On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 9:30 AM, Adam Wight <s...@ludd.net> wrote: > la...@fanhistory.com: > > Do you have any data to back up the theory that women will write women's > > content? > > I would hope not, actually!
I would actually HOPE you did. The connection was made by you. Only 20% of biographies are about women. If we can increase women's participation, this gap in articles in articles about women will disappear. I want to know what this premise is, as it appears to be a fundamental assumption in how the gender gap is addressed. I don't understand why the thinking is this way and I'd love to see research done on this topic to prove if this actually holds true. > But a grassroots approach will give more people > the chance to express whatever it is that interests them, maybe join a few > mailing lists and committees, etc. Maybe some of these new editors will be > inspired by gender justice projects. > But you have no proof that female participation will lead to an increase in articles about women? The whole supposition is based on hope then, not on actual data? The planning and research being actively done is not grounded in any research data on the topic? > > Anyway, the reason I pointed to the notably male biographies was to refute > the > OP's suggestion that we be vague about gender discrepancies on > wikipedia... We > certainly can't hide these extremely obvious facts, so let's improve the > mailing list description--by linking to something fun like > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gender_gap ? > The problem is you came up with a 20% number that has no meaning. Is there a gender gap? Do you want to contextualise this data against the actual backdrop of what is going on? How many articles would you expect about female heads of government in the United Kingdom? How does this compare to the 20% number? 20% would suggest that we're actually OVER-REPRESENTING women as I don't believe there have been 20% female prime ministers and queens when compared to men. I think something like 99% of articles about softball players are about women despite the fact that male softball players have a world championship, often meet WP:GNG and pass sport notability... and when playing up the men's game would actually work towards bringing back softball to the Olympics. The articles about the female presidents of the United States and female senators and female house of reps members in the United States, would you say 50% of these positions historically have been held by women? If that is the case, then we do have big gender gap if the number is actually 20% existing but I some how doubt it. Let's talk about female mathematicians. How many of these are articles about mathematicians are about women? What percentage of the notable and influential mathematicians would be women inside of the maths community and according to Wikipedia's guidelines would be women? So your number of 20% is a nice number, but ultimately meaningless because it doesn't explain much at all. Cursory data that doesn't provide actionable data, which the University of Minnesota research study pretty much was, is not helpful towards formulating solutions to the problem. Perhaps, the researchers at the University of Minnesota could revisit the study and do a better job breaking down these numbers and borrow more practices from both marketing and education where specific groups are looked at so more regionally focused solutions can be developed. (I'd guess the gender gap in the USA would be less pronounced than in say India or Cambodia or Spain or New Zealand.) We need data and research we can act on... We need something more than hope as a rationale that we can act on. I'd feel silly applying for a grant saying "Please give us money to improve Wikipedia's gender gap in terms of participation because we hope that doing so will improve content about women as we hope women will edit content about women." I think, before a grant committee, I'd be laughed and my application set aside. -- twitter: purplepopple blog: ozziesport.com
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