http://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-role-of-english-wikiped... 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
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 www.stineeckert.com @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-wikiped... 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
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 www.stineeckert.com @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-wikiped... 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
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 www.stineeckert.com @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-wikiped... 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
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 2:28 PM, Stuart A. Yeates syeates@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Why do you want categories rather than structured data about gender, religion, and race? We should be moving towards replacing our entire category system with a better implementation of structured data. Categories, while broadly useful, are an incomplete, arbitrary, and arbitrarily heirarchical subset of structured data.
Almost none of the arguments against 'categorization' apply to gathering this data, structuring it, and making it easily searchable and filterable.
Sam.
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 8:40 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Why do you want categories rather than structured data about gender, religion, and race?
Because that structured data would embody even stronger assumptions that the current categorisation system? Gender, religion and race are self-defined on en.wiki; you'd have to get the data first and then prove that your structure didn't contradict any of the self-definitions.
Coming from a Western, English-language point of view it's very easy to create structures that declare groups of people such as fa'afafine incapable of existing. At least with the categories that we have at the moment we have substantial room for local redefinition of terms.
A great example of this is the perennial proposal to import biographical details from some library system (usually the *Deutsche Nationalbibliothek one*), when they have a different definition of gender to en.wikipedia.
cheers stuart
Why do you want categories in the first place? Why not extract whatever semantic meaning you need (e.g., about genderbread) by parsing the sentences in each article?
On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 3:08 PM, Stuart A. Yeates syeates@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 8:40 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Why do you want categories rather than structured data about gender, religion, and race?
Because that structured data would embody even stronger assumptions that the current categorisation system? Gender, religion and race are self-defined on en.wiki; you'd have to get the data first and then prove that your structure didn't contradict any of the self-definitions.
Self-definition is fine, and compatible with what I think of as structured data: large numbers of high-granularity data points associated with each [article]. Category data is a narrow subset of structured data that happens to support a tree structure, in the MediaWiki implementation.
Coming from a Western, English-language point of view it's very easy to create structures that declare groups of people such as fa'afafine incapable of existing.
... so many assumptions you just made there :-)
If the concept of fa'afafine exists in our knowledge-set (and it does: anything that passes some low bar of verifiability can be included in what our projects consider knowledge), then it can be noted as a data point applying to some other topic [article]. There is little that is Western or English about our verifiability standards; though if you are talking about the English-language Wikipedia, having an English-language source increases the verifiability of a data-claim.
We can create a category for every data-attribute -- in this case, [[category:fa'afafine]] (which does not yet exist) or [[category:kathoey]] (which does). If we didn't have wikidata, that would be the clear solution. But now it is enough to capture the attribute of "self-identifies as fa'afafina", whether or not there is an associated category. In particular, arguments about "how many category-intersections of the fa'afafine gender and other traits deserve their own category" are red herrings. All that matters is identifying these (self-defined) attributes in a way that is easy to process in bulk.
A great example of this is the perennial proposal to import biographical details from some library system (usually the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek one), when they have a different definition of gender to en.wikipedia.
Why is this a problem? The attribute "gender according to DNB" is a) useful historical data, b) verifiable, and c) easy to add to wikidata. I believe you can have "DNB-gender" as one of the variations on the global "gender" attribute. Most articles (unless they are talking about the DNB specifically) would likely refer to the global attribute. But this way you can have both datasets globally accessible. Then after the import is done, people can write bulk data-cleaning scripts to help humans review those articles where the two differ. And in cases where there is a years-long edit war about what the global attribute should be, you can keep track of what the input source-data is from various sources.
Sam.
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:34 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
Why do you want categories in the first place? Why not extract whatever semantic meaning you need (e.g., about genderbread) by parsing the sentences in each article?
Because for most people gender is a private matter which never makes it into their article because being a private matter there are no reliable sources about it?
Coming from a Western, English-language point of view it's very easy to
create structures that declare groups of people such as fa'afafine
incapable
of existing.
... so many assumptions you just made there :-)
Yes, but I happen to know they're all true; because I was speaking of myself.
Why is this a problem? The attribute "gender according to DNB" is a) useful historical data, b) verifiable, and c) easy to add to wikidata. I believe you can have "DNB-gender" as one of the variations on the global "gender" attribute. Most articles (unless they are talking about the DNB specifically) would likely refer to the global attribute. But this way you can have both datasets globally accessible. Then after the import is done, people can write bulk data-cleaning scripts to help humans review those articles where the two differ. And in cases where there is a years-long edit war about what the global attribute should be, you can keep track of what the input source-data is from various sources.
