Speaking as the editor in third place with 25%, I'd like to say that my count is only so high because I created articles based on the [[Dictionary of New Zealand Biography]], a source which has already be professionally balanced for gender and ethnicity.

From my point of view, one of the significant barriers to this kind of work is the consensus not to categorise all people by gender, religion and race (see [[Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality]]), alas there are good reasons for that consensus.

cheers
stuart

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 6:51 AM, Klein,Max <kleinm@oclc.org> wrote:

Hi Laura,


I very much like the topic and question of your research. Bravo.

The result that pops out at me I is 23.5% of gendered-content by super-users is Woman-related. The sample size of 0.4% of editors is small, too small to draw conclusions about the super users themselves, but the sample of articles, I think starts to approach being representative. Well at least it is in line with what I found, which was that looking at Biography articles only, 18% of English Wikipedia is about Women [1].

One way to scale up this kind of sentiment analysis would be Mechanical Turk[2] , to "automate" categorizing pages into gender. That would take some money, but maybe there's a research grant for it. With a statiscally significant sample, it seems like a result that would be popular in the media. One could also compare the the likelihood to write gendered articles of the super-users versus others.


The conclusion is quite punchy - finding people to write about women is not as important as convincing people who currently write, to write about women.


I would be very intrigued to collaborate and help on this research. Do you have ideas about what you want "future directions" to look like?


[1] http://hangingtogether.org/?p=2877

[2] https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome


Maximilian Klein
Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC
+17074787023

From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org <wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org> on behalf of Kristin Dagmar Eckert <keckert@umd.edu>
Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2014 7:24 PM

To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] The role of English Wikipedia's top content creators in perpetuating gender bias
 
Thank you very much again for this insightful article on Wikipedia, gender and content creation!! We are very happy we could post it on our blog and are looking forward to responses.

Sincerely,
Stine Eckert

Stine Eckert
Ph.D. Candidate
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
University of Maryland
2100N Knight Hall
@stineeckert



From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] on behalf of Laura Hale [laura@fanhistory.com]
Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2014 7:59 AM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] The role of English Wikipedia's top content creators in perpetuating gender bias

http://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-role-of-english-wikipedias-top-content-creators-in-perpetuating-gender-bias/ is some research I did recently about the role of English Wikipedia's top content creators in terms of perpetuating gender bias.

Any feedback appreciated.

Sincerely,
Laura Hale

--
twitter: purplepopple

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