On 9 June 2014 20:21, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
- WIkidata has ~2080k items marked as people
- Of these, ~1893k have a "gender" property (91%)
Can you define "item" in this context?
"Item" here is a single Wikidata entry:
http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q320
which may correspond to one Wikipedia article, one hundred Wikipedia articles, etc - but all on the same topic. (Potentially it may correspond to *no* Wikipedia articles - it's not strictly required, and in any case the source article may be deleted - but there's unlikely to be a statistically large number of these just now)
Do we have any comparable data points by which to evaluate our progress? Perhaps a similar breakdown of other reference works, or if there is some sort of summary data available about biographies written (using LOC data?), etc.
The new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was about 10% female when published in 2004, though this was skewed by a limitation to include all entries from the original, including a lot of - to modern eyes - very non-notable men. http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/images/stories/articles/baigent2005.pdf (It's since crept up to ~11%)
Max has done some numbers based on gender assigned in VIAF entries, I think, but I can't immediately find it. Ben Schmidt did something similar based on first names of authors: http://sappingattention.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/women-in-libraries.html