I'm primarily an en.wiki editor and frankly don't care about wikidata, except as it affects en.wiki.
What I am sure of is that 'gender' on en.wiki defaulting to DNB-gender unless the individual has spoken about their gender in reliable sources is inappropriate. Not only does it breach WP:BLP, but by white-washing minorities it is a travesty of [[Wikipedia:Systemic bias]].
cheers stuart
Given that the discussion is all happening here anyway, I'll copy the comment I left on the blog. :)
----
Nemo February 16, 2014 at 2:43 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Interesting trivia to munch, but little nutritional value IMHO. Everyone in every field always complains that there are too many articles about pokémon and French municipalities, too few about X very important topic/aspect. All such considerations are worthless because they don’t consider the actual relative *impact* of those articles, e.g. how many other people edited or discussed them after creation and how many page views they had.
One could even argue that the “perception problems related to Wikipedia being male and cliquey” is made worse by posts like this, ;) but that would be trolling. I don’t see how the mere number of articles on one topic or another is going to make Wikipedia feel “too male” or “anti-female” to a normal user who certainly doesn’t notice such things. If you have to dig for it, it doesn’t contribute to public perception; at most it can be a possible symptom of something else that may be contributing to public perception.
Even disregarding the impact, to assess the bias of the contributors themselves a more precise research, comparative in nature, would be needed. For instance, if one writes articles on parliament members in country X, and 70 % of articles are about males, that’s only biased if the actual percentage of male MP is less than 70 %. The same should be done with all the sources for each topic.
And it’s nothing compared to the systemic bias towards the western and anglo-saxon point of view which writing in English and using (mostly online) English sources encourages, let alone languages less global in nature.
On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 9:44 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.comwrote:
Even disregarding the impact, to assess the bias of the contributors themselves a more precise research, comparative in nature, would be needed. For instance, if one writes articles on parliament members in country X, and 70 % of articles are about males, that’s only biased if the actual percentage of male MP is less than 70 %. The same should be done with all the sources for each topic.
I disagree with this. If one is using biased sourced (such as a list which is 70% male) it is one's responsibility to match that, where possible, with other sources to counteract that bias. IMHO.
And it’s nothing compared to the systemic bias towards the western and anglo-saxon point of view which writing in English and using (mostly online) English sources encourages, let alone languages less global in nature.
I completely agree with you.
cheers stuart
A "normal user" might not notice that Wikipedia is "too male" or "too female". If that is so and Wikipedia has bias, then doesn't it follow that the "normal user" will uncritically absorb that bias? If the normal user is reading about tennis (say) and reads many long article about male tennis players and a few short articles about female tennis players, isn't the normal user forming the impression that men are the important players of tennis?
Isn't this why we worry about bias in the first place because we risk perpetuating it?
I agree it is difficult in Wikipedia to: * measure bias in number, size, quality of articles * correlate bias in articles to skewed demographics of editors contributing to those articles (probably adjusted by frequency, size, or nature of edits) * determine if editors creating observable bias in the articles are doing so deliberately or unconsciously * postulate ways to address the bias
But since we are here to discuss research, then let's discuss what would be a set of experiments that would help to answer these questions?
Having said all of that, I would be very interested to have a "bias dashboard" set up for certain topics that shows simple (preferably visually) stats like number, length, quality of "gendered" articles (the first of my bullet points above). Often just making bias visible creates change.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Federico Leva (Nemo) Sent: Tuesday, 18 February 2014 6:44 AM 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
Given that the discussion is all happening here anyway, I'll copy the comment I left on the blog. :)
----
Nemo February 16, 2014 at 2:43 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
Interesting trivia to munch, but little nutritional value IMHO. Everyone in every field always complains that there are too many articles about pokémon and French municipalities, too few about X very important topic/aspect. All such considerations are worthless because they dont consider the actual relative *impact* of those articles, e.g. how many other people edited or discussed them after creation and how many page views they had.
One could even argue that the perception problems related to Wikipedia being male and cliquey is made worse by posts like this, ;) but that would be trolling. I dont see how the mere number of articles on one topic or another is going to make Wikipedia feel too male or anti-female to a normal user who certainly doesnt notice such things. If you have to dig for it, it doesnt contribute to public perception; at most it can be a possible symptom of something else that may be contributing to public perception.
Even disregarding the impact, to assess the bias of the contributors themselves a more precise research, comparative in nature, would be needed. For instance, if one writes articles on parliament members in country X, and 70 % of articles are about males, thats only biased if the actual percentage of male MP is less than 70 %. The same should be done with all the sources for each topic.
