Based on the GenderGap discussion "They want to delete First Ladies
now?", I suggest that anyone with an interest in tracking and saving
articles about women or LGBT people, keep the following Petscan
reports as bookmarks and think about taking a look at it every now and
then when they have a bit of spare wiki-time:
* https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=664225 (Women biographies)
* https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?psid=664239 (LGBT+ biographies)
The report shows biography articles which have been PRODded and
filters them by any with women-related categories. At the moment this
gives 6 BLPs about women have been marked for potential deletion among
a current total of 71 PRODs for BLPs, while there are apparently zero
BLP PRODs relating to LGBT people. The numbers seem to show no special
bias for deleting articles about women or LGBT people, however this is
debatable.
Rescuing a BLP can be as simple as finding a reliable source to add.
It's not hard to adapt the Petscan report to track other minority
groups, you just need to find a good parent category to search on.
Keep in mind the report is not ideal as some stub articles about women
may not be well categorized and so will be missed, plus there may be
false matches due to poor category hierarchies. Similarly most early
biographies about LGBT people will tend to not be categorized (or if
they are, are likely to get speedy deleted as controversial unless
well sourced). To avoid this happening, it is worth going to the
parent category <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:BLP_articles_proposed_for_deletion
>, opening all the relevant articles, and ensuring they have
appropriate women or LGBT related categories.
As alluded to in the previous GenderGap discussion, it makes a lot of
sense that when a relevant edit-a-thon or prize competition is coming
up, we should make a point of suggesting that participants look at the
list of PRODs in addition to starting new articles. :-)
Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae
It was a bit of a shock to see on Nell Arthur
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nell_Arthur>'s page an imminent threat of
deletion. I wouldn't have thought an article on a First Lady could be so
vulnerable. Somebody is claiming that she has no notability just for being
married to the vice president who became president after her death. It took
me about 5 minutes to find RS for the fact that she was indeed notable and
she had everything to do with getting her husband's political career going.
He could not have accomplished what he did without her.
smh
So I edited that fact in; in fact, I created a new section headed
"Political career." Now I can remove the deletion threat (just in time
before the ax falls!), but I became alarmed: Which other articles on women
are under this threat? OK, I'm biased: I come from the town named after her
dad. I couldn't just let her slip away.
Below is the text of the notice, one I haven't seen before, and it has an
alarming red-bordered appearance right up on top of the article, not the
talk page.
For equality,
J.Hy
It is *proposed that this article be deleted
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proposed_deletion>* because of the
following concern:
Notability is not inherited, and subject only seems to really be known for
her marriage to Chester A. Arthur
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chester_A._Arthur>. No indication of
meeting WP:Notability
(people) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)> at
all.
If you can address this concern by improving
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Editing_policy>, copyediting
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style>, sourcing
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Introduction_to_referencing_with_Wiki_Ma…>
, renaming <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Moving_a_page>, or
merging <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Merging> the page,
*please edit
this page
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nell_Arthur&action=edit>* and
do so. *You may remove this message if you improve the article or otherwise
object to deletion for any reason*. Although not required, you are
encouraged to explain why you object to the deletion, either in your edit
summary or on the talk page. If this template is removed, *do not replace
it <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proposed_deletion#Nominating>*.
The article may be deleted if this message remains in place for seven days,
i.e., after 06:27, 7 January 2017 (UTC).
If you created the article, please don't be offended. Instead, consider
improving the article so that it is acceptable according to the deletion
policy <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy>.
------------------------------
*Nominator:* Please consider notifying the author/project: {{subst
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Substitution>:proposed deletion
notify <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Proposed_deletion_notify>|Nell
Arthur|concern=Notability is not inherited, and subject only seems to
really be known for her marriage to [[Chester A. Arthur]]. No indication of
meeting [[WP:Notability (people)]] at all.}} ~~~~
--
__________________________________
I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
--Audre Lorde
Hi Everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday,
December 21, 2016 at 11:30 AM (PST) 18:30 (UTC).
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmrlu5qTgyA
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. And,
you can watch our past research showcases here
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase#December_2016>.
The December 2016 Research Showcase includes:
English Wikipedia Quality Dynamics and the Case of WikiProject Women
ScientistsBy *Aaron Halfaker
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Halfak_(WMF)>*With every productive
edit, Wikipedia is steadily progressing towards higher and higher quality.
In order to track quality improvements, Wikipedians have developed an
article quality assessment rating scale that ranges from "Stub" at the
bottom to "Featured Articles" at the top. While this quality scale has the
promise of giving us insights into the dynamics of quality improvements in
Wikipedia, it is hard to use due to the sporadic nature of manual
re-assessments. By developing a highly accurate prediction model (based on
work by Warncke-Wang et al.), we've developed a method to assess an
articles quality at any point in history. Using this model, we explore
general trends in quality in Wikipedia and compare these trends to those of
an interesting cross-section: Articles tagged by WikiProject Women
Scientists. Results suggest that articles about women scientists were lower
quality than the rest of the wiki until mid-2013, after which a dramatic
shift occurred towards higher quality. This shift may correlate with (and
even be caused by) this WikiProjects initiatives.
Privacy, Anonymity, and Perceived Risk in Open Collaboration. A Study of
Tor Users and WikipediansBy *Andrea Forte*In a recent qualitative study to
be published at CSCW 2017, collaborators Rachel Greenstadt, Naz Andalibi,
and I examined privacy practices and concerns among contributors to open
collaboration projects. We collected interview data from people who use the
anonymity network Tor who also contribute to online projects and from
Wikipedia editors who are concerned about their privacy to better
understand how privacy concerns impact participation in open collaboration
projects. We found that risks perceived by contributors to open
collaboration projects include threats of surveillance, violence,
harassment, opportunity loss, reputation loss, and fear for loved ones. We
explain participants’ operational and technical strategies for mitigating
these risks and how these strategies affect their contributions. Finally,
we discuss chilling effects associated with privacy loss, the need for open
collaboration projects to go beyond attracting and educating participants
to consider their privacy, and some of the social and technical approaches
that could be explored to mitigate risk at a project or community level.
--
Sarah R. Rodlund
Senior Project Coordinator-Engineering, Wikimedia Foundation
srodlund(a)wikimedia.org