On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 7:38 PM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
2012/2/1 emijrp emijrp@gmail.com
... and I'm thinking about an analysis of male-female biographies ratio between Wikipedias.
After an analysis of a sample of 364k biographies where ~44% of them where classified using he/she his/her word occurences, it shows only 6.2% of female biographies on English Wikipedia. These results are preliminar, has anyone done a similar approach before? I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
(1) Check the paper by Lauren Rhue and Joseph Reagle "Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica" http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/gender-bias-in-wp-eb.html
The method of crawling the sites, the large size of the comparison, and the guessing of genders were interesting technical challenges that once addressed permitted us to write (...) We conclude that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender.
(2) Cultural bias in Wikipedia content on famous persons by Ewa S. Callahan, Susan C. Herring http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.21577/full This study examines the extent to which content and perspectives vary across cultures by comparing articles about famous persons in the Polish and English editions of Wikipedia. (I don't remember if and how much they emphasise gender in their analysis and I think they do mainly manual coding but I'm not sure, anyway worth checking)