And its nothing compared to the systemic bias towards the western and anglo-saxon point of view which writing in English and using (mostly online) English sources encourages, let alone languages less global in nature.
_______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
I agree it is difficult in Wikipedia to:
- measure bias in number, size, quality of articles
- correlate bias in articles to skewed demographics of editors contributing
to those articles (probably adjusted by frequency, size, or nature of edits)
- determine if editors creating observable bias in the articles are doing
so deliberately or unconsciously
- postulate ways to address the bias
But since we are here to discuss research, then let's discuss what would be a set of experiments that would help to answer these questions?
What would be great would be a set survey of the top 5000 (i.e. the group that Laura is already working with) where they were asked basic questions about the fields they edited in and their perception of gender bias, then half way through they were presented with their rating by Laura's work, then another set of questions relating to gender bias.
Suitably phrased questions could be used to discover: (a) whether they're a priori aware of the apparent bias (b) whether they are surprised at the gender balance in their articles discovered by Laura's work (c) whether they see the gender balance as an issue (d) whether they are aware of any untapped or under-utilised resources for women's articles in their fields (e) whether they are interested in working to combat apparent bias ....
cheers stuart
Stuart A. Yeates, 18/02/2014 01:48:
What would be great would be a set survey of the top 5000 (i.e. the group that Laura is already working with) where they were asked basic questions about the fields they edited in and their perception of gender bias, then half way through they were presented with their rating by Laura's work, then another set of questions relating to gender bias.
Suitably phrased questions could be used to discover: (a) whether they're a priori aware of the apparent bias (b) whether they are surprised at the gender balance in their articles discovered by Laura's work (c) whether they see the gender balance as an issue (d) whether they are aware of any untapped or under-utilised resources for women's articles in their fields (e) whether they are interested in working to combat apparent bias ....
As a fallback to "serious" research, a handful questions may be added to the next editors' survey whenever one happens. I recommend to copy this suggestion to a suitable Meta-Wiki page (e.g. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:General_User_Survey) so that it stays available for the years to come.
Nemo
On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 1:59 AM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
http://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/the-role-of-english-wikiped... some research I did recently about the role of English Wikipedia's top content creators in terms of perpetuating gender bias.
A minor terminological issue: in some places you use the word editor when you need to use the word account. A number of the top 5000 accounts are owned by editors with multiple accounts. I'm not aware of any editor with two accounts in the top 5000, but it wouldn't surprise me to see a bot owner and their bot(s) in there.
cheers stuart
I would be interested in the following:
As we all know, the rules on sourcing and against original research on Wikipedia make it difficult to write about topics that are not widely covered; furthermore, regarding academic topics, the rules encourage seeking scholarly sources. Thus, it is difficult to write on topics not well-covered by scholarly sources.
I would therefore like to know whether there exist studies on how well traditional reference works, reference libraries etc. cover the kind of "female" topics for which Wikipedia lacks coverage.
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.
(I find it very relevant that the email title talks of "perpetuating gender bias". The rules on citation etc. in Wikipedia are designed so that Wikipedia reflects available knowledge, habits and so on; there are actually rules against using Wikipedia as a broadcast media for newly coined words, not widely accepted theories, etc. It seems to me quite likely that such a system would perpetuate existing biases.)
On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 10:16 AM, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.frwrote:
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... 73 women's teams and http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fc/even/rank/p/openNodeIDs/943/selNodeID/943/r... men's teams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_men%27s_national_basketball_teams is the Wikipedia list for men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women%27s_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
As one of the English Wikipedia's top content creators [1], let me weigh in here with a shameless plug that I would like to present my work at Wikimania this year and am hoping for sponsorship from the WMF in order to do that.[2]
I agree heartily with Laura that <quote>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.</quote>
My corner of the Wikiverse is art, and I have been busily matching up various lists of artists and have become well aware of a huge difference between "documented artists" and "art market artists". I find lots more women in the second group than the first group, and there has been a lot of previous work done on the why of this gender bias. This was in fact one of the main reasons for people to join the recent Art&Feminism edit-a-thon. The gender bias in the world of art museums is much easier to document and track, because it is so overwhelmingly obvious. Pick any top art museum in the world and do a "weenie count" [3]. The percentage of works by women actually hanging in public display galleries is way less than 10%. The main reason is of course that people want the biggest bang for their buck in any situation, and art museum curators are no exception. They would rather buy one Anthony van Dijk than 50 works by his lesser known male or female contemporaries. If you prioritize any "would like to buy list" that any art museum curator is holding at any given auction, the percentage of female names on those lists will probably be zero. That said, I have discovered that most art museums do have quality works by women in their collections, but these are not on show. I have been resurrecting these works wherever I find them virtually on Wikipedia as a way to illustrate biographies on these artists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-01-22/Specia... [2] https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Women_on_Wikipedia [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Girls
2014-02-20 13:16 GMT+01:00, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com:
On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 10:16 AM, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.frwrote:
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... 73 women's teams and http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fc/even/rank/p/openNodeIDs/943/selNodeID/943/r... men's teams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_men%27s_national_basketball_teams is the Wikipedia list for men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women%27s_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
-- twitter: purplepopple
Great work, Jane!
