On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 10:16 AM, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux@free.fr> wrote:

This could help identify to which extent the problem is created by the
Wikipedia authors, as opposed to simply reflecting the situation of
current scholarly literature. That is, I would like to distinguish the
effects of the Wikipedia writing process and the demographics of
contributors from those of available reference sources and general
scholarly outlook.

This is often context specific to the area being edited on Wikipedia.  It is also hard to do 1:1 comparisons between men and women.

One area where it is easier to do 1:1 comparisons is sports. Sports notability pretty much insures that any national team is notable, yet when matching pairs are looked for on English Wikipedia, the chances are higher of the men's national team article existing for the most popular and historically male dominant professional sports are higher.  These article titles are implicitly non-gendered.  On the other hand, women's national teams do not exist, and are often gendered.

One example is basketball. http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fc/even/rank/p/openNodeIDs/1000/selNodeID/1000/rankWome.html shows 73 women's teams and http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fc/even/rank/p/openNodeIDs/943/selNodeID/943/rankMen.html 85 men's teams.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_men's_national_basketball_teams is the Wikipedia list for men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women's_national_basketball_teams is the Wikipedia list for women.   Ignoring defunct teams and including non-FIBA recognise teams, there are 69 redlinks for men.   The number of redlinked women's national teams is 182.  The ratio of redlinked teams is not near parity at all to suggest that the existence of men's national basketball teams women's national basketball teams are similar.  

There are 69 occurrences where both a men's national team and a women's national team article exists for the same country.  (Some of these matched pairs are for junior national teams.) In 55 of these occurrences, the  men's national team article title is ungendered when the women's national team exists, where in only 14 instances of men and women's paired team articles are the men's article names gendered.

Again, notability guidelines generally imply these articles are inherently notable.  (And the lack of the existence of a team doesn't necessarily negate the article's notability, as in a number of cases, the lack of a team in certain sports is discussed in a lot of literature to the point where non-existent teams can be considered notable.)

By competing in world championships and the Olympics, you're also generally considered notable.  Russia's women are ranked third in the world. The men are seventh. 2 articles about women's national team players are missing. 1 is missing for the men.  The French women are ranked fourth in the world. Articles are missing about 4 of the 15 players.  The men are ranked 8th in the world. 0 of the 15 articles are missing.  The Spanish women are ranked sixth and the men second.  3 of the 15 articles are missing for the women, and 0 for the men.  (Though more articles exist about women than men for the Czech Republic and Brazilian national teams.)

One of the things that really needs to be done is to develop a list of inherently notable matching pairs and then see what the patterns are, because general lists of notable women are unlikely to answer the question of how real the systematic bias is.  Further, gendered lists where the percentages of men and women present should also be attained and the red links percentages for each gender should also be looked at.

This just takes huge amounts of work because a lot of these lists are not easy to get.

Sincerely,
Laura Hale

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