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Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red/Archive 17

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Latest comment: 7 years ago by Sander.v.Ginkel in topic Bridges
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Where is the gender gap?

Latest comment: 7 years ago14 comments7 people in discussion

Everywerhe were I read about the gender gap on Wikipedia the argument is that <17% of the pages on Wikipedia are about women. But, how strange it might sound, it is not a reason that there is a gender gap on Wikipedia.

I don't see where the gender gap is. In my vision the gender gap is not solely: There are more articles about men than women on Wikipedia. But the gender gap is: There are more articles about notable men in a certain field, where they have not been created for women. Let me explain this.

  • Imagine: all articles about all notable people have been created and still <20% of the articles is about men. Is there a gender gap?

I in my opionin there is a gender gap in a certain field if the men articles have been created, where the women have not been created. So that for instance all articles about men who competed at the 2016 Summer Olympics have been created, but none for the women. But if all people at the 2016 Summer Olympics have been created and <20% of the participants were women, there is not a gender gap on Wikipeida.

Association football for instance is far more popular for men than women, so there are more articles are about men. And I agree, within football there is a gender gap. But when all notable women football players have been created there are still far more article about men. That's because International women's football is there since let's say 50 year, while before that time only men where playing football. In almost all countries there is a popular men's national competition, while there is not one for women.

  • Creating a men's gender gap with creating solely women's articles in a single field is not the same as closing the (overall) women's gender gap

Imagine, someone closes the percentage men-women with only articles about let's say Paralympic athletes (there are relavtive less articles about Paralympic Games people), in my opinion the women's gender gap is not closed, as in all other fields the women are still under represented. But there is at this point a gender gap within the Paralympic field (for men this time) because the male articles (with the same notability) have not been created.

I agree this is an extreme example, but it illustrates what we do with creating articles from the Wikidata generated red links lists, as the men's list might be 5 times bigger than the women's list. In other words, creating solely women in a certain field, is creating a men's gender gap in this field.

So hopefully you understand now that the reason that <17% of the pages on Wikipedia are about women is not purely a reason that there is a gender gap on Wikipedia.

So my question is, to thinks about, where is the gender gap? In which fields are there notable men created where the women have not been created.

Thanks for reading, Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 14:06, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

The trouble with this line of argument is that it's setting up an impossible premise; most biographical fields don't have nice neat lists of who's notable and who's not (it would make AfDs a lot easier if they did!) so you can't run statistics on what percentage of all the notable people are women. It's easier to get those statistics for sports, which is where most of your examples come from, but for various reasons notability in sports is even more historically skewed toward men than notability at large. And if you look at your example of the 2016 Summer Olympics, about 45% of the competitors were women, which isn't an even split but is much closer to 50% than 17%. I suspect if you actually could take a look at other fields, you'd find something similar; that the percentage of notable women isn't 50%, but it isn't as low as 17% either. (For what it's worth, this seems to be the last major discussion we've had on the issue, and is worth reading.) TheCatalyst31 Reaction•Creation 15:11, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Hi! It is a tough thing to call with exact numbers, but there is a gender gap in many professions. Here's a report about gender gap in the media: WMC 2015 Gender Gap report and this is the Wikidata Gender indicators report. In addition, there is a problem that I've seen where women's contributions aren't part of articles on general topics. This is a problem in many areas. For example, I just wrote about Women in agriculture in Japan and was surprised to find out that women have historically and continue to make up more than 50% of all farmers in Japan. Yet they aren't mentioned in the main article about Japanese agriculture. When I wrote about Women in Antarctica, I had to go back into the History of Antarctica and add in women's contributions--because no one else had bothered to add them. Closing the gender gap isn't just about writing women's bios, it's making sure their contributions are recognized and added to articles where appropriate. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:34, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

The bias is deeply engrained in history/society, partly because men were allowed to simply do more than women and men chose to write about mainly men. You can't change history or ignore the fact that historically encyclopedias write largely about men. What we can do is find those women in history who might have been mentioned in several books or newspapers, who may have only gained brief fame in their country or even locally, but you can glean together sources to write them. I think those are the types Rosie, Susan and myself like writing about, the unsung heroes we discover. It's a beautiful thing to rediscover somebody like that, Florence Nagle springs to mind. Then there's BLPs, and there's definitely more notable living women in the world right now than there are male biographies on English wiki. Any move towards even coverage for both men and women is going to rely heavily on the pool of living women, but we can try to discover as many of the older ones as possible, and a big part of that is just write articles on anything, discover red links through research.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:34, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