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Jane Darnell Sent: Thursday, 20 February 2014 10:44 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
As one of the English Wikipedia's top content creators [1], let me weigh in here with a shameless plug that I would like to present my work at Wikimania this year and am hoping for sponsorship from the WMF in order to do that.[2]
I agree heartily with Laura that <quote>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.</quote>
My corner of the Wikiverse is art, and I have been busily matching up various lists of artists and have become well aware of a huge difference between "documented artists" and "art market artists". I find lots more women in the second group than the first group, and there has been a lot of previous work done on the why of this gender bias. This was in fact one of the main reasons for people to join the recent Art&Feminism edit-a-thon. The gender bias in the world of art museums is much easier to document and track, because it is so overwhelmingly obvious. Pick any top art museum in the world and do a "weenie count" [3]. The percentage of works by women actually hanging in public display galleries is way less than 10%. The main reason is of course that people want the biggest bang for their buck in any situation, and art museum curators are no exception. They would rather buy one Anthony van Dijk than 50 works by his lesser known male or female contemporaries. If you prioritize any "would like to buy list" that any art museum curator is holding at any given auction, the percentage of female names on those lists will probably be zero. That said, I have discovered that most art museums do have quality works by women in their collections, but these are not on show. I have been resurrecting these works wherever I find them virtually on Wikipedia as a way to illustrate biographies on these artists.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2014-01-22/Specia l_report [2] https://wikimania2014.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/Women_on_Wikipedia [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_Girls
2014-02-20 13:16 GMT+01:00, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com:
On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 10:16 AM, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.frwrote:
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.htmlshows
73 women's teams and
http://www.fiba.com/pages/eng/fc/even/rank/p/openNodeIDs/943/selNodeID/943/r ankMen.html85
men's teams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_men%27s_national_basketball_teams is the Wikipedia list for men. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women%27s_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
-- twitter: purplepopple
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Your example of sports is very interesting. I agree that above a certain level, any team etc. is inherently notable. There is still, however, the question of available sources,
I'm not a sports connoisseur, but if I go to a typical library, there is a range of books on popular *male* sports. I can find biographies of famous players, histories of major clubs, etc. A quick Amazon search for instance shows me that they have a book on sale about the successes of AS Saint-Etienne in the French football (that's soccer for Americans) championship in 1976!
I do not find such books on female sports. In fact, if I look for a book on the French women's soccer team on Amazon, I find something... extracted from Wikipedia! (Recall that football is the most popular sport in France...)
In short, for certain topics (e.g. male sports), there is a gazillion books, biographies, and other source material readily available, while for others (e.g. female sports) such sources are more difficult to find.
What I would like to understand is how much the bias is caused by such imbalances in sources. A possible evaluation method would be to consider female and male personalities (e.g. writers) equal in notoriety (e.g. according to scholars from that field), and to compare the length and quality of the biographies. What do you think?
On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 7:55 AM, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.frwrote:
I do not find such books on female sports. In fact, if I look for a book on the French women's soccer team on Amazon, I find something... extracted from Wikipedia! (Recall that football is the most popular sport in France...)
In short, for certain topics (e.g. male sports), there is a gazillion books, biographies, and other source material readily available, while for others (e.g. female sports) such sources are more difficult to find.
What I would like to understand is how much the bias is caused by such imbalances in sources. A possible evaluation method would be to consider female and male personalities (e.g. writers) equal in notoriety (e.g. according to scholars from that field), and to compare the length and quality of the biographies. What do you think?
A couple of confounding factors: (a) Historically many talented women writers have written as men (or using a house pseudonym).
(b) Historically serials have bee consumed disproportionately by women and books by men. Historically libraries index book content but not serial content by subject. Thus material written for a female audience has lower visibility, even to writers in the field, because it's so much harder to find.
cheers stuart
On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 7:55 PM, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.frwrote:
I'm not a sports connoisseur, but if I go to a typical library, there is a range of books on popular *male* sports. I can find biographies of famous players, histories of major clubs, etc. A quick Amazon search for instance shows me that they have a book on sale about the successes of AS Saint-Etienne in the French football (that's soccer for Americans) championship in 1976!
