Hi,
Are there any statistics that track the evolution of page views of male/female biographies in the different Wikipedias?
Regards, Micru
Hi Micru,
in general, there may be better venues to ask this kind of question, e.g. the Wiki-research-l and Gendergap mailing lists (both CCed). But for a partial answer, the paper by Marit Hinnosaar reviewed here looks at these stats (if not their long-term trend): https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/December#Does_adver...
E.g. "On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men versus only 16 percent of the biographies of women."
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 3:35 AM David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Are there any statistics that track the evolution of page views of male/female biographies in the different Wikipedias?
Regards, Micru _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Note that this is not to be confused with there necessarily being more pageviews for the most read articles about women than for the most read articles about men. It does show there's more coverage of less-interesting men than there is of less-interesting women.
A.
On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 3:22 AM Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Micru,
in general, there may be better venues to ask this kind of question, e.g. the Wiki-research-l and Gendergap mailing lists (both CCed). But for a partial answer, the paper by Marit Hinnosaar reviewed here looks at these stats (if not their long-term trend):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/December#Does_adver... ?
E.g. "On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men versus only 16 percent of the biographies of women."
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 3:35 AM David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Are there any statistics that track the evolution of page views of male/female biographies in the different Wikipedias?
Regards, Micru _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Hi Tilman,
I disagree with your appraisal that there are better venues for my question. The gendergap mailing list is technically dead, before your message the last one was from April. The other mailing list is related to research, not to stats that should be readily available.
From your answer (and the lack of more information) I understand that there
is a poor (inexistent?) tracking of audience bias. In my opinion these data would be very useful to monitor how visitors evolve with more availability of women's biographies. I have requested it to be added to the Metrics Kit. If anyone else wants to endorse or comment: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_health_initiative/Metrics_kit...
Regards, Micru
On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 2:22 AM Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Micru,
in general, there may be better venues to ask this kind of question, e.g. the Wiki-research-l and Gendergap mailing lists (both CCed). But for a partial answer, the paper by Marit Hinnosaar reviewed here looks at these stats (if not their long-term trend):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/December#Does_adver... ?
E.g. "On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men versus only 16 percent of the biographies of women."
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 3:35 AM David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Are there any statistics that track the evolution of page views of male/female biographies in the different Wikipedias?
Regards, Micru _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Hmm. I think the subject of what you call "audience bias" is far more general than the tiny targeted area you're talking about. I'm pretty sure that readers from Poland are thousands of times more likely to access the Wikipedia article about [name any town in Poland] than readers in Indonesia are. I'm pretty sure that readers from all over the world are far more likely to access articles about people who are named in other publications, particularly the news media, than they are about notable but comparatively obscure article subjects who haven't recently been the subject of public interest. I do not think you have made a good case for considering the viewing of articles of male subjects vs. female subjects to be directly linked to "audience bias". We only need to look at the top100 articles viewed on any project to see that what drives page views is usually some event external to the Wikipedia projects.
Page view data is pretty readily available - it is available for every single page on every single Wikipedia (and probably for a lot of other projects too, I've just never checked). It would require some technical knowledge to write a script targeting page view information for articles in selected categories - such as page views of articles about women scientists - provided there is correct and appropriate categorization of the article. I'm the first to admit I'm incapable of writing such a script, but there are lots of Wikimedians who have such skills.
It certainly looks like you are asking for ongoing research to be carried out on a topic that interests you (and, I am certain, a lot of other Wikimedians). I am unclear what this kind of metric would tell us about "audience bias" (or any other kind of bias, for that matter), but there may be value in better understanding the frequency of viewing of articles in certain categories and comparing them to related categories; for example, comparing the frequency of viewing of the average article about a female architect as compared to a male architect. It should be noted that there is also an inherent bias in that there are far fewer biographical articles about women in most categories, as compared to men.
Risker/Anne
On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 at 18:20, David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Tilman,
I disagree with your appraisal that there are better venues for my question. The gendergap mailing list is technically dead, before your message the last one was from April. The other mailing list is related to research, not to stats that should be readily available.
From your answer (and the lack of more information) I understand that there is a poor (inexistent?) tracking of audience bias. In my opinion these data would be very useful to monitor how visitors evolve with more availability of women's biographies. I have requested it to be added to the Metrics Kit. If anyone else wants to endorse or comment:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_health_initiative/Metrics_kit...
Regards, Micru
On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 2:22 AM Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Micru,
in general, there may be better venues to ask this kind of question, e.g. the Wiki-research-l and Gendergap mailing lists (both CCed). But for a partial answer, the paper by Marit Hinnosaar reviewed here looks at these stats (if not their long-term trend):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/December#Does_adver...
?
E.g. "On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men versus only 16 percent of the biographies of women."
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 3:35 AM David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Are there any statistics that track the evolution of page views of male/female biographies in the different Wikipedias?
Regards, Micru _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Etiamsi omnes, ego non _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Of course, there is more than one way to skin a potato, but it doesn't mean that those ways are useful, desirable, or informative. You say that readers are more likely to access people who are named, than people who are notable, but isn't that relevant? If notable people are not named, then we can point at the issue, bring the information to the light and ask for measures to be taken. Because as it is now, it seems as if we are at the mercy of what others decide that is relevant, however I believe that the community also can have a say in identifying media blind spots and reporting them to the public.
