[Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica

[Lennart Guldbrandsson]

Interesting!

I don't know if you know about the categories that exist on some Wikipedias, for instance German and Swedish Wikipedia: namely the categories for articles about men and women respectively. On Swedish you can find the super-category here:

http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:Personer_efter_k%C3%B6n

Män = Men
Kvinnor = Women

Those numbers suggest that for each article about a woman on Swedish Wikipedia, there are 4,29 about men. That is a little bit better than the German Wikipedia (1 woman, 5,85 men).

As you can see from the interwiki links, some other languages also have these categories. English Wikipedia in fact have an impressive 1,65 articles about *women* for every article about men. All *38* of the women article towers of the 23 men articles :-) Time to fill in those categories?

Best wishes,

Lennart

Lennart Guldbrandsson, 
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Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 14:39:30 -0700
From: rkaldari at wikimedia.org
To: joseph.2011 at reagle.org; gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica



  


    
  
  
    Thanks for the article link, Joseph. I haven't yet finished the
    article, but I do have a couple of preliminary questions:

    

    * Do you know what the ratio of male to female contributors is at
    Encyclopedia Britannica?

    * Why the emphasis on female biographies? It seems like a weak
    indicator of gender bias (as reflected by the WikiSym study). Do we
    really know that women are significantly more likely to write about
    women than men are? If so, how much more likely?

    

    Ryan Kaldari

    

    

    On 9/2/11 6:54 AM, Joseph Reagle wrote:
    
      
      
       
      http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/gender-bias-in-wp-eb
       
      Abstract: Is there a
        bias in the against women's representation in Wikipedia
        biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six
        sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and
        the online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage,
        gender representation, and article length. We conclude that
        Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that
        Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica
        in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more
        likely to be missing than articles on men relative to
        Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not
        consistently differ by gender.
      
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