Totally agree Megalibrarygirl with the statement "they aren't mentioned in the main article", nor are they mentioned in many articles. Writing about these cookbook authors, I am totally surprised not to even see their names mentioned in articles of their peers. For example, every article I found on Helen Evans Brown mentioned James Beard and their long partnership. His WP article didn't mention her at all. Every article I read about Helen McCully after 1960 talked about her and her work with Jacques Pépin. Pépin himself wrote numerous articles about her, calling her "my surrogate mother", "director of my career", and "the woman who introduced me to Julia Child" and other such descriptors. Pépin's article didn't mention McCully at all. Why would someone who had such an impact on someone else's career be left out of their biography? It makes no sense, but routinely happens. Wives are not mentioned in too many biographies to count. Even if they didn't have careers in their own right, they were an integral part of a person's life. TheCatalyst31 yes, it isn't about arriving at some artificial 50/50 split, it is about putting the balance back in, restoring women to the parts they were allowed to play. It may not mean they get an article of their own, but they should be included in articles about the people whose lives they influenced. Thankfully on both Brown and Evans, they were notable women in their own rights and now have articles. SusunW (talk) 17:40, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
That's why I think we need to encourage more women to join Wikipedia as editors. I know not everyone agrees with me but I am convinced women editors can shed new light on the role of women in virtually every aspect of human enterprise. While the physical meetups can help to some extent, I have been wondering whether we could not make better use of the social media, not only to spread news about our new articles but to give out short sharp messages about the inadequate coverage of women on Wikipedia. We could also try to develop one or two introductory pages for new editors under WiR, providing some simple guidelines on how to edit existing articles and how to create new ones. The information under the Welcome template must appear pretty frightening to most newcomers. (Just try clicking on the blue links it contains.) Indeed, many women who are interested in improving Wikipedia complain about the difficulty of coping with its complex editing requirements. So it might really help if we could back up our editathons with improved initial guidance (perhaps including a few easy exercises) and more consistent mentoring. I think it would be useful if some of our more recent participants/members could help with this as the Wikipedia editing environment has evolved in many different directions since the days I joined up about 10 years ago. Don't you think this would be a worthwhile initiative?--Ipigott (talk) 07:55, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
I agree that it needs to be easier to edit and that we need to do a better job of mentoring newbies. The problem is, IMO, how do you make it simple and concise? Describing it takes a page in itself. (I know because someone asked me to write what I do to create a new article and it took a lot of explaining). The system itself is unwieldy. 1. Pick a topic; 2. research whether there are adequate secondary sources not generated by the subject to write an article. 3. Create the article. All sounds easy. But it isn't. That last step is fraught with knowing the technology. I'd love to know how to tweak the creation template so that so much of it did not have to be manually input each time, but I have no idea how to do that. SusunW (talk) 17:00, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Many of us, including me, have created articles on women who were related to someone -family, occupation, etc.- to a man who already had a Wikipedia article and there was no mention of the woman in his article, let alone a redlink. This is one method of writing women out of history and this is why compiling redlink redlists is valuable. --Rosiestep (talk) 17:31, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
I've had the same experience as Rosiestep and SusunW in finding notable women who were barely or (most often) not mentioned in their spouse's, teacher's, mentor's, friend's, etc article. It's a huge problem. We don't see gender imbalance properly. For example, if women in a meeting speak exactly half the time and men speak half the time, most men feel as if the women have spoken more than the men (or dominated the meeting). We are comfortable with television shows and movies (esp. kids' shows) that have a full cast of male characters and one token female. That's just normal. The normal of our world makes us overlook women's contributions as part of the "normal" scheme of things. Everyone's biased. I know I am. I can't say how many times I've assumed someone was a man because of their profession, or how as a child I only identified with male characters in stories (when I was a kid, there were no women doing cool things in stories). I agree with Ipigott that I would love to see more women editing. It helps to create a friendly space, which WiR is. However, it's hard to retain editors since it is work. I edit because it makes me feel useful in the world. We need to find more people who are driven to help change the world a word at a time. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:55, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
  • On introducing newcomers to editing, I think it would be far more productive to break down the learning process into stages instead of presenting everything in one fell swoop. How about a simple introduction on "Adding a fact from a reliable source to a Wikipedia article". Give an example, show how it's done in a few easy stages and then give the newbie one or two similar exercises for practice. They could then be encouraged to make a genuine new edit based on an acceptable source. The next stage would be to get them to create a short new article based on at least two reliable sources. Same procedure with a couple of exercises then the real thing. I think a few pages like this would make things much easier and more transparent for newbies. They could be used in connection with all our editathons to attract new members and could be linked from items on the social networks. Finally, we should not forget the copycat approach, i.e. see how others have been doing similar things - that's how I learnt to edit without consulting any of those lists of editing rules. But maybe I'm underestimating the difficulties. Pity we can't find a few guinea pigs for trials.--Ipigott (talk) 19:23, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Ipigott You mean like: "Adding a fact from a reliable source to a Wikipedia article" step one, figure out what you want to add. Step two, find a secondary reliable source that is not related to or created by the subject. Step three, press the edit button, look for the tab that says "Cite" press it and a template box should appear. Step four add your information. Step five, choose a template from the drop down box and complete as many of the fields as you can before pressing the insert button. Step six, preview your edit with the tabs at the bottom of the page. Step seven, save your edit. SusunW (talk) 21:16, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW: I was thinking of something even simpler for women's biographies based on one or two examples with a short sample text, simple reference formats, basic categories, etc., with explanations after each, followed by a skeleton as a basis for creating a new article. To some extent it would be a matter of filling in the gaps and previewing the results. But you've got the general idea. First attempts would of course be draft or sandbox articles ready for mentoring. (Each new editor would be assigned one or more mentors.) I think it would be a more effective way of showing newcomers that they can start to be productive without reading up on 20 or 30 pages of rules and regulations and then having their articles deleted. It might be worth a try with groups of school or college students or people from the GLAM community. But I don't want to push it unless there is real support. We could present it as a specially tailored "Editing Ice-breaker Week" under one of our future events, just to see if it works. We could then make improvements on the basis of feedback and create a special page for new editors on WiR, perhaps linked to a two or three-minute presentation on YouTube showing the process step by step.--Ipigott (talk) 07:57, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
  • You ask, "Where is the gender gap"? In Ramón Armando Rodriguez's Diccionario biográfico, geograf́ico e histórico de Venezuela (1957), 3% of the biographies are about women. --Rosiestep (talk) 20:59, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: Wikipedia's List of Venezuelans is hardly an improvement: Archtecture: 2 men, 0 women; Artists: 13 men, 1 woman; Authors: 40 men, 1 woman; Business and law: 9 men, 1 woman; Cartoonists: 2 men, 0 women; Engineering: 3 men, 1 woman; Historical: 18 men, 1 woman; Mass media: 16 men, 1 woman, Medicine: 9 men, 0 women; Mountaineers: 1 man, 0 women; Music: 127 men, 19 women; Politicians: 26 men, 1 woman; Science 5 men, 1 woman; Sports: 93 men, 12 women. The only sections listing a majority of women are Beauty queens: 49 women; and Entertainment: 35 men, 36 women. If we exclude the Beauty queens, Entertainment, Music and Sports, that gives 124 men vs. 8 women or just over 6%. If these are included, there are still less than 11% (39 women vs. 364 men). But maybe the list itself needs to be revised?--Ipigott (talk) 08:41, 17 November 2016 (UTC)

WASPs

Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 

The Women Airforce Service Pilots has several women in red. One of them was Elizabeth Chambers (right) but she has been covered recently at the National Archives Gender Equality Edit-a-Thon. Unfortunately, somebody wants to turn her red again. Please see Articles for deletion/Elizabeth Chambers (pilot). Andrew D. (talk) 09:48, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Articles created outside of editathon

Latest comment: 7 years ago10 comments5 people in discussion

Is there a template to tag Women in Red articles created outside of an editathon? I created the article Jennifer Velez, a former New Jersey cabinet member which is not within the scope of a current editathon. I know we have templates to tag the talk pages for articles created in editathons and I'm wondering if there is anything similar for other articles created for Women in Red. Thanks! Knope7 (talk) 22:38, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

The place to add new articles for the month is here - you can find it under Metrics on the main WiR page. Nearly all those listed are picked up automatically from their Wikidata listing. I see you also added JV to Wikidata yesterday. Every day, a bot scans Wikidata for new entries with gender "female" and adds them to the list. As the bot does not pick up non-biographical articles (women's works, associations, etc.), for the time being these should be added manually. I've added JV to the November list but it would have been picked up by bot from the Wikidata listing during the day. Your D'Arcy Carden is listed for October. Hope all this is clear. Let me know if you experience any other problems and thanks for creating biographies on women.--Ipigott (talk) 09:17, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Thank you for the response. I am afraid I was unclear. I'm looking for anything the equivalent of the template currently on the talk page for Jennifer Velez identifying it as part of the 50,000 project. My understand is that we create those templates for editathons and the 50,000 project uses them as a way of essentially advertising the project. I'm looking to see if we have anything like that for Women in Red. Knope7 (talk) 17:29, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Sorry, Knope7, on rereading your question, I see it was quite clear. My misunderstanding. Until now, our template tags for WiR have indeed been specifically related to our editathons but it might be sensible to create one for more general use. How about {{WIR 2016}} with the text "This article was created as a contribution to Women in Red." Rosiestep: If you agree, I'll create the template.--Ipigott (talk) 08:57, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Ipigott, yes, please! And Knope7, thank you for the idea behind this. --Rosiestep (talk) 17:11, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Ditto. I love this idea! SusunW (talk) 19:02, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
Thank you Ipigott! That is exactly what I was hoping for. I'm glad other editors think it will be useful too. Knope7 (talk) 03:27, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
  • I've created WIR 2016 but I'm not too sure how to promote it. It should probably be presented somewhere on our main page but I can't see where. Any help would be appreciated. Those of you who write articles outside the scope of our editathons can of course start to use it immediately.--Ipigott (talk) 19:33, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
  •   I've started using it. --Rosiestep (talk) 07:00, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
I love this! I'm going to go back and retag any of my articles created outside an editathon! :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:04, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Women in Red across all the projects

