Greetings Gendergap-sters,
I wanted to tell everyone about a new game that Magnus Manske has created, called 'Wikidata - The game!'
http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/
As games go, it's not tremendously exciting - it's not going to be peeling too many people away from their Xboxes or Nintendos.
There's three sub-games: Person, Merge and Gender. You pick one and then the system asks you questions... forever. These answers end up getting pushed back into Wikidata.
I've just been playing the 'gender' game. It shows you a Wikidata object, with a description in a language, as well as possibly a picture. Based on the description, you pick which gender best matches out of male or female (for non-binary genders, you can open up the Wikidata object by clicking on it and editing it directly). If you can't work it out, you can skip it by pressing 'Not sure'.
I've now done over 400 of these. The interface is designed to work with touch devices so you should be able to do it with smartphones and iPads and so on.
But why bother? Why should we care about making sure Wikidata accurately reflects the gender of its subjects?
1. It builds the future capacity of a replacement to the category system. Currently, we have a category system that turns identity into politics. We saw this on English Wikipedia with the "American women novelists" debacle: articles about female writers being moved from being in the main "American novelists" category into a gender-specific category. Some of the women who were thus moved objected on the basis that this was a form of ghettoisation of women's voices, and also pointed out that men weren't being equally moved to "American men novelists".
The categories for discussion debates on English Wikipedia have become a place where identity politics plays out: should we have an "LGBT scientists" category? In come the people to argue that someone being LGBT is somehow a non-essential or non-central part of that person's identity. As it is for gender, so it is for religion and nationality. The flipside to this argument is that having categories based on gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity and religion enables readers to find people. The gay kid who thinks all gay men are stereotypically effeminate men working as beauticians can be disabused of that notion by looking through the 'LGBT sportspersons' category; the girl who has been told that women don't go into science or engineering can do similarly by looking in the 'Women scientists' category. Wikidata may give us a way out of these kinds of conundrums by letting us slice up the world on a great number of different axes. Want to see all the gay Buddhist scientists from Morocco? Fire up some future Wikidata powered faceted semantic search system that one day we'll maybe integrate into Wikipedia and you can do just that.
2. It'll enable us to monitor how well we're doing on systemic bias and the gender gap. Wikidata operates across different versions of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. On 'American women novelists', how well is each language doing in covering them? Is English Wikipedia better or worse at covering women novelists writing in English than French Wikipedia is covering women novelists writing in French? If we can make the machine readable data in Wikidata good and comprehensive, we can use it to flag up shortcomings and systemic bias in how Wikipedias in different languages handle these kinds of sensitive identity topics like gender and ethnicity and nationality. Countering systemic bias and the gender gap among article subjects isn't only an English language problem: Wikimedia is a global movement, and finding weak spots and opportunities to improve in all languages is something we should try and do.
If you haven't played around with Wikidata, give it a go. Get yourself logged in with an account and go through the OAuth process, then you can start playing the games that Magnus has created and help build a system that can be used to monitor and improve coverage across Wikipedias. Wikidata is still at very early stages and you sort of have to have faith in what it could end up being in a few years time rather than being able to see immediate results now. But getting there might be quite good fun.
Yours,
This is great Tom, and something I have been waiting for (and vocalizing the need for on social media).
Lately all I have been doing is working on wikidata re: gender/women subjects these days.
-Sarah
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Tom Morris tom@tommorris.org wrote:
Greetings Gendergap-sters,
I wanted to tell everyone about a new game that Magnus Manske has created, called 'Wikidata - The game!'
http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/
As games go, it's not tremendously exciting - it's not going to be peeling too many people away from their Xboxes or Nintendos.
There's three sub-games: Person, Merge and Gender. You pick one and then the system asks you questions... forever. These answers end up getting pushed back into Wikidata.
I've just been playing the 'gender' game. It shows you a Wikidata object, with a description in a language, as well as possibly a picture. Based on the description, you pick which gender best matches out of male or female (for non-binary genders, you can open up the Wikidata object by clicking on it and editing it directly). If you can't work it out, you can skip it by pressing 'Not sure'.
I've now done over 400 of these. The interface is designed to work with touch devices so you should be able to do it with smartphones and iPads and so on.
But why bother? Why should we care about making sure Wikidata accurately reflects the gender of its subjects?
- It builds the future capacity of a replacement to the category
system. Currently, we have a category system that turns identity into politics. We saw this on English Wikipedia with the "American women novelists" debacle: articles about female writers being moved from being in the main "American novelists" category into a gender-specific category. Some of the women who were thus moved objected on the basis that this was a form of ghettoisation of women's voices, and also pointed out that men weren't being equally moved to "American men novelists".
The categories for discussion debates on English Wikipedia have become a place where identity politics plays out: should we have an "LGBT scientists" category? In come the people to argue that someone being LGBT is somehow a non-essential or non-central part of that person's identity. As it is for gender, so it is for religion and nationality. The flipside to this argument is that having categories based on gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity and religion enables readers to find people. The gay kid who thinks all gay men are stereotypically effeminate men working as beauticians can be disabused of that notion by looking through the 'LGBT sportspersons' category; the girl who has been told that women don't go into science or engineering can do similarly by looking in the 'Women scientists' category. Wikidata may give us a way out of these kinds of conundrums by letting us slice up the world on a great number of different axes. Want to see all the gay Buddhist scientists from Morocco? Fire up some future Wikidata powered faceted semantic search system that one day we'll maybe integrate into Wikipedia and you can do just that.
