Emilio - thanks for the reminder of that excellent page!

On Mon, Apr 13, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Jane Darnell <jane023@gmail.com> wrote:

I have a theory that it is much more difficult to create bios of females in whatever category due to the systemic academic bias aginst including women's biographies in the list of "reliable sources" mostly used in Wikipedia. I would be especially interested in comparison of male-female ration of bios in established dictionaries of biography and how these compare to Wikipedia, and of those, how many such bios were previously deleted on Wikipedia and recreated.

Agreed. I think one of the most effective ways to counter this sort of systemic bias is to find dictionaries of biography & encyclopedic histories of women and digitize them / make them available to editors. Those sources often do exist, though they are less commonly known or available online. We have a decent reason for them to relicense those works, especially if we can more actively help with the digitization as a result.

It would be a small but precise blow against systemic bias to say "the following areas have historical & reporting bias; so we make extra effort to find and recognize additional sources, and vary criteria in inverse proportion to that bias".

Sam