Latest comment: 7 years ago18 comments7 people in discussion

Asian Month inspired me to add (not only, but mostly female) poets from India and Bangladesh to the de.WP. As it happens so often with incentives like these I found out a whole lot of new facts, learned about new ideas and became sidetracked from my articles again and again - and I did enjoy it hugely. Part of what amazes and inspires me in such initiatives is to watch what others are doing side by side with me. Mostly I watch which articles are being written on my home project, and I do enjoy watching Asian voles, UN-resolutions, villages, mountains, sportsmen, politicians and yes, many women getting articles. This wonderful success got me thinking - why don't we have something similar for articles about women? A longer period of time across all the projects, where some kind of competition encourages users to help close the content gap? Has this been tried? Talked about? --Kritzolina (talk) 10:52, 12 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi there Kritzolina. Thanks for taking such an interest in Women in Red. I see you are mainly active on the DE wiki where you have already contributed articles on three interesting Asian writers: Sajjad Sharif, Shahnaz Munni and Anitha Thampi. I might get around to covering them in English too. This year Wikipedia Asian Month is indeed progressing very well, thanks in part to the collaboration with WiR for at least the English-language articles. In fact we have recently seen the development of a number of similar initiatives which should give a further boost to WiR. I am referring to the "Challenges" developed by Dr. Blofeld which you can see from this template. Most of the areas covered make special provision for articles about women and have already led to many additional women's biographies for Africa, Asia and Europe. Unlike WAM, the challenges are not restricted to just one month but will continue until the targets are achieved. For the time being, the challenges are aimed at the EN wiki but your suggestion of a multilingual woman-based initiative along the lines of WAM certainly deserves consideration.--Ipigott (talk) 12:12, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the quick answer. Yes, I did find out about the "Blofeld-challenges" after the Wikimania 2016, where I was introduced into the international community and found out about WiR. But since I do contribute mainly to the de.WP and I do think most of us prefer to write articles in their mother-tongue, I would love to see challenges that aim at projects in all languages. I do know an number of users in the de.WP, who would be encouraged and inspired by it. --Kritzolina (talk) 12:22, 12 November 2016 (UTC)
@Dr. Blofeld, Megalibrarygirl, Rosiestep, SusunW, and Victuallers: In view of the above, I was wondering whether we could launch a multilingual Women in Red exercise along the lines of Wikipedia Asian Month for Women's History Month next March. As I think it might be over-ambitious to try to handle all the non-Latin-alphabet languages, I suggest we stick to the European languages such as Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (bokmål), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbo-Croat, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish and Swedish, or maybe just a subset, for instance Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. We would of course have to prepare this carefully, identifying coordinators for each language. But it looks to me as if we could at least try to start the ball rolling. Any thoughts?--Ipigott (talk) 11:21, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Kritzolina touches on a very good point, and something which I've personally wanted for a long time. A way to unite all of the wikipedias as one with a shared target. It would need extreme coordination to really get everybody who works on every wikipedia to contribute women articles towards it but something like a 1 million articles on women created or expanded across all wikipedias would be highly attractive. But at the moment we'd take ages to realistically reach it. I think it would be premature to start something like that across all projects at the moment, but yes, we could certainly try to get WIR started for all of the languages Ipigott mentioned and try to spread it. Evrentually I'd like each wikipedia to have a Challenge/women target and then an overall global one like 1 million or something and a bot working to list articles created or expanded on all wikipedias to count towards it.♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:25, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
I agree; we must take the lead in making WiR more multi-lingual than it is, and this will take careful planning. --Rosiestep (talk) 12:42, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps for starters it would be good to know what the % female vs male bios are on say the top 50 wikipedias. You can then use that to "recruit" people on those projects to the WIR cause.♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:59, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Locally, those of us living in areas with a large amount of people who speak non-English languages could recruit and have live editathons based on translation. I live in an area that has a lot of Spanish language speaking people and it would be awesome to encourage them to help contribute to Wiki. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:15, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for taking the wider perspecitve into consideration :)! --Kritzolina (talk) 16:38, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

@Dr. Blofeld: The stats for the top 40 Wikipedias are here. They show a variation from 6.68% for Malagasy to 25.13% for Korean. But I think a coordinated effort on the principal European languages would be easier to manage initially. If that works, we could then try to introduce other important world languages such as Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. In any case, whatever languages we choose, the entire trial will depend on finding reliable people to coordinate each of the languages we cover.--Ipigott (talk) 16:49, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

It would seem to me that our red lists are easily accessible to anyone on any WP platform at any time. Names, unless they are in a different script, fortunately aren't often translated, thus the basic lists are useful across language groups. The crowd sources lists have sufficient info (or hopefully they do) to confirm notability. The "missing from English WP lists" tie to articles on other WP projects, thus hopefully they have sources noted in the articles. Would not be difficult to utilize over different WPs, and have others add to the lists with names, sourcing, etc. Targeting women as a specific campaign over the languages on WP would simply be a matter of promoting it on other WP and getting key players to assist with promotion on other language platforms, IMO. March would be the perfect month, Ipigott, I agree. SusunW (talk) 17:56, 13 November 2016 (UTC)
This is a great plan. We need a "new idea" and this supplies the synergy. March is a good time to launch as we will get a re-boost by International Women's Day. Asian month seems to have very good tools. Suggestions as to how we improve communications would be good. At present "we" have a shout out for good work here, on twitter and Pinterest but I'm not sure that non-English gets as big a shout as we can give them. On the subject of shout-outs we seem to magically have stats available - thanks to all involved. When this project was launched we only knew it was poor. We now know that Koreans are way ahead of us and the Swedes have made amazing improvements. Victuallers (talk) 09:12, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
I think we would need to go a bit further than simply promoting it on other WikiProjects on the EN wiki. What has been so successful about Wikipedia Asian Month is that its features are translated into all the participating languages with separate invitations, lists of participants and lists of articles for each. I think it would be sensible to start by trying to find coordinators for at least four or five other languages. As under WAM, they would become responsible for translating the background information into their own language and maintaining the pages for participants and contributions (although for the languages we understand we could provide assistance). For starters, we could contact some of the language coordinators of WAM, perhaps initially those for Danish, French, German, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish and Swedish (see here). They might be interested is helping with a multilingual Women's History Month. But I don't think we should bother them until mid-December as they probably have too much to do with WAM at the moment.--Ipigott (talk) 09:24, 14 November 2016 (UTC)
I also see another way this could be helpful. Just as women are omitted from many of the biographies of their colleagues, peers and families, as well as omitted from industries and occupations, items on English WP tend to focus on subjects where English is spoken. For WP to become more inclusive, we have to address a broader world view. We have seen that location has a lot to do with what sources are available on a Google search. Cross-project WP work would help improve articles and the overall coverage. For example, Megalibrarygirl and I just did an article on Women in brewing and our research showed clearly that women dominated the occupation the world over until industrialization. If Kritzolina did a similar article, and others on other-language WP did the same, they would find sources we did not have access to. I am sure the sources they found would be useful in expanding the article we created to be more inclusive of women's experiences in other cultures. Imagine how much the project would expand if that happened on a multiple-article scale. SusunW (talk) 17:23, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
I probably won't do an article on brewing :D ... but if we are talking about Women Poets we just might work together that way. Good point! --Kritzolina (talk) 17:34, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
Agree with SusunW, whatever topic you pick to work on and look at women's contributions in that field will reveal a large amount of women who have often been contributing unnoticed to that field. Kritzolina, if you need references for working on Women poets I'll be happy to help. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:03, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
Two more things: --Rosiestep (talk) 18:07, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
  • Collaboration: Women in Red has been established on 8 languages besides en-wiki. I think we need to be more collaborative and less stovepiped with them; if we could develop a communications model for sharing info with them -e.g. like WAM and Art+Feminism- that would be helpful. We also need to be more collaborative with the Affiliates movement as Chapters, User Groups, ThOrgs have access to resources (people, grants, etc.).
  • Mainpage: The lede is all we need on the project mainpage. It would make the mainpage easier to translate into other languages, and it should include the stats on other language wikis to demonstrate inclusivity across languages. Postponing/ignoring the mainpage redesign issue is working against us.
Thanks for the offer, Megalibrarygirl, I just might get back to you ;) --Kritzolina (talk) 18:09, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Collaboration with Amazon?

