On 15/10/13 19:08, Klein,Max wrote: ...
I'm not saying anyone has done anything wrong. I just feel abstractly concerned - that's nobody's fault in particular. Somehow Wikidata has given us the power to greater quantify our view of the world, and our bias is really becoming clear - numerically.
+1 to that. For example, I noticed from Tom's post that Freebase knows about 500 people called Nicola [1], while I found only 320 on Wikidata:
* Freebase: 248 men and 257 men * Wikidata: 276 men and 50 women
Who are these mysterious 200+ female Nicolas are that Freebase cares about while Wikipedia doesn't? The general size of the numbers suggests that both datasets are highly selective, considering only a tiny percentage of the world's Nicolas to be notable enough to be included. (Of course, we might also find that their men are not the same as ours.)
Markus
[1] http://namegender.freebaseapps.com/gender_api?name=nicola