Leaving aside the language issue, there's an important issue in this
article re the Gendergap. I had been under the impression that Wikipedia's
ratio of bios by gender was skewed, but overall no more skewed than the
secondary sources. That we have many gaps, male and female but, and this
could be the biggest success of those involved in combating the gender gap,
If a woman makes it into the secondary sources her chances of a Wikipedia
article are now about the same as a man's. Obviously that varies by topic,
there are subjects where people have systematically worked on all the
female redlinks and others where the skew may be the other way. If the
message that was meant by that article was that notable women are less
likely to have an article on them than notable men then we have regressed.
If the message was intended to be that Wikipedia's notability standards
perpetuate past wrongs done to women, then I'd agree, but perhaps the
solution is elsewhere.
More importantly, I had thought that we had failed the women we write about
in two ways. Wikipedia articles about women tend to over emphasise their
appearance and family ties as opposed to the things we cover in bios of
men, and bios of women are linked to less than bios of men. If that's still
the case then I'd appreciate a signpost article on do's and don't when
writing about women, I'm not qualified to write such an article but I do
promise to help promote it. As for relative underlinking, this could just
be a function of time, if the proportion of female BLPS has risen since the
gendergap project started it could just be that articles get more linked to
if they exist. If women are mentioned in other articles but are less likely
to be linked to then I have an idea as to how we might address this, if
they are less likely to be mentioned in other articles then we have a
problem in search of a solution.
PS Those who like and expect profanity in discourse are welcome to crack
the code and count the profanities hidden in this email.
WSC