As one of the English Wikipedia's top content creators [1], let me weigh in here with a shameless plug that I would like to present my work at Wikimania this year and am hoping for sponsorship from the WMF in order to do that.[2]
I agree heartily with Laura that <quote>One of the things that really needs to be done is to develop a list of inherently notable matching pairs and then see what the patterns are, because general lists of notable women are unlikely to answer the question of how real the systematic bias is. Further, gendered lists where the percentages of men and women present should also be attained and the red links percentages for each gender should also be looked at.</quote> My corner of the Wikiverse is art, and I have been busily matching up various lists of artists and have become well aware of a huge difference between "documented artists" and "art market artists". I find lots more women in the second group than the first group, and there has been a lot of previous work done on the why of this gender bias. This was in fact one of the main reasons for people to join the recent Art&Feminism edit-a-thon. The gender bias in the world of art museums is much easier to document and track, because it is so overwhelmingly obvious. Pick any top art museum in the world and do a "weenie count" [3]. The percentage of works by women actually hanging in public display galleries is way less than 10%. The main reason is of course that people want the biggest bang for their buck in any situation, and art museum curators are no exception. They would rather buy one Anthony van Dijk than 50 works by his lesser known male or female contemporaries. If you prioritize any "would like to buy list" that any art museum curator is holding at any given auction, the percentage of female names on those lists will probably be zero. That said, I have discovered that most art museums do have quality works by women in their collections, but these are not on show. I have been resurrecting these works wherever I find them virtually on Wikipedia as a way to illustrate biographies on these artists. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-01-22/Special_report [2] https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Women_on_Wikipedia [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Girls 2014-02-20 13:16 GMT+01:00, Laura Hale <la...@fanhistory.com>: > On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 10:16 AM, David Monniaux > <david.monni...@free.fr>wrote: > >> >> This could help identify to which extent the problem is created by the >> Wikipedia authors, as opposed to simply reflecting the situation of >> current scholarly literature. That is, I would like to distinguish the >> effects of the Wikipedia writing process and the demographics of >> contributors from those of available reference sources and general >> scholarly outlook. >> > > This is often context specific to the area being edited on Wikipedia. It > is also hard to do 1:1 comparisons between men and women. > > One area where it is easier to do 1:1 comparisons is sports. Sports > notability pretty much insures that any national team is notable, yet when > matching pairs are looked for on English Wikipedia, the chances are higher > of the men's national team article existing for the most popular and > historically male dominant professional sports are higher. These article > titles are implicitly non-gendered. On the other hand, women's national > teams do not exist, and are often gendered. > > One example is basketball. > http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fc/even/rank/p/openNodeIDs/1000/selNodeID/1000/rankWome.htmlshows > 73 women's teams and > http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fc/even/rank/p/openNodeIDs/943/selNodeID/943/rankMen.html85 > men's teams. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_men's_national_basketball_teams is > the Wikipedia list for men. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women's_national_basketball_teams is > the Wikipedia list for women. Ignoring defunct teams and including > non-FIBA recognise teams, there are 69 redlinks for men. The number of > redlinked women's national teams is 182. The ratio of redlinked teams is > not near parity at all to suggest that the existence of men's national > basketball teams women's national basketball teams are similar. > > There are 69 occurrences where both a men's national team and a women's > national team article exists for the same country. (Some of these matched > pairs are for junior national teams.) In 55 of these occurrences, the > men's national team article title is ungendered when the women's national > team exists, where in only 14 instances of men and women's paired team > articles are the men's article names gendered. > > Again, notability guidelines generally imply these articles are inherently > notable. (And the lack of the existence of a team doesn't necessarily > negate the article's notability, as in a number of cases, the lack of a > team in certain sports is discussed in a lot of literature to the point > where non-existent teams can be considered notable.) > > By competing in world championships and the Olympics, you're also generally > considered notable. Russia's women are ranked third in the world. The men > are seventh. 2 articles about women's national team players are missing. 1 > is missing for the men. The French women are ranked fourth in the world. > Articles are missing about 4 of the 15 players. The men are ranked 8th in > the world. 0 of the 15 articles are missing. The Spanish women are ranked > sixth and the men second. 3 of the 15 articles are missing for the women, > and 0 for the men. (Though more articles exist about women than men for > the Czech Republic and Brazilian national teams.) > > One of the things that really needs to be done is to develop a list of > inherently notable matching pairs and then see what the patterns are, > because general lists of notable women are unlikely to answer the question > of how real the systematic bias is. Further, gendered lists where the > percentages of men and women present should also be attained and the red > links percentages for each gender should also be looked at. > > This just takes huge amounts of work because a lot of these lists are not > easy to get. > > Sincerely, > Laura Hale > > -- > twitter: purplepopple > _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
