On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 1:29 AM, Adam Wight <s...@ludd.net> wrote: > > It's obviously too early to dismantle a gender equality project however. > Maybe I can point to another factoid which demonstrates a generative, > systematic bias: only 20% of notable person biographies on WP are about > women [1].
This number feels isolated, too big and there are obvious holes. A lot of articles don't describe gender. I'd be curious as to which methods are being done to identify which articles are about women versus which articles are about men? More importantly, I'd like to see these numbers broken down. I strongly suspect in certain geographic and topic areas, there is much more likely to be parity than in other areas. (Olympic medalists from 2008 are probably covered in terms of existence equally well. I would guess the number of male softball players would be UNDER represented as a function of notability. I'd also guess women from Africa are less likely to have articles if they are notable than say women from the United States.) This sort of in-depth look is probably MORE important at the end of the day than the 20% because it gives a clear path to guidance of areas to fix. > IMO, recruiting more women editors is an excellent way to > combat that bias, because it doesn't presuppose we know how to fix the > problem... only that we know some people who can do the job. > > At the end of the day, I'd need to see data which supports this as a theory. I've been involved in the fan fiction writing community for more years than I would care to count before taking a two year break. The community probably has the inverse gender proportion of English Wikipedia. One of the CONTINUAL problems is that women do not write about female characters. They often ignore them. More women write male/male erotica inside the female dominated fan fiction community than women write female/female erotica. (And in some communities, female writers of male/male fan fiction outnumber the female writers of male/female fan fiction inside a specific fan community.) I know of a few female contributors who edit sport articles, but rarely edit women's sport articles. Do you have any data to back up the theory that women will write women's content? Sincerely, Laura Hale -- mobile: 0412183663 twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com
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