On the issue of notability and availability of men's versus women's top level teams, there are a number of issues at play. There are regional notability issues that make sourcing even more difficult, and then biases by a dominant editing pool that become enshrined. (Look at the men's football league notability guidelines.) There might be a lot of sources about Norwegian women fútbol players in Norwegian newspapers. These sources may be online, and easily accessible to anyone looking at Norwegian language newspapers. But there is an inherent bias against automatic notability for leagues and players from non-English speaking countries, where English speaking players are not playing, and where English speaking fans are not following the league.
I do not find such books on female sports. In fact, if I look for a book on the French women's soccer team on Amazon, I find something... extracted from Wikipedia! (Recall that football is the most popular sport in France...)
But most sports people I know wouldn't make their first stop at a bookstore unless they were looking for historical information. Most of the sport related activity happens around current players. Hence, newspaper sources tend to be relied on heavily.
In short, for certain topics (e.g. male sports), there is a gazillion books, biographies, and other source material readily available, while for others (e.g. female sports) such sources are more difficult to find.
In the case of sports and for the most highly visible (re: national teams), this is not an issue of readily available but the relative volume of one compared to another. http://www.google.com/trends/explore?hl=en-US&q=/m/01l3vx,+/m/06drlz&... the Google trends for the French men's national team versus the women's national team. I went to Google news and searched for french men national soccer team and had 57,000 results. I searched for french women national soccer team and had 43,200 results. There is not an availability of sources issue. In fact, there is likely sooooo much information that you actually need to filter. The basics for national teams for many sports can also generally be filled out by the sport's governing bodies. (FIFA is really, really excellent in this regards. FIBA is also great.)
I personally think that this is often an excuse because for certain topics, the sources are there but people are not utilizing them to create articles about women while they are out there creating them about men. Or when they aren't as accessible for both men and women, people are willing to go the extra length to try to create articles about the men's national team. A quick search on Google news for Gabon men's national basketball team pulls up zero results. Another search for Gabon women's national basketball team pulls up zero results. Guess which team has an article on English Wikipedia?
And how big of a role does that play anyway in article creation? A while back, I looked at the Australian women's national soccer team players versus the men's national team players. There were an average of 6.7 sources on women's articles and 19.6 for men. Women's articles are more poorly sourced when looked at head to head, and I can guarantee you there is waaaaaay more available sources to take all articles about both sets all to FA if people were motivated, but no one appears to be motivated enough to do so even with available sources.
I would love to see research on source availability as a factor leading to the lack of creation of articles about women in head to head situations with their direct male counterparts.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
And, indeed, I see your point. For historical/older information, it is indeed difficult to write about women's sports because these topics were not widely covered on paper (newspapers, books) but for current teams, at least for factual information, there is a large quantity of information online.
Indeed, if one is interested in France's national soccer team, one can probably get considerably more information online than through conventional media (which, at least in France, covers female sports very little, except in special events such as the Olympics).
Things are different with e.g. writers, since discussion on them tends to come from academics and "literary-type" newspapers. There is no equivalent to having factual databases of team rosters.
Thanks Kerry! I have been working on lists of painters per museum collection in order to show how few women artists are represented in major collections. With all of the work we do for GLAMS, it is interesting to note that they themselves are highly successful at perpetuating systemic bias.
Magnus is able to collect data on all the museums on the BBC's "Your Paintings" website, and with his data I just created a list of painters of the National Gallery, London. I was surprised to see that there is not even one female artist from Britain represented (though the British men are also underepresented, with only 18 out of 750 names). Lists like these can help generate demographic data for all sorts of diversity issues, as the amount of art in the museum is overwhelmingly Italian, Dutch/Netherlandish, and French, without any art at all from areas outside Europe.
The list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalog_of_paintings_in_the_National_Gallery,_...
2014-02-21 8:32 GMT+01:00, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr:
And, indeed, I see your point. For historical/older information, it is indeed difficult to write about women's sports because these topics were not widely covered on paper (newspapers, books) but for current teams, at least for factual information, there is a large quantity of information online.
Indeed, if one is interested in France's national soccer team, one can probably get considerably more information online than through conventional media (which, at least in France, covers female sports very little, except in special events such as the Olympics).
Things are different with e.g. writers, since discussion on them tends to come from academics and "literary-type" newspapers. There is no equivalent to having factual databases of team rosters.
