[WikiEN-l] Systemic bias wrt gender

Keith Old keithold at gmail.com
Wed Nov 22 23:02:32 UTC 2006


On 11/23/06, Stan Shebs <stanshebs at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Puppy wrote:
> > Article quality and content reflect the bias of their authors; whether
> > internal  or external (access to sources, exposure to topics) that is
> > the issue. Your example is of geographical/political bias. There is also
> > religious bias (see my user page), and many other biases on Wikipedia.
> > This thread is about gender bias, note the subject: wrt gender: as in,
> > with regard to gender, ie; gender bias. It has expanded to note that
> > there may be gender bias or at least gender imbalance within the editor
> > pool on Wikipedia, and explored various possible reasons. Your email
> > does not seem to be addressing any of that. I am not sure what you are
> > saying with your email: are you saying that geopolitical bias is more
> > rampant and deserves more attention than gender bias? Are you saying
> > gender bias is hard to identify? Please clarify.
> >
> I'm saying that I don't know of any significant systemic bias relating
> to gender. Systemic bias can happen even when everybody has good
> intentions and is on their best behavior, so it's orthogonal to editor
> gender, editor behavior, etc. The original post mentioned scanty
> coverage of blowdryers, perhaps not a great example for reasons already
> discussed; are there better examples where topics of particular interest
> to women are being overlooked?
>
> (I'm assuming you're familiar with [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering
> systemic bias]], which explains things better than I can. I note that
> it's primarily geographical - should it have a gender subproject?)
>
> Stan
>
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G'day Stan,

Going back to the original post, Keitei states* "our ballet
articles make me weep inside*." I recall that in a Guardian exercise where
experts reviewed articles in various areas, our fashion-related article was
given a very low rating.

These may be areas where we have significant work ahead of us to get our
articles up to scratch.

Regards


*Keith Old*
**
Keith Old
**
User Capitalistroadster



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