Oliver,
Here is one paper on mapping topic coverage in Wikipedia from 2009:
Kittur, A., Chi, E. H., and Suh, B. 2009. What's in Wikipedia?: Mapping Topics and Conflict using Socially Annotated Category Structure http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~echi/papers/2009-CHI2009/p1509.pdf. In Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI '09. ACM, New York, NY, 1509-1512. ACM Link http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518930 (24% acceptance rate)
--Ed (on my tablet) On Apr 8, 2015 05:01, wiki-research-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
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Today's Topics:
- Re: Gender-specific page titles (Flöck)
- Re: Research on Wikidata's content coverage (Flöck)
Message: 1 Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 11:09:00 +0000 From: Flöck, Fabian Fabian.Floeck@gesis.org To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Gender-specific page titles Message-ID: 7ECBA035-F388-4F89-9B65-A7C1C956AA2C@gesis.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Interesting, thanks Mark!
- Fabian
On 07.04.2015, at 16:38, Mark J.Nelson <mjn@anadrome.orgmailto: mjn@anadrome.org> wrote:
Flöck, Fabian <Fabian.Floeck@gesis.orgmailto:Fabian.Floeck@gesis.org> writes:
Does anyone know about a study that looks at how often for example articles about a profession use the male instead of the female form as the name (female form doesn't exist or is just a redirect)?
It would probably not be a so much of an issue for English, but rather Spanish, German, Russian etc. Concrete example: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor exists in German, but https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professorin is just a redirect.
One thing to be careful of in such a study (though I would also like to see it!) is tha the politics and preferences in this area vary widely across languages, and sometimes within a language, so a purely data-driven study has to be careful about its assumptions and generalizations.
Below a long-ish discussion of Greek that you may skip if not interested (it ended up longer-winded than I had expected):
For example in Greek it is very profession-specific whether the trend is towards using a slashed form of both genders, or towards convergence on a single form that applies to both genders (sometimes with atypical morphology). Sometimes it depends on the specific word form and historical usage. In fields that historically had both men and women, both forms are very well established and tend to persist, e.g. a male teacher is a δάσκαλος and a female one is a δασκάλα. But in fields that were typically so male-dominated that only the masculine version has been in common use, there's disagreement over whether it's more progressive to "revive" a feminine form, or to generalize the masculine form to cover both genders. For example a female president would universally be called by the historically masculine form πρόεδρος, but with a feminine article (i.e. πρόεδρος can now be either a masculine or feminine noun, depending on context, even though it's morphologically irregular as a feminine noun). There is in Byzantine Greek a feminine analog, προέδρισσα (referring to a different position), but it isn't used today outside humorous contexts (roughly where you might use "Presidentess" in English). The same applies for a number of other more common professions, but for some it's more disputed which form should be used (for President there isn't any usage variance).
In short it's complex, so I hope any data set is careful about what it's counting as data, and why. :)
-Mark
-- Mark J. Nelson Anadrome Research http://www.anadrome.org
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Cheers, Fabian
-- Fabian Flöck Research Associate Computational Social Science department @GESIS Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany Tel: + 49 (0) 221-47694-208 fabian.floeck@gesis.orgmailto:fabian.floeck@gesis.org
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