On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 8:24 AM, Jane Darnell <jane...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Oddly, there appears to be no solidarity among female Wikipedians that take > this into account, because I assume we have lots of female academic > Wikipedians who could easily write about other female academics in academic > articles (or on Wikipedia) if they wanted to and don't. I have a very basic question, to do with navigating Wikipedia's categories. Is there a sensible way to query the category system (or extracts, e.g. to DBPedia) to produce a side-by-side comparison of how many pages on♀vs ♂ [might as well add: vs ⚧, i.e. nonbinary] academics there are in existence on Wikipedia? I should say that as a user I've often found the category system confusing, no less in this case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Academics -> 36 persons, 14 subcategories of which one subcategory is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_academics -> 33 persons, 3 subcategories of which one subcategory is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_academics_by_nationality To take an example: Daniela Müller is on the list of Academics, but not the list of Women Academics; neither is she listed on these various subcategory pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_historians -> 120 pages, 6 subcategories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_women_academics -> 69 pages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_women_academics -> 6 pages Nor, coming at this from another angle, is she listed on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Expatriate_academics -> 6 pages, 9 subcategories ... although her bio page says that she is a "German theologian and church historian, who works in the Netherlands since 2007 and who holds the chair of Church History/History of Christianity." narrative: I don't for a moment question that representation is very unequal (and we could re-do this exercise along other dimensions as you suggest Jane -- as evidenced by the German women vs Dutch women comparison, combining dimensions produces revealing results)... but I wish I knew just HOW unequal things are. At the moment it seems very difficult to know the answer to that question -- but, again, this may be because I'm naive about the art of wiki querying. I know that some researchers have managed to get good data out about this sort of thing, e.g. «More information on Wikipedia deals with Europe than all of the locations outside of Europe.» GRAHAM , M., HOGAN , B., STRAUMANN , R. K., AND MEDHAT , A. 2014. Uneven geographies of user-generated information: patterns of increasing informational poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, 4, 746–764. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
