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,
--
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>