https://toolserver.org/~robin/?tool=incubatorprefs&db=ruwikiversity is a tool that allows you to check the participation rates of males/females on various wikiprojects based on users who explicitly state this information in their profile. I've been trying to get this data for specific country pages on the http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiWomenCamp/FAQ/Perspectivesnational perspectives. I've done a sample of about 89 different projects, getting the total number of males/females and the percentage of males/females on a given project.
Across these projects, the mean, median and mode was:
Females Users % Mean 638.4269663 13.05741573 Median 9 10.88 Mode 0 0
What was surprising was some projects have 20%+ female participation for relatively large projects including Russian and Portuguese Wikipedia. Slovene Wikiquote only has 90 women on it, but they make up 75% of the identified by gender population. Data below.
Language Project Gender Users % Slovenian Wikisource Female 90 77.59 Arabic Wikimedia Female 1 50 Polish Wikiquote Female 132 42.31 Slovenian Wikipedia Female 928 35.79 Russian Wikiquote Female 127 31.91 Portuguese Wikibooks Female 223 30.42 Portuguese Wiktionary Female 114 29.61 Portuguese Wikiquote Female 58 29 Russian Wikiversity Female 180 26.63 Portuguese Wikipedia Female 12,264 25.9 Russian Wikibooks Female 195 25.36 Dutch Wikibooks Female 54 24.43 Persian Wikibooks Female 43 23.5 Russian Wikipedia Female 33,275 23.34 French Wikisource Female 100 23.15 French Wikiquote Female 34 22.52 Dutch Wiktionary Female 52 22.51 Portuguese Wikisource Female 36 21.56 Portuguese Wikiversity Female 106 21.54 Russian Wikinews Female 60 21.05 Polish Wikimedia Female 27 20.3 Polish Wiktionary Female 54 20.3 Polish Wikibooks Female 63 20 Arabic Wikiquote Female 29 19.46 Arabic Wikibooks Female 30 19.35 Slovenian Wikiquote Female 2 18.18 Polish Wikisource Female 23 17.69 Russian Wikisource Female 60 16.76 Arabic Wikisource Female 22 16.67 Dutch Wikimedia Female 8 16.33 French Wikibooks Female 49 16.12 Persian Wikiquote Female 17 15.89 French Wikiversity Female 87 15.88 Norwegian (Nynorsk) Wikipedia Female 57 15.83 Vietnamese Wiktionary Female 37 14.92 Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia Female 79 14.77 Arabic Wikipedia Female 3,580 14.73 French Wikipedia Female 4,319 14.65 Vietnamese Wikisource Female 12 13.95 Dutch Wikiquote Female 5 13.51 Korean Wikisource Female 9 12.68 French Wikinews Female 26 12.32 Arabic Wikiversity Female 9 12.16 Polish Wikinews Female 13 11.71 Portuguese Wikinews Female 16 10.88 Vietnamese Wikiquotes Female 8 10.67 Vietnamese Wikibooks Female 14 10.61 Arabic Wikinews Female 12 10.43 Russian Wikimedia Female 5 10.42 Catalan Wiktionary Female 3 10 Persian Wikisource Female 14 9.72 Korean Wiktionary Female 7 9.21 Catalan Wikibooks Female 3 9.09 Persian Wikinews Female 7 8.75 Persian Wiktionary Female 16 8.56 Asturian Wikipedia Female 10 8.55 Korean Wikiquote Female 2 8 Catalan Wikisource Female 1 7.14 Corsican Wikimedia Female 1 7.14 Portuguese Wikimedia Female 1 6.67 Dutch Wikinews Female 1 4.76 Ripuarian Wikipedia Female 3 4.29 Kurdish Wiktionary Female 1 3.57 Dutch Wikisource Female 1 3.45 Furlan Wikipedia Female 1 2 Banjar Wikipedia Female 1 1.75 Corsican Wikipedia Female 1 1.69 Buginese Wikipedia Female 1 1.67 Kurdish Wikipedia Female 1 0.81 Catalan Wikinews Female 0 0 Catalan Wikiquote Female 0 0 Fijian Wikpedia Female 0 0 Fijian Wiktionary Female 0 0 Korean Wikibooks Female 0 0 Korean Wikinews Female 0 0 Kanuri Wikipedia Female 0 0 Kanuri Wikiquote Female 0 0 Kashmiri Wikipedia Female 0 0 Kashmiri Wikibooks Female 0 0 Kashmiri Wikiquote Female 0 0 Kashmiri Wiktionary Female 0 0 Kurdish Wikibooks Female 0 0 Kurdish Wikiquote Female 0 0 Slovenian Wikibooks Female 0 0 Asturian Wikibooks Female 0 0 Asturian Wikiquote Female 0 0 Buryat (Russia) Wikipedia Female 0 0 Corsican Wikibooks Female 0 0 Corsican Wikiquote Female 0 0
What is going on here? What makes the Portuguese, Russians, Poles and Slovenes so good at attracting a larger percentage of female contributors than their English speaking counterparts?