Latest comment: 7 years ago11 comments7 people in discussion

Dr. Blofeld et al: It recently dawned on me that we might want to consider a collaboration with Amazon if we'd like to run a contest-type editathon which offered Amazon voucher awards. This would be in lieu of requesting a WMF grant. Thoughts? --Rosiestep (talk) 14:35, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

1. Good idea, 2. some (not me) may be concerned about the advertising angle of such an association, 3. as we recently found out in the Africa campaign, Amazon supplies to only 4 countries out of 55, so some users will be excluded. Whilst noting 2 & 3, I'm in favour; and noting 3, would expect that we should do something in addition so that the 51/55 are not excluded. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:05, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Yes, great idea, though not so good for some of the developing world countries they don't ship to haha. Still, it's something to consider for the areas they ship to! What would work if they donated something like coupons with codes which people can enter when buying a book on Amazon. The people who contribute the most could be emailed enter codes to get discount on books etc, so be able to get a lot of resource material for free or with discount to fuel their own article work etc.♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:13, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Sadads might have something to say about this. An arrangement with Amazon in which they give editors who contribute to contests discount or free books to contribute might attract more people to contribute if they get that, and for prizes. Editors who contribute to a contest being able to get books like that I think could prove very productive for wikipedia. There'd be a limited amount available for discount or free books or something, so the people who sign up and contribute to the contests would get their books on a first come first served basis and guarantee numbers and production, as people would suddenly have loads of books to use to make the encyclopedia flourish. That has potential IMO. The question is would Amazon be willing to help wikipedia out? ♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:26, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Another option may be to invite Amazon to contribute a number of pre-established book prizes which could be mailed to the winners. I think Dr. Blofeld had a similar arrangement for his Wales drive.--Ipigott (talk) 15:35, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
I think this is a good proposal. Built it needs to be discussed openly. I would have a major problem with it if Amazon (or another partner) could not deliver prizes to a substantial part of our editor base - and we decided to accept that restriction. It would be imperialistic to have a project where the recipients of the work were not allowed full membership/leadership etc etc. We could solve this problem by using our organisation (or a mail money firm) to deliver prizes as we can could not disenfranchise part of our editors. Victuallers (talk) 10:06, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
I am looking into this as an outgrowth of the work I do as User:Astinson (WMF): there may be a way to get unrestricted vouchers from Amazon that WMF could make available for community events -- if we do it for one org though, as Victuallers points out we should probably consider other similar organizations also being available in parts of the world, undersupported by Amazon. It may take me a few weeks: ping back circa mid November. Sadads (talk) 01:28, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
@Sadads:.   All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 17:51, 15 November 2016 (UTC).
@Rich Farmbrough: I checked into it: we don't have much of a relationship with Amazon yet, but we could explore it further (and the Strategic Partnerships team can do so -- plan on talking deeper with them after Thanksgiving). What we don't have at the moment, is a clear model for who would be responsible for the workflow of distributing the vouchers, if we had them (I talked to Community Resources, and it doesn't look like they capacity). When this conversation does happen (maybe before the holidays, maybe after), we would also need to figure out how we distribute them -- or see if an affiliate wants to do that -- like WMDC or WMUK, which have a history of doing small grant programs. Cheers, Sadads (talk) 16:46, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the follow-up, Sadads. Circling in Kirill Lokshin who may have some additional thoughts. --Rosiestep (talk) 17:10, 22 November 2016 (UTC)
If this is a small administrative task (like posting or emailing 100 vouchers) then I would be happy to do it. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 19:44, 22 November 2016 (UTC).

A List of Female Technology Experts in Libraries

Latest comment: 7 years ago6 comments4 people in discussion

I came across this List of Female Technology Experts in Libraries and thought it worth parking it here; not sure how many would meet our notability requirements, but surely some will. Probably worth it being worked up into a by-hand redlist? (visitors from twitter - Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red is probably where you want to start) --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:58, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Nice find, Tagishsimon. I think they could be added to these redlists: Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Librarians and Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Technology. If their country is unclear, they could be placed in a new section in each redlist, such as "Women technology experts in libraries". Megalibrarygirl, as this is your area of expertise, I wonder if you have other suggestions? --Rosiestep (talk) 19:08, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Hi Rosiestep! We have Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Librarians. It may be best to add to that list. I'll take a look. Thank you, Tagishsimon for the find! Megalibrarygirl (talk) 19:16, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Rosiestep, I added a link to the list in the redlist for librarians, but I was not sure of their notability, so didn't transclude them into the list. I can investigate them further over the next few days. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 21:38, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

Portal: Women's history

Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I was bopping around Wikipedia today and noticed that while there is a Portal:Feminism and Portal:Women's sport, there is no Portal:Women's history. I think maybe we should think about creating that since it's a redlink. What do you think? Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:25, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi Megalibrarygirl - I think it's cool, but don't know how much work is involved with creating and maintaining a portal. If you and or page stalkers feel inclined to pursue it, Women's History would probably be a nice addition to the portals network. --Rosiestep (talk) 01:34, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
I'm not sure either, Rosiestep. I'll investigate! Megalibrarygirl (talk) 22:17, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

Commons subcat for images uploaded in connection with a WiR event

Latest comment: 7 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

Elsewhere, Megalibrarygirl brought up what I think is a great idea... creating a Commons subcat for images uploaded in connection with a WiR event. Are there any Commons pagestalkers with thoughts about that? I thought it was a good idea as I've uploaded a lot imgs which I subsequently add to a WiR-scope article. Maybe you have, too? --Rosiestep (talk) 21:14, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

Water polo players

Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

At the moment I'm working on water polo players. Does someone know how to get a list of links from Wikidata with water polo players (Q17524364) who have a page on a foreign wiki without a page on the English Wikipedia? Thanks, Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 13:52, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

this is probably the place to ask. Not sure if you can say any more about what you want - e.g. do you need to know which wiki the article is on, and under what name? Right now my request on wikidata will get you a list of wikidata items, fullstop. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:36, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
Thanks! I repliek there. The thing is I don't know which water polo players are notable, so that would be a good list to continue with :). I asked here, because this Wikiproject has all these great red links lists. Thanks again :) Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 16:34, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

List of streets named after reknowned women

Latest comment: 7 years ago10 comments4 people in discussion

Hi there, we are at the Wikimidi sessions at Unige with User:Yann and we are establishing priority working lists on reknowned women. Do you happen to have a list of streets (and places)named after reknowned women for whom we have no articles? If not, how about working together? User:Yann has allready started to design a wikidata query List of places named after reknowned women--Nattes à chat (talk) 11:33, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Nattes à chat. No such list from me. What an excellent line of thought & WDL query; kudos. It provides the organisation for many articles following the format of List of eponymous roads in London, such as List of roads in (city-name) named after women. Two things about the query, Yann: the column 1 Q reference points to the city item when it might be more useful to point to the road item. And it is not finding roads in London, presumably because their 'located in the administrative territorial entity' property tends to be a London Borough - see for instance Baylis Road. But good work. You have my interest. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:54, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
There are some qualifying roads listed in the London list, above; I'll add them. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:56, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Tagishsimon: Thanks for your answer. There aren't so many such roads, so I would instead create List of roads in England named after women. What do you think? Regards, Yann (talk) 16:17, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
If so, agreed; divide the articles according to length. But can you hack the London issue, above, in our query? It would be most useful if the report output could include coordinates from wikidata, where they exist, and road and women page names from en.wiki where they exist (they may vary from wikidata item labels). My SPARQL still (probably) isn't up to that. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:34, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Here is a start: List of roads in Switzerland named after women. Yann (talk) 10:16, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Good start. Has the query been amended to give you coords where they exist? Do any of the roads have articles. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:33, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
I like the idea too. I see there are many streets in Copenhagen with the names of famous women as well as proposals for more in new areas of development. Perhaps Ramblersen could help to compile a list. I would actually prefer a list which gives more background about the women in question, not just street coordinates. I wonder whether having a street named after you could be accepted as sufficient notability for a Wikipedia article. Otherwise we are likely to have quite a number of red links.--Ipigott (talk) 14:16, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
Yes, to me, having a place named after someone is a good criteria to establish notability. AFAIK, there is no article for streets in the first 3 cantons, where I added coordinates and corresponding entries in Wikidata. I still have to do Zurich, and more research about other cantons. help welcome. ;o) I also started List of roads in Haute-Savoie named after women. Regards, Yann (talk) 22:26, 10 November 2016 (UTC)