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Jane Darnell, 22/02/2014 23:23:
[...]he amount of art in the museum is overwhelmingly Italian, Dutch/Netherlandish, and French [...]
The horror! Those Italians, Dutch and French should really be ashamed of all the unjust advantage they amassed in centuries of abusive domination of the western arts. More seriously speaking, I have no en.wiki or art competence to judge the editorial activity here described, but watch yourself when you use expressions which make it /sound/ like advocacy for some sort of affirmative action for underrepresented painters, or rationing of arts' tastes, or arts export quotas as for milk. You may do damage to your cause.
Nemo
Funny you should interpret me that way. I think my point is twofold; namely Wikipedia is only a reflection of its sources, and that it's sources show an odd set of demographics no matter how you slice and dice the data.
Sent from my iPad
On Feb 23, 2014, at 2:59 AM, "Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jane Darnell, 22/02/2014 23:23:
[...]he amount of art in the museum is overwhelmingly Italian, Dutch/Netherlandish, and French [...]
The horror! Those Italians, Dutch and French should really be ashamed of all the unjust advantage they amassed in centuries of abusive domination of the western arts. More seriously speaking, I have no en.wiki or art competence to judge the editorial activity here described, but watch yourself when you use expressions which make it /sound/ like advocacy for some sort of affirmative action for underrepresented painters, or rationing of arts' tastes, or arts export quotas as for milk. You may do damage to your cause.
Nemo
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I would love to know more about the damage, and what research has been done on the negative impacts of bringing awareness to the issues of a lack of representation of both women as contributors and as subjects of article has done to the cause of increasing this. The limited research on this subject that I have seen suggests that by bringing up this issue, the response has actually included a large backlash against women by males from since inside the community and by members of the media. At the same time, there is a new body of research emerging that women by being silent in response to misogynistic trolling are in some ways rewarding the behavior that awards the negative performance which further encourages additional harassment of women.
Indeed, based on observations I have of the community and in talking to other female contributors, the current environment on Wikipedia for women is to engage in performance activities that suggest they are male so as to avoid the type of attention that otherwise retards female participation in the project, and to otherwise submerge identity, refuse to claim credit for success and otherwise render this area invisible. This requirement for female engagement to be expressly male (either by assuming a male identity, or by modeling oneself after successful male contributors) would actually be interesting to research in terms of motivational issues for female participation on Wikipedia, and the goal of the Wikimedia Foundation in increasing overall participation on the project.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
On Saturday, February 22, 2014, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jane Darnell, 22/02/2014 23:23:
[...]he amount of art in the museum is overwhelmingly Italian, Dutch/Netherlandish, and French [...]
The horror! Those Italians, Dutch and French should really be ashamed of all the unjust advantage they amassed in centuries of abusive domination of the western arts.
More seriously speaking, I have no en.wiki or art competence to judge the
editorial activity here described, but watch yourself when you use expressions which make it /sound/ like advocacy for some sort of affirmative action for underrepresented painters, or rationing of arts' tastes, or arts export quotas as for milk. You may do damage to your cause.
Laura, I am of course only a sample of one, but in my experience based on the issues discussed at length in workshops and on the gendergap mailing list, often what is perceived to be anti-female behavior is enough to drive women away. Men, when perceiving anti-male behavior tend to do the opposite, namely they become aggressive and stand their ground. The key way to entice more women to contribute is to give them the tips and tricks they need to 1) feel their contribution is appreciated 2) see their contributions are reused in the normal ways of "wiki magic"
The main problem with keeping women on board is because men are more tech-savvy in general and can get both points much easier than women, who see both points much more easily on fb, pinterest, and other social media sites.
Jane Sent from my iPad
On Feb 23, 2014, at 10:13 AM, Laura Hale laura@fanhistory.com wrote:
I would love to know more about the damage, and what research has been done on the negative impacts of bringing awareness to the issues of a lack of representation of both women as contributors and as subjects of article has done to the cause of increasing this. The limited research on this subject that I have seen suggests that by bringing up this issue, the response has actually included a large backlash against women by males from since inside the community and by members of the media. At the same time, there is a new body of research emerging that women by being silent in response to misogynistic trolling are in some ways rewarding the behavior that awards the negative performance which further encourages additional harassment of women.
Indeed, based on observations I have of the community and in talking to other female contributors, the current environment on Wikipedia for women is to engage in performance activities that suggest they are male so as to avoid the type of attention that otherwise retards female participation in the project, and to otherwise submerge identity, refuse to claim credit for success and otherwise render this area invisible. This requirement for female engagement to be expressly male (either by assuming a male identity, or by modeling oneself after successful male contributors) would actually be interesting to research in terms of motivational issues for female participation on Wikipedia, and the goal of the Wikimedia Foundation in increasing overall participation on the project.
