Hello, everyone.
Back in June 2016, on this thread, I had published some data on the *content gender gap* in Wikipedia biographies (i.e. how many articles are about men versus how many are about women). I intended to keep generating snapshots of these stats, to track progress against the gap, but then realized the excellent WHGI project[1] is already collecting and preserving snapshots of the data, so I did not do so myself.
However, being curious about the numbers for a particular community, I realized WHGI does not provide an easy way to compare snapshots across time. The data is all there[2], but a convenient visualization and comparison tool between two arbitrary snapshots is not available yet. So while I did not build such a tool myself, I did update my little page with fresh numbers, *plus a comparison to the June 2016 *numbers.
You may find the data interesting: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ijon/Content_gap#Data_as_of_February_20... (note that the table is sortable by clicking the column heads)
While it is difficult to ascribe the change to specific programs, overall there can be little doubt that the increased attention to the content gender gap, alongside specific programs and groups such as Women in Red, Art+Feminism, WikiMujeres, WikiDonne, and even certain runs of #100wikidays, have all contributed to narrowing the gap on most Wikipedias.
Special congratulations to the Punjabi, Malayalam, and Odia Wikipedias, which have all narrowed the gap by more than 10 points! Of the larger wikis, great progress was made by the Vietnamese and Armenian Wikipedias.
As before, I'll note:
1. Your efforts, particularly on small-to-medium wikis, can really make a dent in these numbers!
2. I encourage you to share these numbers with your communities. Perhaps you'd like to overtake the wiki just above yours? :)
Cheers,
A.
[1] https://whgi.wmflabs.org/gender-by-language.html [2] https://whgi.wmflabs.org/snapshot_data/
On Thu, Jun 16, 2016 at 10:14 PM Asaf Bartov abartov@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hullo everyone.
I was asked by a volunteer for help getting stats on the gender gap in content on a certain Wikipedia, and came up with simple Wikidata Query Service[1] queries that pulled the total number of articles on a given Wikipedia about men and about women, to calculate *the proportion of articles about women out of all articles about humans*.
Then I was curious about how that wiki compared to other wikis, so I ran the queries on a bunch of languages, and gathered the results into a table, here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ijon/Content_gap
(please see the *caveat* there.)
I don't have time to fully write-up everything I find interesting in those results, but I will quickly point out the following:
- The Nepali statistic is simply astonishing! There must be a story
there. I'm keen on learning more about this, if anyone can shed light.
- Evidently, ~13%-17% seems like a robust average of the proportion of
articles about women among all biographies.
- among the top 10 largest wikis, Japanese is the least imbalanced. Good
job, Japanese Wikipedians! I wonder if you have a good sense of what drives this relatively better balance. (my instinctive guess is pop culture coverage.)
among the top 10 largest wikis, Russian is the most imbalanced.
I intend to re-generate these stats every two months or so, to
eventually have some sense of trends and changes.
- Your efforts, particularly on small-to-medium wikis, can really make a
dent in these numbers! For example, it seems I am personally responsible[2] for almost 1% of the coverage of women on Hebrew Wikipedia! :)
- I encourage you to share these numbers with your communities. Perhaps
you'd like to overtake the wiki just above yours? :)
- I'm happy to add additional languages to the table, by request. Or you
can do it yourself, too. :)
A.
[1] https://query.wikidata.org/ [2] Yay #100wikidays :) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/100wikidays -- Asaf Bartov Wikimedia Foundation http://www.wikimediafoundation.org
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