Well I see conversation has been going on it's great! I only noticed iwas being notified just now, I have some issues with flow. --Nattes à chat (talk) 22:30, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Meta?

Latest comment: 7 years ago20 comments5 people in discussion

I've been thinking: what if we created a Women in Red page on Meta? There are a few benefits. --Rosiestep (talk) 03:18, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

  • It would give our work more exposure.
  • Pages on Meta can be translated into other languages.
  • We could have a section with links to all the WiR pages (now in 10 languages!).
  • We could maintain a WIGI percentages update for all languages.
  • If we wanted to have some "global" conversations, e.g. plan a phone call, create a Slack, etc., we could use the Meta talkpage.
@Rosiestep: If we go ahead with our multilingual strategy for March, we'll need pages on Meta along the lines of Wikipedia Asian Month as I suggested earlier. From the beginning of December, we could start preparing something along similar lines. Pages on Meta would also help to attract participants from other language communities. I think it would be better if we started with something clearly focused in connection with the March editathons rather than just a general presence on Meta. We might start with "Wikipedia: Women Activists Month" in different languages for next March. If this works, we could later move on to "Wikipedia: Women in Red" with all the participating languages. But we should not forget that inclusion on Meta will also require a considerable amount of preparation and organizational work. Unfortunately, most of our participants seem to be more interested in content editing than in taking on administrative and back-up work. Another problem is that not many of our participants are fluent in foreign languages. We will need at least one devoted editor for each of the languages we cover. We could try to overcome these problems by attracting interested Wikipedians from other language communities although initially it would help if they were also members of the EN wiki. I would be happy to help out with some of this but I don't really want to spend several days more every month on additional chores. (As a footnote, I must say I have been rather disappointed at the lack of enthusiasm for my proposal on a multilingual Women's History Month but perhaps it hasn't been promoted in the right quarters.)--Ipigott (talk) 08:25, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
Regarding Meta, I think a Women in Red page would basically be a landing page. The translation would be done by translators, e.g. not necessarily anyone affiliated with WiR. I'd suggest starting simple, e.g. copy over most of the same info we have in our lede. At the moment, I can only think of one section, which would be bulleted (not prose), with WIGI updates for various languages. Regarding maintenance, anyone in any language can deal with that as Meta has a global readership, vs. enwiki. --Rosiestep (talk) 19:43, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: I'm intrigued by what you have to say about the translators. Who are they? Who pays them? Who checks the quality of their work? From what I have seen in connection with Wikipedia Asian Month, the English-language pages on Meta were translated by representatives of the language communities who joined the project. Perhaps you should contact AddisWang for further details. In any case, WiR has until now proved to be an extremely cost-effective way of promoting increased interest on the coverage of women on Wikipedia. I think we should be careful not to squander funds unnecessarily on translation. Quid "landing page", can you point to any similar examples on Meta or would this be a first? I'm sorry to be asking for all these details but if we go ahead with a multilingual approach on Meta, we really need to know exactly what the requirements will be.--Ipigott (talk) 08:10, 25 November 2016 (UTC)
Volunteers translate Meta pages (if/when they wish to do so).
Examples of other landing pages? In addition to WAM, as you mention, there are all the Affiliate communities, e.g. Art+Feminism, which is now a UG. Just poke around on Meta and you'll see that it's related to the "movement" rather than to "English Wikipedia". I'd like to see WiR more movement-oriented across languages vs. stove-piped between languages. We need to be on Meta.
Victuallers, thoughts? --Rosiestep (talk) 20:47, 25 November 2016 (UTC)
Some thoughts - I'm worried by using meta as I don't believe our productive editors watch or hang out at meta. (Rhetoric Q. why is this discussion not on meta) Finding a place that is not en:wiki is attractive as I can see that non en:wiki editors find it arrogant to use em:wiki. Other alternatives to en:wiki that occupy the centre ground are wikidata ad commons. WiR has made good use of wikidata but we haven't exploited its multi-language capabilities. Maybe a data modeller could work out how we might manage our stats there. A simple solution would be to use the "metrics" query and ask it to list the same for every language. // The other solution is commons. I have run projects some years ago where we created a chart that recorded how many articles etc had been written and who was 1st, 2nd etc..... and we then published that as a jpg. Editors could read the chart because it had no language on it and editors could store it and every time it was updated by the organisers it changed. // We do need to move away from being Anglocentric but I think the solution we are looking for should be based on wikidata as that can be delivered free of English to any of the wikis. I'm not suggesting the complete solution is described here as I can see other problems (and their solutions). The Asian project's system is very good... but a wikidata solution should be language free and lower the admin charge. With some small additions we should be able to create our project pages. HTT R Victuallers (talk) 00:05, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

I think outreach:Main page would be better. More women hang out there because it's heavy on GLAM, and people click there once a month who are subscribed to "This Month in GLAM". From other initiatives (like Art&Feminism) we know women are in the majority among GLAMers. Jane (talk) 11:20, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, Jane. Outreach looks like a good option to me too. @Jane023: Do you think we could list Women in Red on the main page, along with GLAM, Education, Best practices and Success stories? If so, we could bring it more easily to the attention of other language communities. But I still think we will need to make use of Meta for our multilingual coverage in March, if there is sufficient support for going in that direction. @Victuallers: I'm not too happy about using Commons with jpg pages and I don't think Wikidata will be able to handle everything we want to do, although it will certainly be a useful too for monitoring progress in the various languages, as well as for producing language-based redlink lists.--Ipigott (talk) 16:26, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
I don't see why not, though I would set up a WiR portal first. And as far as multi-language writing challenges go, I had a lot of success with this set of lists when I ran the TED speakers challenge in June. Since the end of the challenge in July, more new articles have been created than were created during the challenge. I think this has to do with the availability of the lists and using Wikidata for the metadata about the speakers. Jane (talk) 17:12, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
How would a portal differ from our current approach? Would it simply be a matter of displaying the same information on a portal? I would have thought a portal would cover all aspects of the coverage of women, not just article creation.--Ipigott (talk) 17:46, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
Ian I wasn't suggesting the commons idea. But I do think wikidata can create much more than it does at present. Setting ourselves up in parallel to GLAM within outreach wouldnt be so bad. Maybe I'm being selfish but I very rarely goto meta. I edit mostly and I see the changes made on wikipedia not on meta. Maybe the new tools made it work Janes's work has been good but I haven't kept track of it anywhere near as closely as I have done of the stuff that was en:wiki centric. Maybe you could move this conversation to meta as a test (rhetorical suggestion) I suspect the list of contributors would change. Victuallers (talk) 18:04, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

