From: gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org <gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Joseph Reagle <joseph.2011@reagle.org>
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2013 12:20 PM
To: Max Klein
Cc: Addressing gender equity and exploring ways to increase the participation   of women within Wikimedia projects.
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Seeking advice on how to talk to other lists about sex-issue.

On 10/25/2013 12:56 PM, Klein,Max wrote:
> Well when Markus released his research on-list, I applauded his
> innovative methods and techniques. I also wanted to remind that
> forcing this binary or trinary classification onto people is not
> something that the software is making us do, but rather the us
> inflicting our bias onto the database. At that point I received a
> dismissive answer that if I wanted to talk about the gendergap that I
> should this mailing list, and that my comments were off topic. Then
> another user responded saying that my comments were very much on
> topic, and that's where the conversation stopped.

Hi Max, as you know in my study [1] I used given names, gendered
honorifics, and the ratios of pronouns in biographies to guess gender
[2]. However, beyond the difficulty of gender vs sex, and false binaries
is the imperfectness of the techniques. For instance in my data [3],
such as "10-anbo-1k" [4] I report:

> Of 1000 entries: I guess that 163 are female, 809 are male and 28 are
unknown.

I think it is right to classify the 28 as unknown. Would the be
characterized as "intersexed" in this scheme? I think that would be a
mistake...

Markus' research was not meant for classifying Wikidata items into sex. However there were proposals on Wikidata to classify items by less sophisticated methods than either you or Markus' have proposed. That is a mistake I think, feeling the need to autoclassify wikidata with any heuristic technique. Although I don't dispute statistical gender classification for other purposes like your own.

Maximilian Klein
Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC
+17074787023

[1]: http://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/777
[2]:
http://reagle.org/joseph/pelican/technology/guessing-the-gender-of-bibliographic-subjects.html
[3]: http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/06/gender/results.html
[4]: http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/06/gender/10-anbo-1k.html

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