Today I was able to make a graph of the biographies in the Swedish Wikipedia, showing how male and female biographies are distributed by decade of birth, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LA2-gender-age.png

Among living people (born 1920 or later, secion A), there are 1 woman to 3 men. The gender inequality ratio peaks at 1:13 among people born 1800-1849 (section B). The Swedish Wikipedia contains articles about 16,987 women and 70,318 men, together making up 27 percent of all articles in the Swedish Wikipedia.

Knowing this is the result of a long and hard group effort in categorizing all biographies, that started a year ago.

Samples in older printed encyclopedias indicate that Wikipedia, with an overall ratio of 1 female to 4 male biographies, as inequal as that might seem, could be the most gender equal Swedish encyclopedia to date. And we're the first to keep count.

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A year ago, I was intrigued by the various parody illustration of Wikipedia's content as a bookshelf, such as http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Size_of_English_Wikipedia_broken_down...

The embarrasing fact is that we don't know what an accurate diagram would look like. We know how many articles there are in total, but not what percentage is about geographic places, people, historic events, popular culture, or abstract scientific concepts.

So one year ago I started to categorize all biographies in the Swedish Wikipedia as either "men" or "women". This is something the German Wikipedia had already done. With the help of some friends and a modified pywikipediabot script, it took 18 weeks and was completed at the end of December 2008. We had found 80,150 biographies or 26.6 percent of all articles. Of these, 15,500 were women (5.1%) and 64.650 were men (21.4%) for a ratio of 1 woman to 4 men. The German Wikipedia had (and still has) 1:6.

That was 26.6 % of all articles. I suspect another big section of the bookshelf is articles about geographic places. I have not yet started to identify them systematically. That should probably be done by assigning geographic coordinates.

During the first half of 2009, another 7000 biographies have been added to the Swedish Wikipedia (280 each week). This remains 27% of all articles and the ratio of women:men also remains constant.

Already before, we had categories for years of birth and death, but nobody had tried to cover all biographies. After all 80,150 biographies were categorized by gender, only 80% of them were categorized by birth year. This has since increased to 91%.

It turns out that people born 1920 or later, i.e. mostly living people, are 1 women to 3 men, and quite evenly distributed over the decades, from 4,195 born in the 1920s to 8,439 in the 1970s.

As one goes back into the 19th century, the total number of biographies declines (2,122 born in the 1870s, 1,494 in the 1840s) and at the same time the gender inequality steadily increases, to peak at 1:13 among people born 1800-1849. For people born in the 18th century, the ratio is "only" 1:8.

The great inequality in older times could be the result of good coverage of scientists and members of parliament (all men), and less coverage of artists and writers (many women active in this time).