On Wednesday, 18 July 2012 at 13:18, Delirium wrote:
I'm not sure if that's the best way to do it,
but I think that asymmetry
in interest and navigational usefulness is why we have some asymmetries
in the category structure. As for changing it, I think it'll have to be
looked at on an area-by-area basis with involvement of relevant
wikiprojects, because some of the category systems are fairly complex
and/or brittle, and people have opinions about them. In sports, for
example, many people are already categorized into the leagues they play
in, and many leagues are single-gender, so that could provide an easy
way of adding people indirectly to a category without going through an
editing tens of thousands of articles.
Alternately (or perhaps, additionally), there are increasingly more ways
than the category system for encoding metadata, if the goal is to use it
for external sorting rather than navigation. For example, perhaps
Template:Infobox_person could have a gender field, which would then be
picked up by DBPedia and similar projects that extract infobox data.
Funny you should mention DBpedia. DBpedia can only work based on the things in Wikipedia
and given that we don't include gender in Wikipedia info boxes or category structures,
there won't be anything in DBpedia.
But, DBpedia links into Freebase, and Freebase has been running a game through the
'Freebase apps' platform called "Genderizer". This allows people to
select either from a queue of real or fictional people and set their gender based on the
lead from their Wikipedia article. While this isn't a reliable source to integrate the
information back into Wikipedia, for the purposes of doing a rough study into the gender
ratios of Wikipedia articles about people (and fictional people), Freebase may do what you
want.
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>