Greetings Gendergap-sters,
I wanted to tell everyone about a new game that Magnus Manske has created, called 'Wikidata - The game!'
http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/
As games go, it's not tremendously exciting - it's not going to be peeling too many people away from their Xboxes or Nintendos.
There's three sub-games: Person, Merge and Gender. You pick one and then the system asks you questions... forever. These answers end up getting pushed back into Wikidata.
I've just been playing the 'gender' game. It shows you a Wikidata object, with a description in a language, as well as possibly a picture. Based on the description, you pick which gender best matches out of male or female (for non-binary genders, you can open up the Wikidata object by clicking on it and editing it directly). If you can't work it out, you can skip it by pressing 'Not sure'.
I've now done over 400 of these. The interface is designed to work with touch devices so you should be able to do it with smartphones and iPads and so on.
But why bother? Why should we care about making sure Wikidata accurately reflects the gender of its subjects?
1. It builds the future capacity of a replacement to the category system. Currently, we have a category system that turns identity into politics. We saw this on English Wikipedia with the "American women novelists" debacle: articles about female writers being moved from being in the main "American novelists" category into a gender-specific category. Some of the women who were thus moved objected on the basis that this was a form of ghettoisation of women's voices, and also pointed out that men weren't being equally moved to "American men novelists".
The categories for discussion debates on English Wikipedia have become a place where identity politics plays out: should we have an "LGBT scientists" category? In come the people to argue that someone being LGBT is somehow a non-essential or non-central part of that person's identity. As it is for gender, so it is for religion and nationality. The flipside to this argument is that having categories based on gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity and religion enables readers to find people. The gay kid who thinks all gay men are stereotypically effeminate men working as beauticians can be disabused of that notion by looking through the 'LGBT sportspersons' category; the girl who has been told that women don't go into science or engineering can do similarly by looking in the 'Women scientists' category. Wikidata may give us a way out of these kinds of conundrums by letting us slice up the world on a great number of different axes. Want to see all the gay Buddhist scientists from Morocco? Fire up some future Wikidata powered faceted semantic search system that one day we'll maybe integrate into Wikipedia and you can do just that.
2. It'll enable us to monitor how well we're doing on systemic bias and the gender gap. Wikidata operates across different versions of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. On 'American women novelists', how well is each language doing in covering them? Is English Wikipedia better or worse at covering women novelists writing in English than French Wikipedia is covering women novelists writing in French? If we can make the machine readable data in Wikidata good and comprehensive, we can use it to flag up shortcomings and systemic bias in how Wikipedias in different languages handle these kinds of sensitive identity topics like gender and ethnicity and nationality. Countering systemic bias and the gender gap among article subjects isn't only an English language problem: Wikimedia is a global movement, and finding weak spots and opportunities to improve in all languages is something we should try and do.
If you haven't played around with Wikidata, give it a go. Get yourself logged in with an account and go through the OAuth process, then you can start playing the games that Magnus has created and help build a system that can be used to monitor and improve coverage across Wikipedias. Wikidata is still at very early stages and you sort of have to have faith in what it could end up being in a few years time rather than being able to see immediate results now. But getting there might be quite good fun.
Yours,