Interesting, Magnus, thanks! After working on lots of the female names in various databases, I can also say that it is pretty difficult to scrape enough information together to produce a Wikipedia-worthy stub on many of the women mentioned in those databases. As you point out, we don't have paintings to illustrate their articles that indicate age and culture (such paintings may still exist, but they are lacking the name of the sitter by now). What we also lack is their birthdate and birthplace. Many women don't disclose this information as it is considered impolite. It is often lacking in historical sources as well. Pretty much all we know is that somebody had a mother, but the mother's name and heritage is often lost along the wayside.
On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske@googlemail.com
wrote:
To spam this list as well as Twitter :-)
http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=250
On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 5:41 PM, Maximilian Klein isalix@gmail.com wrote:
Thank you all for the feedback. I will have taken away quite a few good ideas for further investigation, to summarize:
Gerard - look at the ratios of those bios of a language, which exist only in that language. Han Teng - "male gaze" hypothesis, create a by-profession crosstabular analysis. Jane - look at the ratios of leading actors by language, and "fictional humans" more closely. Jonathan - perform a filter step, or perhaps a weighting by page-views.
Thanks so much for the advice, what a great list.
Make a great day, Max Klein ‽ http://notconfusing.com/
On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 5:57 AM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
I have spent quite a bit of time at new page patrol over the years. My suspicion is that many if not most of the people who create articles on newly signed pop stars and actors are from their management agency rather than fans, especially if they seem too early in their career to have fans. Sportspeople I suggest are more likely to be written about by fans, especially if they have been signed by a major team, or more importantly for Wikipedia a team with an actively editing fan.
On this theory the quality of articles, the number of edits, and when we had the Article Feedback Tool the number of "is hot" type comments would be a good indication of interest from the volunteer editing community. But article creation is in part a matter of the policy of the relevant talent agencies.
Sorry if that sounds overly cynical, perhaps if it were possible one would filter out the articles that get scarcely any views and then look at the gender balance of articles that are of interest to our audience as well as our editors.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy
On 11 Jan 2015, at 22:23, h hanteng@gmail.com wrote:
Hello Piotr and Gerard,
I think a competing hypothesis would be "male gaze". That is to say,the more female representation is not about a culture (defined as national, ethnic, linguistic or regional, not macho/feminine), but rather a gender-interest bias. Thus the more female representation could mean more male dominant culture, which is against the theoretical assumption of Piotr's research.
Note that East Asian Wikipedians that I know, especially those whoedit Chinese Wikipedia, are predominantly very young. Some of them can be highly interested in opposite sex.
Check the following category pages as examples:(1a) Female actresses of every countries in the world
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:%E5%90%84%E5%9C%8B%E5%A5%B3%E6%BC%94%E... (1b) Male actresses of every countries in the world
http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:%E5%90%84%E5%9B%BD%E7%94%B7%E6%BC%94%E...
(2a) Female Japanese AV (i.e. porn) actresses
http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%ACAV%E5%A... (2b) Male Japanese AV (i.e. porn) actresses
http://zh.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%ACAV%E7%9...
It is quiet clear that the male gaze hypothesis seems to apply here.More female presentation simply because they are there to be consumed by men or boys.
So one of my suggestions for research is to select a fewprofessional categories that are of interest (say, politicians, poets, entertainers, etc.) to do some cross-tab analysis.
Thus, I will be extremely cautious against using the currentmetrics/methods as viable "gender inequality index".
As a proponent of "data normalization" and "geographicnormalization" method myself, I would distinguish two sets of comparisons: one is cross-country or cross-language version absolute value comparison, another is cross-country or cross-language version "normalized" value comparison. By geographic normalization, I mean that researchers must gather another set of cross-country or cross-language datasets that captures some aspects of realities "external" to Wikipedia. In this case, I would say the Wikipedia represented politicians' gender ratio against the offline gender ratio of politicians. In other words, "data normalization" allows researchers to compare which language version are more or less (and how much) equal than the corresponding offline societies.
BTW, the methods you develop to extract gender from biographyarticles for large-scale analysis may also be re-purpose to study other dimensions. One dimension that will interest me would be nationality. It will be interesting to see the coverage, focus or bias of a language version on people based on nationalities. Age might be another one.
Best, han-teng liao
2015-01-11 19:01 GMT+02:00 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, Having read it, I find it is still very much a Wikipedia oriented.It makes use of the toolset by Markus. That is fine. the notion of diversity and notability is also very much culturally defined. It would be nice to know how the different wikipedias accept notability of people from other cultures and if it impacts the diversity of their own articles.
I have found that many people do not have an article in the languages of their own cultures. Often it has to do with an interest in a domain that is more of relevance to the other culture.
Diversity is very much part of a domain; in Roman Catholicism male dominance is obvious. I am curious if diversity in gender is affected by such considerations and if items with a single article are more in line with what is the norm for a culture, a domain. Thanks, GerardM
On 10 January 2015 at 11:51, Piotr Konieczny piokon@post.pl wrote:
Here (http://notconfusing.com/preliminary-results-from-wigi- the-wikipedia-gender-inequality-index/) are some early findings from a research project I am involved in (together with Maximilian Klein). (To find out more about the project, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/ wiki/Research:Wikipedia_Gender_Inequality_Index and it's talk page). We are very curious what you think (don't hesitate to be critical). What we would really appreciate would be any alternative hypotheses (to the one presented) that could try to explain why post-1950s Confucian and South Asian clusters seem so much more inclusive of female biographies than others (including the "Western" clusters). Are we seeing a data error, or something else - and if so, what?
-- Piotr Konieczny, PhD http://hanyang.academia.edu/PiotrKonieczny http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=gdV8_AEAAAAJ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Piotrus
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