Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wiki-research-l Digest, Vol 116, Issue 16

Send Wiki-research-l mailing list submissions to wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to wiki-research-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org You can reach the person managing the list at wiki-research-l-owner(a)lists.wikimedia.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of Wiki-research-l digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Re: Gender-specific page titles (Flöck) 2. Re: Research on Wikidata's content coverage (Flöck) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Message: 1 Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 11:09:00 +0000 From: Flöck, Fabian &lt;Fabian.Floeck(a)gesis.org&gt; To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities &lt;wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Gender-specific page titles Message-ID: &lt;7ECBA035-F388-4F89-9B65-A7C1C956AA2C(a)gesis.org&gt; Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Interesting, thanks Mark! - Fabian On 07.04.2015, at 16:38, Mark J.Nelson &lt;mjn(a)anadrome.org&lt;mailtomailto: mjn(a)anadrome.org&gt;&gt; wrote: Flöck, Fabian <Fabian.Floeck@gesis.org<mailto:Fabian.Floeck@gesis.org>> writes: Does anyone know about a study that looks at how often for example articles about a profession use the male instead of the female form as the name (female form doesn't exist or is just a redirect)? It would probably not be a so much of an issue for English, but rather Spanish, German, Russian etc. Concrete example: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor exists in German, but https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professorin is just a redirect. One thing to be careful of in such a study (though I would also like to see it!) is tha the politics and preferences in this area vary widely across languages, and sometimes within a language, so a purely data-driven study has to be careful about its assumptions and generalizations. Below a long-ish discussion of Greek that you may skip if not interested (it ended up longer-winded than I had expected): For example in Greek it is very profession-specific whether the trend is towards using a slashed form of both genders, or towards convergence on a single form that applies to both genders (sometimes with atypical morphology). Sometimes it depends on the specific word form and historical usage. In fields that historically had both men and women, both forms are very well established and tend to persist, e.g. a male teacher is a δάσκαλος and a female one is a δασκάλα. But in fields that were typically so male-dominated that only the masculine version has been in common use, there's disagreement over whether it's more progressive to "revive" a feminine form, or to generalize the masculine form to cover both genders. For example a female president would universally be called by the historically masculine form πρόεδρος, but with a feminine article (i.e. πρόεδρος can now be either a masculine or feminine noun, depending on context, even though it's morphologically irregular as a feminine noun). There is in Byzantine Greek a feminine analog, προέδρισσα (referring to a different position), but it isn't used today outside humorous contexts (roughly where you might use "Presidentess" in English). The same applies for a number of other more common professions, but for some it's more disputed which form should be used (for President there isn't any usage variance). In short it's complex, so I hope any data set is careful about what it's counting as data, and why. :) -Mark -- Mark J. Nelson Anadrome Research http://www.anadrome.org _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l Cheers, Fabian -- Fabian Flöck Research Associate Computational Social Science department @GESIS Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Cologne, Germany Tel: + 49 (0) 221-47694-208 fabian.floeck@gesis.org<mailto:fabian.floeck@gesis.org> www.gesis.org www.facebook.com/gesis.org