On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Laura Hale <la...@fanhistory.com> wrote:
> What was surprising was some projects have 20%+ female participation for
> relatively
> large projects including Russian and Portuguese Wikipedia. Slovene Wikiquote
> only
> has 90 women on it, but they make up 75% of the identified by gender
> population.
Note that a key function of the gender setting (the one which
originally motivated its creation) is to make it possible for the user
to be addressed correctly by the software in their respective
language. [*] This means it's statistically a fairly poor measure of
gender participation across projects because it's distorted by a) the
magnitude of gender-specific language differences in different
languages, b) the degree to which the localization into a given
language takes those differences into account, c) the awareness of
users regarding those differences.
It's probably a better predictor of actual gender participation in
languages where there is little or no gender-specific localization,
and little or no awareness of that localization aspect of the feature,
and a large overall sample of participating users (e.g. English).
If you'd like to research that further, you can specifically find out
the degree to which the MediaWiki software takes gender differences
into account for a given language by grepping for the text "{{GENDER"
in the Messages*.php files in the "languages/messages" directory of a
MediaWiki check-out.
[*] For even more technical detail: The gender setting in the user
preferences, and taking gender into account in the localization,
pre-dates the gender localization of the User: namespace. The User:
namespace localization by gender was just a particularly tricky case
of taking that setting into account and was only deployed with
MediaWiki 1.18.
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
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