- It'll enable us to monitor how well we're doing on systemic bias and
the gender gap. Wikidata operates across different versions of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. On 'American women novelists', how well is each language doing in covering them? Is English Wikipedia better or worse at covering women novelists writing in English than French Wikipedia is covering women novelists writing in French? If we can make the machine readable data in Wikidata good and comprehensive, we can use it to flag up shortcomings and systemic bias in how Wikipedias in different languages handle these kinds of sensitive identity topics like gender and ethnicity and nationality. Countering systemic bias and the gender gap among article subjects isn't only an English language problem: Wikimedia is a global movement, and finding weak spots and opportunities to improve in all languages is something we should try and do.
If you haven't played around with Wikidata, give it a go. Get yourself logged in with an account and go through the OAuth process, then you can start playing the games that Magnus has created and help build a system that can be used to monitor and improve coverage across Wikipedias. Wikidata is still at very early stages and you sort of have to have faith in what it could end up being in a few years time rather than being able to see immediate results now. But getting there might be quite good fun.
Yours,
-- Tom Morris http://tommorris.org/
Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
FYI, msg from another list below.
-Jeremy
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Jeremy Baron" jeremy@tuxmachine.com Date: May 21, 2014 11:58 PM Subject: Re: [WikimediaMobile] micro-contributions on mobile via wikidata To: "Magnus Manske" magnusmanske@googlemail.com Cc: "mobile-l" mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On May 21, 2014 9:55 PM, "Jeremy Baron" jeremy@tuxmachine.com wrote:
On May 21, 2014 9:07 PM, "Erik Moeller" erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Most of these "games" would be great in a mobile context.
The current design is already responsive - but I wasn't able to actually get the OAuth authorization to work on mobile, at least not on Firefox/Android :(
I just did it with Firefox. I think I first hit "allow" on desktop
MediaWiki and then got an "application connection error" from mobile. Unknown OAuth key, E006.
Then went back to tool labs, hit the button again and back to desktop
MediaWiki. Now the dialog had some bad styles or something so some of the text was hidden and I couldn't see the buttons at all. Manually changed URL from www.mediawiki.org → m.mediawiki.org and then authorized through mobilefrontend and finally got the game working.
A couple more issues (but not strictly mobile things):
- You may want to avoid merges/"same item" tasks until
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Requests_for_deletions&a... resolved.
- Can we force HTTPS for the game so we're not leaking usernames over
cleartext HTTP? (not just because the edits can be correlated with who was asked about them but also the game interface displays your username and a user could do Wikidata actions in your name if they got your HTTP cookie in the clear)
Thanks
-Jeremy
Can we force HTTPS for the game so we're not leaking usernames over cleartext HTTP? (not just because the edits can be correlated with who was asked about them but also the game interface displays your username and a user could do Wikidata actions in your name if they got your HTTP cookie in the clear)
I would support this change.
Thank you,
Derric Atzrott
From: gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:gendergap-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jeremy Baron Sent: 22 May 2014 00:00 To: Increasing female participation in Wikimedia projects Subject: Re: [Gendergap] Wikidata, gamification and gender
FYI, msg from another list below.
-Jeremy
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Jeremy Baron" jeremy@tuxmachine.com Date: May 21, 2014 11:58 PM Subject: Re: [WikimediaMobile] micro-contributions on mobile via wikidata To: "Magnus Manske" magnusmanske@googlemail.com Cc: "mobile-l" mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org
On May 21, 2014 9:55 PM, "Jeremy Baron" jeremy@tuxmachine.com wrote:
On May 21, 2014 9:07 PM, "Erik Moeller" erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 2:17 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
Most of these "games" would be great in a mobile context.
The current design is already responsive - but I wasn't able to actually get the OAuth authorization to work on mobile, at least not on Firefox/Android :(
I just did it with Firefox. I think I first hit "allow" on desktop MediaWiki and then got an "application connection error" from mobile. Unknown OAuth key, E006.
Then went back to tool labs, hit the button again and back to desktop MediaWiki. Now the dialog had some bad styles or something so some of the text was hidden and I couldn't see the buttons at all. Manually changed URL from www.mediawiki.org → m.mediawiki.org and then authorized through mobilefrontend and finally got the game working.
A couple more issues (but not strictly mobile things):
- You may want to avoid merges/"same item" tasks until https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Requests_for_deletions https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Requests_for_deletions&oldid=132186913 &oldid=132186913 is resolved.
- Can we force HTTPS for the game so we're not leaking usernames over cleartext HTTP? (not just because the edits can be correlated with who was asked about them but also the game interface displays your username and a user could do Wikidata actions in your name if they got your HTTP cookie in the clear)
Thanks
-Jeremy