographic financial instruments. He returned to MIT as a research engineer, and also served as a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. and earned a PhD in 2008 with a thesis about the history and collaborative culture of Wikipedia, supervised by Helen Nissenbaum.

Career and research Reagle was a member of the World Wide Web Consortium from 1996 to 2003.

In 2002, he was listed as one of MIT Technology Review's TR35, a list of the world's top innovators under the age of 35.

In 2010, he reconstructed the first ten thousand contributions to Wikipedia from a previously lost data dump as a simple website. In 2011, Reagle published a journal article with Lauren Rhue that examined gender bias in Wikipedia, using gendered pronouns to detect articles about women and comparing and contrasting their findings against female coverage in other encyclopedias. The article concluded "that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica". and all of his books are available online.

Selected publications