On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
What was surprising was some projects have 20%+ female participation for relatively large projects including Russian and Portuguese Wikipedia. Slovene Wikiquote only has 90 women on it, but they make up 75% of the identified by gender population.
Note that a key function of the gender setting (the one which originally motivated its creation) is to make it possible for the user to be addressed correctly by the software in their respective language. [*] This means it's statistically a fairly poor measure of gender participation across projects because it's distorted by a) the magnitude of gender-specific language differences in different languages, b) the degree to which the localization into a given language takes those differences into account, c) the awareness of users regarding those differences.
It's probably a better predictor of actual gender participation in languages where there is little or no gender-specific localization, and little or no awareness of that localization aspect of the feature, and a large overall sample of participating users (e.g. English).
If you'd like to research that further, you can specifically find out the degree to which the MediaWiki software takes gender differences into account for a given language by grepping for the text "{{GENDER" in the Messages*.php files in the "languages/messages" directory of a MediaWiki check-out.
[*] For even more technical detail: The gender setting in the user preferences, and taking gender into account in the localization, pre-dates the gender localization of the User: namespace. The User: namespace localization by gender was just a particularly tricky case of taking that setting into account and was only deployed with MediaWiki 1.18.
-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
This data is interesting, but even if you ignore the weirdness introduced by gender localization and small sample sizes, it doesn't compare directly to the gender numbers that came out of the editor surveys. I don't have actual statistics on it but going from memory I'm almost positive that the software settings indicate a consistently higher proportion of women than men than direct surveys like editor trends do. This tool can't provide enWP stats and I don't know them offhand, you can look at other en projects to get an idea of how different the numbers reported this way are from the numbers reported directly by survey. This tool has enWikiversity reporting ~20% women, enWikibooks ~16%, and enWikisource ~17% - all significantly higher %'s than have been found using other methods. So, instead of ptWikiversity reporting 21% women vs the 8.5% you would expect enWikiversity to have going off of this year's survey results, it would be ~21% vs ~20%.
This is certainly something worth exploring and I am certain that there are language community based differences in gender ratios, but it is good to be aware of the limitations of the dataset.
It would be very interesting though if the Portuguese communities really do have more balanced gender ratios than the English ones do, since I've heard some interesting things about their community.
---- Kevin Gorman User:Kgorman-UCB
I would love to know what do you heard about us that makes you so surprised that we have women editing there.
Laura, in pt case I can imagine the wp number to be right (or close enough), but from where did you took the wikimedia one? pt.wikimedia.org is a redirect to wikimedia.pt No dia 29 de Dez de 2011 03:56, "Kevin Gorman" kgorman@gmail.com escreveu:
This data is interesting, but even if you ignore the weirdness introduced by gender localization and small sample sizes, it doesn't compare directly to the gender numbers that came out of the editor surveys. I don't have actual statistics on it but going from memory I'm almost positive that the software settings indicate a consistently higher proportion of women than men than direct surveys like editor trends do. This tool can't provide enWP stats and I don't know them offhand, you can look at other en projects to get an idea of how different the numbers reported this way are from the numbers reported directly by survey. This tool has enWikiversity reporting ~20% women, enWikibooks ~16%, and enWikisource ~17% - all significantly higher %'s than have been found using other methods. So, instead of ptWikiversity reporting 21% women vs the 8.5% you would expect enWikiversity to have going off of this year's survey results, it would be ~21% vs ~20%.