Sincerely, Laura Hale
On Saturday, February 22, 2014, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote: Jane Darnell, 22/02/2014 23:23: [...]he amount of art in the museum is overwhelmingly Italian, Dutch/Netherlandish, and French [...]
The horror! Those Italians, Dutch and French should really be ashamed of all the unjust advantage they amassed in centuries of abusive domination of the western arts. More seriously speaking, I have no en.wiki or art competence to judge the editorial activity here described, but watch yourself when you use expressions which make it /sound/ like advocacy for some sort of affirmative action for underrepresented painters, or rationing of arts' tastes, or arts export quotas as for milk. You may do damage to your cause.
-- twitter: purplepopple
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Jane Darnell, 23/02/2014 10:37:
Men, when perceiving anti-male behavior tend to do the opposite, namely they become aggressive and stand their ground.
True, and in laughable ways even. Is such an attitude, however, so peculiarly true of this "male" label, which seems so secondary and useless? The "males under siege" attitude I sometimes saw (never on Wikimedia projects though) is ludicrous and looks crazy fanaticism. However, earlier this morning, I experienced something like that with Jane's observations. The hint that I may be considered evil for the shameful underrepresentation of non-Italian (or even non-Ariosto/Tasso) ottava rima poems authors in my personal library... made me feel under attack. And I bite back automatically. Suddenly I understood how one can stupidly feel attacked for one's own inner self. It would be interesting to know more about such social dynamics in a more general way. They're certainly not new, see e.g. an Ariosto example in Walter Scott's "Waverley", chapter 54.
The key way to entice more women to contribute is to give them the tips and tricks [...]
Sounds like warfare and trenches. The real solution is making people not feel attacked, not making your attacks stronger or more subtle. Like, admit that a user writing about "underrepresented painters" is just the ordinary story of a volunteer who contributes to a wiki with the bias of their own personal interests, because that's how volunteers and wikis work, compensated by the other people's interests, NPOV, NOR etc. The same story as with users exclusively writing about [male] catholic bishops, [male] soccer, [ungendered?] pokémons, or [mixed!] English modernists writers. (Though I intimately and strongly despise the first three, and I do the latter.) Unilateral proclaims of one's own higher moral and intellectual stance rarely result into durable peace treaties.
Nemo
Nemo, that is so cool you said that, because it proves as I have long suspected that I have developed some sort of blind eye to such things. I recognized your snippy response as only being a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived anti-Italian remark, not to an anti-male remark!
Anyway as I said in my first mail in this thread I am also reacting to a self-interpreted attack for being perceived for the shameful underrepresentation on women's topics (I think way less than 10% of what I have contributed onwiki is female-oriented). For the record, I am a huge Glam fan and i think Caravaggio rocks, so don't shoot me for these observations, which are I think fascinating. I will continue to compile these lists on museum collections, because exploring the data of the institutions Wikipedia bases its own content on is important to our understanding of the perceived biases.
I am somewhat confused about your comment on warfare and trenches. I simply advocate one-on-one coaching of women in the tips and tricks that male contributors discover easily on their own.
Like you I am also interested in learning more about such social dynamics and feel a yearly editor survey would be a good place to start. Jane
Sent from my iPad
On Feb 23, 2014, at 12:44 PM, "Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
Jane Darnell, 23/02/2014 10:37:
Men, when perceiving anti-male behavior tend to do the opposite, namely they become aggressive and stand their ground.
True, and in laughable ways even. Is such an attitude, however, so peculiarly true of this "male" label, which seems so secondary and useless? The "males under siege" attitude I sometimes saw (never on Wikimedia projects though) is ludicrous and looks crazy fanaticism. However, earlier this morning, I experienced something like that with Jane's observations. The hint that I may be considered evil for the shameful underrepresentation of non-Italian (or even non-Ariosto/Tasso) ottava rima poems authors in my personal library... made me feel under attack. And I bite back automatically. Suddenly I understood how one can stupidly feel attacked for one's own inner self. It would be interesting to know more about such social dynamics in a more general way. They're certainly not new, see e.g. an Ariosto example in Walter Scott's "Waverley", chapter 54.
The key way to entice more women to contribute is to give them the tips and tricks [...]