By "portal" I just mean a local page. Saying "page" I usually mean a Wikipedia page. The page itself would be a good idea whether or not you want to run writing challenges off of it. It can just be a page that links to this project space (and maybe also the talkpages of various gendergap taskforces on other language projects). I know I added our Dutch WMNL work to the Meta Gendergap page a few years ago but I am pretty sure none of our new members came from there. They all come from our own work at meetups and mailing lists in the Netherlands. Having something set up on Outreach might bring a few more people in, especially now that systemic bias is getting a bit more attention in GLAM circles finally. Btw, I also don't hang out on Meta, but I don't "hang out" on Outreach either. I do click on Outreach at least once a month though! Jane (talk) 19:28, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

  • I have followed this discussion and the suggestions made with great interest but I think two issues are being somewhat confused. Some of the suggestions seem to be aimed primarily at increasing the visibility of WiR for editors on the EN wiki (including those who edit both in English and in other language) while I think both Rosie and I have been more concerned with bringing the project to the attention of the other main language versions of Wikipedia in order to extend interest over the coming months. I have found Meta particularly useful as a means of contacting representatives of the other language communities in order to try to extend coverage of women in Wikipedia Asian Month in the other language versions of Wikipedia. I think if we were to run our March editathon on activists and feminists along lines similar to those used for WAM, we could expect a considerable degree of success. The problem of having this discussion here is that those involved are concerned first and foremost with the success of our English-language efforts on WiR. Maybe we should indeed be opening a discussion on Meta too but I don't know how and where to place it. Perhaps we could start with something on Outreach as Jane suggests. In parallel, we could also liaise with those behind the recently created Meta page on Art and Feminism as those behind it already have far more of an international approach than WiR. We could possibly work together with them on our March editathon. We could also try to establish contacts with the other 40 Wikimedia chapters. Any interest in proceeding in this direction?--Ipigott (talk) 08:24, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
My point about Outreach is that you will find all the people you are talking about above are probably also active there, since the chapters are all behind those various monthly GLAM country summaries. Just browse through the summaries per country for the contact list you are looking for (i.e. active in a chapter/community/language AND writing English language summaries of those activities). For the multi-lingual lists I would have recommended Wikidata prior to June, but seeing the results of the TED speaker challenge and knowing what I know now about how language-centric most initiatives are, I suggest building a similar "network of enwiki-based red-link lists in userspace". So I made a beginning here: nl:Gebruiker:Jane023/Vrouwen_rode_links. This is a list of redlinks with an image, and stub-like metadata of women with an item on Wikidata and not on the Dutch Wikipedia, but all born in the Netherlands. I will make a simlar one for the Dutch colonies with cut-off dates for independence (as theoretically those women were Dutch too). Though this is highly nationalistic, I already received a compliment about how inspiring the list is, split out per occupation. I think Art&Feminism is great, but we also need more female politicians, scientists, teachers, charity founders, sports pioneers and other professions not connected with the arts. Just edit the language "nl" to the wiki language of your choice to reuse this listeria list in your userspace in the language of your choice. Jane (talk) 08:50, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Oh and you must change the Q55 to the item number of the country of your choice as well :) Jane (talk) 08:53, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Maybe you can get the communities involved if it is not seen as much as a "push" from enwiki but also as a "pull" from enwiki, so for every list there must be the reverse of the list in enwiki : "a list of redlinks with an image, and stub-like metadata of women with an item on Wikidata and not on the English Wikipedia, but all born in the Netherlands". See here: User:Jane023/Vrouwen rode links. Jane (talk) 08:56, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
@Jane023: Thanks for preparing the Wikidata redlinks for women born in the Netherlands. I was surprised to see there were so few on the list which means either that Dutch coverage is already very good or (more probably) that there has not been much interest in covering Dutch women in the other languages unless they have already been covered in Dutch. In the other direction, your list of Dutch women not covered in English at User:Jane023/Vrouwen rode links is an interesting first step in what might become a series of redlink lists of women from different countries or language communities. If we were to organize collaborative virtual editathos on say "Women artists and painters from the Netherlands" for both Dutch and English speakers, it would be a useful tool. (The Dutch could also work on Jane's first list at nl:Gebruiker:Jane023/Vrouwen_rode_links). @Rosiestep, Megalibrarygirl, Victuallers, and Dr. Blofeld: and all our other members: Do you think we could/should develop an approach along these lines? It would not be difficult to develop similar Wikidata lists for a few other countries and/or languages for the March editathon. The approach would also allow us to club together on arranging multilingual virtual editathons with Art and Feminism.--Ipigott (talk) 11:59, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
Yes these lists are very interesting, in many different ways. I suspect that many Dutch women on nlwiki are not notable enough for enwiki and the other way around, but many *are* notable enough and the reasons they don't have articles on enwiki yet may be related to systemic bias in authority control indexes (see my presentation that I linked below on %female in authority control indexes - Wikipedia projects tend to have a higher percentage across the board). I agree that a similar setup could be the basis for a large multi-chapter approach. From other work it seems that English tends to be the linking pin for many hard-core Wikipedians, but if we setup the infrastructure carefully, with the new content translation tool we might be able to assist in areas where no English translation is necessary (Spanish<->Catalan translations, German<->Dutch, etc). Jane (talk) 12:12, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott:, I think doing that would be super. I'll help in whatever way I can, though I'm mostly monolingual since my Spanish is very basic. Jane023, if there are enough references (in any language) then the Dutch women should be notable enough for enWiki. We just need to make sure they can pass GNG. If there's good Dutch sources out there for them then put them on enWiki. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:44, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
  • I've tried to summarize what we might do below. I look forward to comments. If there is general agreement, I'll try to help in going forward on this basis.--Ipigott (talk) 17:40, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Problems with the "ill" template

Latest comment: 7 years ago7 comments2 people in discussion
Speaking of interlanguage, can someone tell me, why the tron gods changed the simple "ill" template? Apparently while I was gone some bot changed all my input to "Interlanguage link multi", but for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to input a link with it. It is making all the options red? Grrrrrr, I am a writer, not a technician. Can't even figure out how to look up the template and have wasted an hour I could have been writing trying to figure out how to do the technical stuff without avail. SusunW (talk) 00:40, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
I think the documentation for that template may be a little borked, SusunW. With any luck I've fixed the Lidia Zvereva instance in Women in aviation. I'll do some more digging. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:55, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
Thank you Tagishsimon so frustrating. The previous version was so simple. Now, I have no idea. SusunW (talk) 01:01, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
Well, in this instance, {{Interlanguage link multi | Lidia Zvereva | fr | Lydia Vissarionovna Zvereva | ru | Зверева, Лидия Виссарионовна}} ... you had the language codes after the article titles, when they should be before the titles. The template documentation misleads you, and I've suggested on the template talk that this be addressed [1]. But yes, nothing as frustrating as a template that does not work, replacing a template with which one was familiar. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:09, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
And now is probably not a great time for more mansplaining, but I cite The Scorpion and the Frog ... on Can't even figure out how to look up the template, you can always navigate to a template used in an article, with the article in edit mode, by finding the template in the list beneath "Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page", itself beneath the edit window; or else by searching for template:Interlanguage link multi in the search box. --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:16, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
Tagishsimon Did'ja ever watch Charlie Brown? When the parents talked and it sounded like waawaawawaaawaaaaa? That's what explaining technology translates to for me. Writing how you fixed it, was helpful and I totally appreciate that. Why on earth did they change it? It was simple before. Now, one must remember a whole string of words before, plus a new format. It is not good to reinvent the wheel if one makes it more complex. (Besides which, I am old-er and won't remember it, but maybe will remember this discussion is here ;) )SusunW (talk) 03:11, 1 December 2016 (UTC)
Probably their way of encouraging you to translate the non-EN article into EN ;) --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:17, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Women whose work is on the circulatory or lymphatic systems?

