It is a little while ago now that I was asked, by Roberta Wedge, about the
"missing women" on the English Wikipedia, who are identified in the Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). I'm glad to say that, with a
recent technical development I now have a list.
(Recent means "since this morning", by the way - thanks as ever to Magnus
Manske for his assiduous pushing of the tech support envelope for Wikidata.
The new tool PagePile tool at
https://tools.wmflabs.org/pagepile/ filled
the final gap.)
So I can reveal a list of 2,345 women with their Wikidata IDs at
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Charles_Matthews/PagePile
This comes out as pile 188 for PagePile. If you look at the wikitext on my
page, the data is actually in two columns, Wikidata ID followed by name.
(This is tabbed data, though the first four or so tabs seemed not to come
out straight. Doubtless a teething problem.) It was a question of combining
two Wikidata queries with the new tool, which generally speaking handles
and combine lists in a clean way that wasn't previously available.
So much for the technical advance. A few comments on the content. These are
females with an OBIN (Oxford biographical identifier), rather than those
with an article to themselves. They are not automatically notable,
therefore. "Missing" is relative: Myra Hindley is on the list, but that is
because the name is a redirect on enWP.
Also, this list is not warranted complete, since we are aware of a couple
of percent of OBINs that do not yet have a Wikidata entry. Around 150 or
200 more names may have to be added, in the end.
All said, this is the first sight of realistic list, however, of the ODNB
missing women. Translation lists, such as those with existing articles on
the German or French Wikipedias, can easily be added.
Charles