This is certainly something worth exploring and I am certain that there are language community based differences in gender ratios, but it is good to be aware of the limitations of the dataset.
It would be very interesting though if the Portuguese communities really do have more balanced gender ratios than the English ones do, since I've heard some interesting things about their community.
Kevin Gorman User:Kgorman-UCB
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 02:45, Béria Lima beria.lima@wikimedia.pt wrote:
Laura, in pt case I can imagine the wp number to be right (or close enough), but from where did you took the wikimedia one? pt.wikimedia.org is a redirect to wikimedia.pt
it is a redirect but it's also a wiki with content and therefore a database and therefore gender stats! see back door: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pt/wiki/Wikimedia_Portugal :)
-Jeremy
ya, but render false results, Jeremy, since we don't use it anymore ;) _____ *Béria Lima* Wikimedia Portugal http://wikimedia.pt (351) 963 953 042
*Imagine um mundo onde é dada a qualquer pessoa a possibilidade de ter livre acesso ao somatório de todo o conhecimento humano. Ajude-nos a construir esse sonho. http://wikimedia.pt/Donativos*
On 29 December 2011 10:32, Jeremy Baron jeremy@tuxmachine.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 02:45, Béria Lima beria.lima@wikimedia.pt wrote:
Laura, in pt case I can imagine the wp number to be right (or close
enough),
but from where did you took the wikimedia one? pt.wikimedia.org is a redirect to wikimedia.pt
it is a redirect but it's also a wiki with content and therefore a database and therefore gender stats! see back door: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/pt/wiki/Wikimedia_Portugal :)
-Jeremy
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Erik Moeller, 29/12/2011 03:35:
[*] For even more technical detail: The gender setting in the user preferences, and taking gender into account in the localization, pre-dates the gender localization of the User: namespace. The User: namespace localization by gender was just a particularly tricky case of taking that setting into account and was only deployed with MediaWiki 1.18.
Thanks to Nikerabbit I've added a list of languages which currently use this feature, for the sake of clarity (it wasn't documented anywhere): current location https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:MediaWiki_architecture#Interface_langu... (end of the paragraph).
Nemo
2011/12/29 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:
On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
What was surprising was some projects have 20%+ female participation for relatively large projects including Russian and Portuguese Wikipedia. Slovene Wikiquote only has 90 women on it, but they make up 75% of the identified by gender population.
Note that a key function of the gender setting (the one which originally motivated its creation) is to make it possible for the user to be addressed correctly by the software in their respective language. [*]
That would explain, why it is these languages in particular which show seemingly increased female participation. In Slavic languages, grammatical gender distinctions are particularly pervasive. I suppose that the software addresses you as male by default. So males are less likely to adjust their setting than females.
Johannes
Johannes Rohr, 29/12/2011 12:32:
I suppose that the software addresses you as male by default.
Not necessarily (because there a male/female/undefined tripartition and it defaults to male only if the third option is not defined), but AFAIK mostly.
So males are less likely to adjust their setting than females.
Sure, and probably even more than average when gender namespaces are implemented, because that's very visible.
Nemo
2011/12/29 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com:
Johannes Rohr, 29/12/2011 12:32:
I suppose that the software addresses you as male by default.
Not necessarily (because there a male/female/undefined tripartition and it defaults to male only if the third option is not defined), but AFAIK mostly.
So males are less likely to adjust their setting than females.
sounds like an easy way to get more accurate gender settings: switch the default to female in these languages. one month male default, one month female default and so on...
greetings, elian