Latest comment: 7 years ago17 comments6 people in discussion

I asked a few days ago at the reference desk about the name of a woman (any woman) who had contributed to our knowledge on the circulatory system or lymphatic system, and got no response. The question's been archived, so I doubt it will get any further responses. I'm not sure whether my question provoked the 'homework' test (it's not my homework) or whether no-one actually knew of any women in those fields. Does anyone here know of any women who have contributed to our knowledge of these systems? Even though both the articles on the systems have a 'history' section, they only list ancient developments, not more modern discoveries, where women might be more likely to have contributed. Thank you! --122.108.141.214 (talk) 02:49, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

  • Elizabeth M. Ramsey would be one - "used cineradiology to reveal the workings of the placental circulatory system in primates". --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:50, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
How did you find her??? --122.108.141.214 (talk) 02:53, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
My esteemed colleage Chrisvls wrote the article this evening. I seem to do nothing more than sit on Petscan nowadays, looking for women biographies which have not been added as items to Wikidata. She came up on one or other of the lists I use - this one, which is normally dominated by men (and takes a few mins to load) - and I chanced to read it. Serendipity. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:02, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
So there's no clear 'women bloodologists' (making up words here) category or anything that I could have found by anything other than just knowing about Ramsey from my women bloodologist-lacking general knowledge? --122.108.141.214 (talk) 03:06, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Probably not a useful category, no. I've just found Abby Turner (below) by searching for Circulatory. I'll do one or two other searches and see if I can find anyone else. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:10, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Florence R. Sabin [2] SusunW (talk) 02:57, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Now you have to say how you found her, Susun. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:02, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Google. Hey, I'm on vacation. I'm a researcher by profession. Interesting question, I had 5 minutes between gigs with friends. :) SusunW (talk) 03:16, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
ETA: Turns out she has a stubby entry already, as Helen Ranney; I've just added a bit right now.Penny Richards (talk) 14:56, 30 November 2016 (UTC)
I found this list by searching hematology:

...And no less than 18 women later, I've now got an answer. Options, even! Thanks, all! I've tried to pay it forward by asking someone to add Diana McSherry to the circulatory system article, and transferred the redlinked women to the wp:women scientists redlist. --122.108.141.214 (talk) 04:40, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, for the question, and for the follow-ups. I dealt with the Diana addition, and note the trouble you went to to get a good reference; thanks for that. --Tagishsimon (talk) 04:48, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Someone should write this up for signpost - an impressive collaboration (I polished the first article). Well done all. Victuallers (talk) 09:37, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
Several more from here, including:

also from here:

Many more women researchers can be found from conference programmes, etc., others from research papers. Not sure how far we need to go with this. Perhaps a Wikipedia list would be useful.--Ipigott (talk) 12:11, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

World list of women institutions

Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I wonder if there is a detailed list somewhere of women institutions by country? Something like that would be very useful for WIR I think in potential future agreements. Like Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Organizations but by every country and as comprehensive as possible. I see we have List of women's organizations but it badly needs expansion to cover every country. What I think would be great is if we had a tabled list by country with date of founding, headquarters and a website link♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:53, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Many more organisations can be found in the category: Category:Women's organizations. But also here, it's far from complete. For instance, Category:Women's organizations by country is not listing the Netherlands and Belgium, while there are many looking at the Duth Wikipedia: nl:Categorie:Vrouwenorganisatie. Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 14:36, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
Yes, there's a ton missing. I think the A-Z country tabled approach would be ideal. It's important to have a website link for as many as possible I think.♦ Dr. Blofeld 14:39, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

Proposal for preparing for a multilingual March

Latest comment: 7 years ago12 comments3 people in discussion

On the basis of all the exchanges on this page I suggest the following:

  1. Liaise with Art and Feminism on expanding their Meta page with a short intro to WiR and our intention to run a multilingual editathon in March 2017.
  2. Prepare a WiR page on Outreach calling in particular for collaborators on arranging a multilingual editathon in March in some of Wikipedia's major languages.
  3. Liaise with AddisWang and other key players in Wikipedia Asian Month on the possibility of using their approach and their coordinators in support of our March multilingual editathons.
  4. Develop Wikidata lists by language and/or country on the basis of those shown by Jane023 above.
  5. If all the above is successful, we can then develop our WiR Meta page as a basis for multilingual transfer.