I am not asking for "ongoing research", I am asking for data to back our claims that wikipedia reflects the bias of the media. OTOH, for research purposes it would be interesting to: - evaluate the distribution of sources by gender and area of expertise - correlation between page views and sources
"It should be noted that there is also an inherent bias in that there are far fewer biographical articles about women in most categories, as compared to men."
That is not so injurious. If we have 80% articles about men and 20% articles about women, however 50% of pageviews go to men and 50% go to women, suddenly the gender gap would be narrower, as it would show that women, even with a reduced number of articles, have more public exposure. Still there would be areas of expertise where men would attract more pageviews than women, and vice versa, but that would be ok according to my understanding.
It should be noted however, that in the depths of the gendergap rabbit hole there is the core of societal (and individual) values, and how individuals are rewarded in exposure (and money) according to those values. If women are naturally more skilled than men in certain areas, why is not that expertise recognized and valued? If our platforms are predominately male, does it mean that our mission has an inherent gender bias?
@Strainu: thanks for the links!
Micru
On Thu, Dec 6, 2018 at 3:45 AM Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm. I think the subject of what you call "audience bias" is far more general than the tiny targeted area you're talking about. I'm pretty sure that readers from Poland are thousands of times more likely to access the Wikipedia article about [name any town in Poland] than readers in Indonesia are. I'm pretty sure that readers from all over the world are far more likely to access articles about people who are named in other publications, particularly the news media, than they are about notable but comparatively obscure article subjects who haven't recently been the subject of public interest. I do not think you have made a good case for considering the viewing of articles of male subjects vs. female subjects to be directly linked to "audience bias". We only need to look at the top100 articles viewed on any project to see that what drives page views is usually some event external to the Wikipedia projects.
Page view data is pretty readily available - it is available for every single page on every single Wikipedia (and probably for a lot of other projects too, I've just never checked). It would require some technical knowledge to write a script targeting page view information for articles in selected categories - such as page views of articles about women scientists
- provided there is correct and appropriate categorization of the article.
I'm the first to admit I'm incapable of writing such a script, but there are lots of Wikimedians who have such skills.
It certainly looks like you are asking for ongoing research to be carried out on a topic that interests you (and, I am certain, a lot of other Wikimedians). I am unclear what this kind of metric would tell us about "audience bias" (or any other kind of bias, for that matter), but there may be value in better understanding the frequency of viewing of articles in certain categories and comparing them to related categories; for example, comparing the frequency of viewing of the average article about a female architect as compared to a male architect. It should be noted that there is also an inherent bias in that there are far fewer biographical articles about women in most categories, as compared to men.
Risker/Anne
On Wed, 5 Dec 2018 at 18:20, David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Tilman,
I disagree with your appraisal that there are better venues for my question. The gendergap mailing list is technically dead, before your message the last one was from April. The other mailing list is related to research, not to stats that should be readily available.
From your answer (and the lack of more information) I understand that
there
is a poor (inexistent?) tracking of audience bias. In my opinion these
data
would be very useful to monitor how visitors evolve with more
availability
of women's biographies. I have requested it to be added to the Metrics
Kit.
If anyone else wants to endorse or comment:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_health_initiative/Metrics_kit...
Regards, Micru
On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 2:22 AM Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Hi Micru,
in general, there may be better venues to ask this kind of question,
e.g.
the Wiki-research-l and Gendergap mailing lists (both CCed). But for a partial answer, the paper by Marit Hinnosaar reviewed here looks at
these
stats (if not their long-term trend):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/December#Does_adver...
?
E.g. "On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26
percent
of the biographies of men versus only 16 percent of the biographies of women."
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 3:35 AM David Cuenca Tudela <dacuetu@gmail.com
wrote:
Hi,
Are there any statistics that track the evolution of page views of male/female biographies in the different Wikipedias?
Regards, Micru _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Etiamsi omnes, ego non _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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În joi, 6 dec. 2018 la 01:20, David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com a scris:
Hi Tilman,
I disagree with your appraisal that there are better venues for my question. The gendergap mailing list is technically dead, before your message the last one was from April. The other mailing list is related to research, not to stats that should be readily available.
From your answer (and the lack of more information) I understand that there is a poor (inexistent?) tracking of audience bias. In my opinion these data would be very useful to monitor how visitors evolve with more availability of women's biographies. I have requested it to be added to the Metrics Kit. If anyone else wants to endorse or comment: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_health_initiative/Metrics_kit...
David, The data is trivial to get but very hard to interpet: 1. Use PetScan (https://petscan.wmflabs.org/) to identify "biographies of men/women" and save the outputs as PagerPile 2. Use MassiveViews (http://tools.wmflabs.org/massviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org) to get the data from those PagePiles.
That's all there is to it. It can also be automated, although I won't go into details without testing. But without clear guidelines of how to interpret it, the data can be extremely misleading, so that part is the hard one.
HTH, Strainu
Regards, Micru
On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 2:22 AM Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Micru,
in general, there may be better venues to ask this kind of question, e.g. the Wiki-research-l and Gendergap mailing lists (both CCed). But for a partial answer, the paper by Marit Hinnosaar reviewed here looks at these stats (if not their long-term trend):
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/December#Does_adver... ?
E.g. "On a typical (median) day in September 2014, no one read 26 percent of the biographies of men versus only 16 percent of the biographies of women."
On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 3:35 AM David Cuenca Tudela dacuetu@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Are there any statistics that track the evolution of page views of male/female biographies in the different Wikipedias?
Regards, Micru _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- Tilman Bayer Senior Analyst Wikimedia Foundation IRC (Freenode): HaeB _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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