Sounds like warfare and trenches. The real solution is making people not feel attacked, not making your attacks stronger or more subtle. Like, admit that a user writing about "underrepresented painters" is just the ordinary story of a volunteer who contributes to a wiki with the bias of their own personal interests, because that's how volunteers and wikis work, compensated by the other people's interests, NPOV, NOR etc. The same story as with users exclusively writing about [male] catholic bishops, [male] soccer, [ungendered?] pokémons, or [mixed!] English modernists writers. (Though I intimately and strongly despise the first three, and I do the latter.) Unilateral proclaims of one's own higher moral and intellectual stance rarely result into durable peace treaties.
Nemo
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On 02/22/2014 11:23 PM, Jane Darnell wrote:
Magnus is able to collect data on all the museums on the BBC's "Your Paintings" website, and with his data I just created a list of painters of the National Gallery, London. I was surprised to see that there is not even one female artist from Britain represented (though the British men are also underepresented, with only 18 out of 750 names). Lists like these can help generate demographic data for all
To be fair, if I was asked the name of one single female French painter from before the 19th century (or even 20th century), I would only be able to name Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (widely considered one of the foremost portraitists of her era in France). I don't know enough about British painting to name a single one.
One interesting question is whether this is a consequence of bias from the museums, or from the way that 18th-19th society worked. I'm no historian, but as far as I know, women in those days were not expected to become artists; they probably could paint as amateurs but certainly not become professionnals. (For instance, I've read that W.A. Mozart's sister, as a child, exhibited the same extraordinary capacities as him, but since she was a woman she was expected to marry and have children, instead of becoming a professionnal musician.)
We cannot repair the unfairness of centuries past, but we can certainly try avoiding selection bias on top of it.
My point in preceding messages was that reliance on traditional scholarship mechanically propagates the biases present in that scholarship. If traditional scholarship lists as "the most important painters on the 18th century" 100% West Europeans, 95% males, then this will be reflected into Wikipedia.
David, I think we are both on the same page, but I am a bit farther in my thinking about HOW you can illustrate the biases. The mobile team coined the phrase 'ghost edits' to mean the edits we don't make while on mobile devices (I am on my iPad right now and experienced a ghost edit which will definitely not get done now because I don't care about it enough).
We need another term for the edits that are never considered, because we don't have the people to even make those 'ghost' considerations. By creating lists of topics and working with Wikidata, we can eventually make statements possible such as in the 20th century, Harvard only appointed x women to full professorship, an x percentage of the faculty, which compares favorably or not to the Sorbonne, etc. Jane Sent from my iPad
On Feb 23, 2014, at 11:38 AM, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@free.fr wrote:
was expected to marry and have children, instead of becoming a professionnal musician.)
We cannot repair the unfairness of centuries past, but we can certainly try avoiding selection bias on top of it.
Not discounting the excellent points made above, I can't help but feel that there are groups that have been fighting discrimination in institutions for decades and that maybe we need to work with them rather than reinvent a non-straight-white-male-wheel ourselves. People like http://womenintheartsfoundation.org/ , http://www.guerrillagirls.com/ , http://www.ifuw.org/ , etc. It seems to me like the kind of activity that WMF might have funds for.
cheers stuart
Stuart, Yes there are lots of institutions we could work with, given the proper funding and volunteers to monitor efforts. However, we can also use the GLAM contacts we already have. I believe the proper channel to propose something like this is the Wikiproject Women artists. We need to be careful though about partner selection, because we don't want to get involved in political discussions with activist groups. The Guerrilla girls don't seem to be an institution, but more a group of performance artists. When you look at GLAMs that we have worked with in the past, generally the work relationships are through image donations and/or data donations. I advocate using the lists we already have access to as a basis for making statements about "black holes" in our data. Making a statement about how many women vs. men there are in any given list of names (french engravers, dutch architects, and so forth) is useless, because those lists are not based on any finite list from an institution. When you publish a list of "french engravers in the collection of the British library" then you can make valid statements about that specific set of data.
I am a bit unclear about what you mean about a non-straight-white-male-wheel, because the list I published is from the PCF (via Magnus) and there is nothing about it that re-invents a wheel (though we should probably be doing that anyway as well).
Jane
On Feb 23, 2014, at 8:06 PM, Stuart A. Yeates wrote:
Not discounting the excellent points made above, I can't help but feel that there are groups that have been fighting discrimination in institutions for decades and that maybe we need to work with them rather than reinvent a non-straight-white-male-wheel ourselves. People like http://womenintheartsfoundation.org/ , http://www.guerrillagirls.com/ , http://www.ifuw.org/ , etc. It seems to me like the kind of activity that WMF might have funds for.
cheers stuart
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