No subject

http://july.fixedreference.org/en/20040724/wikipedia/Famous_women_in_histor=
y

That article was moved on 23 September 2005 to "List of famous women
in history". It had 542 edits at the point it was deleted on 24
September 2006 following this discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_famous=
_women_in_history

One of the comments there:

"Please leave it - debate criteria if you will, but it's a very useful
resource for educators".

Does anyone feel that something went wrong there? Surely the data on
which articles are about women and which are about men should be
present somewhere so people can query and produce such lists if they
want them, for educational purposes, such as in the first link I
provided? Maybe that is more the domain of wikibooks, but even so, it
requires the basic information to be present somewhere in the articles
about whether the subject of the article is a man or a woman.

I have no idea how many entries were on the list when it got deleted
(looks to be several hundred), but the tour of 45 articles
(undoubtedly hand-picked) took people through the following:

http://www.dailylit.com/books/wikipedia-tours-famous-women-throughout-histo=
ry

Hatshepsut
Cleopatra VII
Boudica
Hypatia of Alexandria
Theodora (6th century)
Hildegard of Bingen
Eleanor of Aquitaine
Christine de Pizan
Joan of Arc
Elizabeth I of England
Artemisia Gentileschi
Christina of Sweden
Catherine II of Russia
Caroline Herschel
Mary Wollstonecraft
Sacagawea
Sojourner Truth
Victoria of the United Kingdom
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Julia Margaret Cameron
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Susan B. Anthony
Florence Nightingale
Mary Cassatt
Marie Curie
Emma Goldman
Gertrude Stein
Margaret Sanger
Hellen Keller
Virginia Woolf
Georgia O'Keeffe
Martha Graham
Amelia Earhart
Margaret Mead
Hannah Arendt
Rachel Carson
Simone de Beauvoir
Babe Zaharias
Rosa Parks
Ella Fitzgerald
Rosalind Franklin
Anne Frank
Valentina Tereshkova
Margaret Thatcher
Madeleine Albright

[Why on earth couldn't they give a list somewhere? I had to click
through all of them...]

I'm wondering how that compares to our list of 200 core biographies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biography/Core_biographi=
es

Nine (9) of those 200 articles are on a woman.

We do have lists of women:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_women

Some quite good:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-21st-century_female_scientists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_mathematicians
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Nobel_laureates

Those are good lists and resources, but I still think some basic tag
should enable identification of gender of the subject of a
biographical article (including transgender and other options, of
course). But how on Earth can something like that be done now, at such
a late stage?

Going back to that website:

http://www.dailylit.com/tags/wikipedia-tours

That's really quite impressive.

Carcharoth