I thought it would be useful to summarize these possibilities as the discussion was becoming rather long and confused. Hope this helps.--Ipigott (talk) 15:20, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for putting this together, Ipigott. Can you please link to the A+F page you refer to in point#1, e.g. the A+F User Group page? --Rosiestep (talk) 17:51, 30 November 2016 (UTC)
Art and Feminism Meta page--Ipigott (talk) 21:03, 30 November 2016 (UTC)
If there is some support for this, I could start preparing drafts of the pages we need, etc. If not, let's just drop it and concentrate on English.--Ipigott (talk) 07:30, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for putting this together, Ipigott! I have been working on making more lists per country (starting with the ones most relevant for Dutch Wikipedia: Belgium/Germany/Indonesia/Congo). I will make a page on Outreach that links to these (in my userspaces on non-english Wikipedias). Since I already did this for the 20 or so languages in the TED project, some more language Wikipedias have enabled the listeria templates. If we do this then hopefully we can get others to join as well. I suppose this time I should include lists on a landing page in Wikidata itself, since most Wikidatans tend to hang out there and not on Wikipedia projects. Jane (talk) 11:24, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Jane. I'm glad you are interested in the multilingual approach. Unfortunately, you seem to be the only real enthusiast - so I still wonder whether it's worthwhile going ahead with it all. I would have hoped there would be more reactions from others, as well as suggestions regarding the languages/countries we should cover (see discussion above). As this is no longer at the bottom of the page, it probably won't be noticed but I don't feel like pinging people all the time.--Ipigott (talk) 07:47, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
Well monolingual people have no idea what the use of it is, but this is a piece of infrastructure that if built, will last for several iterations of a WiR multi-lingual editathons. That is until there are so many redlinks that Listeria breaks, which could easily happen, because I think it is way easier to upload images to Commons or create items on Wikidata than to create articles. So 1) there is plenty of time to make it before March and 2) as soon as a list is built everyone can use it (no time issue involved). If a list gets low traffic it will be immediately obvious, because scrolling down the list some links will show up blue. Anyone can update the list and cause the list to look for more redlinks. Jane (talk) 08:48, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't think Listeria will break down. We have been developing a wide range of Wikidata lists for English, most with a limit of 5,000 articles. The blue links only last for a day as they are automatically updated. While the Wikidata lists are important and will certainly help us along, if we go ahead with a multilingual approach, we will really have to do a lot more. We'll need good contacts for all the languages we cover and we'll need to prepare pages on WiR tailored to the editathon with provision for listing participants, new articles, etc. (Here we can draw on the experience of Wikipedia Asian Month.) I have a feeling that as usual I'll probably be the one who has to take care of all this. While I think Rosie would like to see it all happen, I don't think she would be interested in handling the nitty-gritty (apart from higher-level contacts with Wikimedia, etc.). I'll give it another week or so, then I might drop a few messages on the user pages of multicultural, multilingual editors and those affiliated with Art and Feminism to see if they are interested in providing support.--Ipigott (talk) 13:39, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
Ipigott, last week, Megalibrarygirl and I had a phone meeting with the A+F leaders. They don't create meetup pages or come up with redlists; they leave it to other volunteers to do this in many language, across all continents. Those pages should be up by February. As for virtual events in other languages, we're connected with 10 other WiR language communities and they're connected with A+F efforts through the AffCom, so I don't think we need to take on so much ourselves. I still think we could plan for this more easily from Meta, e.g. others could be included in the conversation. --Rosiestep (talk) 01:09, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep, Megalibrarygirl, and Jane023: OK. So I'll leave the whole thing in your hands, Rosie, and stop bothering about it. Go ahead and create a page on Meta with a talk page for discussion, and perhaps one on Outreach too as Jane suggests. You can also arrange for translations into the 10 other language communities you mention (who are they?) if you think these are necessary. I thought they were very effective for Wikipedia Asian Month and am convinced the wide interest in that event was mainly a result of the multilingual coverage. But maybe you think English would be sufficient for everyone concerned at this level.--Ipigott (talk) 08:40, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott: I don't understand everything you're saying. The issue with having only having this discussion on en-wiki talkpage is that it doesn't support talk links with editors who are mainly present on other languages Wikipedias. For example, Alex, the director of the Catalan language Chapter which does a lot of women's content work would get a ping if we wrote him a talkpage post from Meta, but not from here as he isn't on en-wiki. I'm unfamiliar with the Outreach page you mention but I'm supportive of it if you find it useful; go for it! Other people in other languages are working (or will be working) on the March event and I think it would be helpful if our conversations are connected vs. stovepiped. You seemed to express a concern earlier that you thought prep work would fall on you, and my thoughts was that it doesn't have to be that way. You could lead the convo on how you've set up our work in previous years, but others could replicate in their languages, e.g. share the load, vs. one person doing 100% of a task. One additional consideration is the invitation. Last year, I sent them out by hand to almost all participants at every A+F event after each edit-a-thon was done. It was a lot of work done by hand. Can some of the other language folks do some of the inviting? --Rosiestep (talk) 17:00, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
Rosiestep I can see you have indeed misunderstood what I was trying to say. I was in fact trying to support your suggestion of putting a WiR page up on Meta. I originally thought it would be better to put something up along the lines of WAM Meta but now see there was little support here for that option. So your original suggestion of creating a general page on WiR on Meta now would indeed allow representatives of the other Wiki communities, including non-English speakers, to take part in a discussion which might serve as a basis for developing a more multilingual, multicultural strategy. I thought it would be better if you created the page yourself as I would have preferred to suggest a more international March-based approach from the start whereas you seem to think the page should be what we have on WiR apart from the statistical info. But if you wish we can work together on it. It's entirely up to you. The reason I also suggested Outreach was that Jane said it has been very effective for GLAM and she had little success with TED on Meta. (You will remember Tagishsimon prepared an Outreach page a while back but it has remained static.) On the A+F invitations and thank-you, you have certainly been doing a great job. I have followed your work closely from your contributions listings and have tried to help improve many of the subsequent contributions. Invitations beyond the main mailing list are important for each event. I was able to handle one or two quite well for a number of months but with so much to handle at the moment I've had to make a compromise between content editing and back-office work. As you know, a while back I said I would no longer have time for the thank-yous although I have been in touch with many of the most productive participants on their talk pages. Until the December editathos, I sent out a considerable number of additions invitations but this time I've been tied up with all the editathon pages, not to mention discussions on WAM and the BBC. I'm not too sure what you mean by leading the "convos", but I would certainly be happy to collaborate on a more international approach, especially if we can agree on priorities, scheduling, etc. I'm a firm believer in preparation. I'm not too happy about leaving things until the last minute in the hope that everything will work out. But here I seem to be in the minority. That's why I said I would stop bothering everyone and leave things in your expert hands. You have had considerable success in liaising at the international level and I'm sure you could get the ball rolling here too. Finally, I think it is important to remember that all this started as a result of the German wiki's Kritzolina's suggestion on 12 November that we should have "Women in Red across all the projects" (see above).--Ipigott (talk) 12:42, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

FreeThe20 campaign

Latest comment: 7 years ago4 comments2 people in discussion

On simple.wikipedia there is an article for FreeThe20. The article and some of the women are not included here at en.wiki. Thought it might be of interest to some of the editors here. (And if anyone is willing to take on the challenge of writing Simple English we could use some women's articles too - plenty of low hanging fruit) Thanks! --Tbennert (talk) 18:23, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

@Tbennert: Thanks. Done. I'll look at the women later.--Ipigott (talk) 07:49, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
Tbennert I've done what I can to include the info from the Simple English biographies on the EN Wiki. In doing so, I discovered many of our articles were incorrectly linked. But we now have info on all the women still being detained. If you come across any other articles about women in Simple English which deserve to be included on the EN wiki, please let us know.--Ipigott (talk) 13:16, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
I appreciate your work on this. Thank you! --Tbennert (talk) 21:37, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Help please

Latest comment: 7 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion
 
Percentage women by occupation

A VIP in the wiki community is asking for stats and needs a source for each. --Rosiestep (talk) 17:46, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

  • Only around x% of Wikipedia editors are female.
  • Less than y% of notable profiles on Wikipedia are of women. If this one has additional breakdowns by language, please include that, too.
  • Thanks for the link, @Jane. Forgot about it. --Rosiestep (talk) 00:43, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
  • @Rosiestep and Jane023: With respect, the basic data on that page and in other pages on the gender problem go back to a survey conducted in 2011. We urgently need a new survey to collect current data, especially on the percentage of female vs. male editors. And although we have overall stats on women biographies from WIGI, I don't think anyone has defined or investigated "notable profiles" for men and women, although Jane's Wikidata-based slide on %women by occupation is revealing. (It may of course be argued that all women on Wikipedia are notable.) Perhaps, Rosie, you could suggest Wikimedia could conduct a new survey, perhaps with some additional questions on the basis of emerging world interest in the gender gap.--Ipigott (talk) 13:09, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
 
Subgroup at Katherine Maher's movement strategy session, San Diego, October 2016
Yup, Ipigott, various surveys are under discussion as part of movement strategy and are included in the 2016-2017 annual plan. But I don't know the particulars, e.g. haven't seen questions so unclear how much re gender. --Rosiestep (talk) 19:25, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
I am not sure you have followed the discussion, but the reason that little time, money and energy have been invested in new surveys since the last one is 1) self-selection bias in surveys in general that tend to lean towards more responses from women and 2) no way to check that responders are in fact who they say they are onwiki. I suppose we could setup a voluntary thing whereby editors whose identities are known allow a central analysis of edits. Probably by gathering a dataset like that with buy-in from the chapters we will eventually be able to use it to discover patterns in editor behavior over time. If I had the tools I could probably do something with public data gathered based on Wiki(p/m)edians I know personally, though they are mostly European and Dutch. The tricky thing is finding Wikipedians worldwide willing to have their edits examined with their identities known to chapters. I doubt many people would be willing, frankly. Jane (talk) 13:41, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
I realize the 2011 survey has been criticized for the reasons you cite but unfortunately it is still the most recent source of information on some of the key issues. It might be advisable for Wikimedia to liaise with specialist polling bodies in order to come up with a more reliable methodology, bearing in mind the difficulties in establishing the gender of a fair proportion of editors. In the interim, I think Wikidata is producing a fairly good picture of general trends on biographies and could no doubt be used for monitoring works by women too (especially literature, visual art and music) if appropriate queries could be developed. But as people keep mentioning the low proportion of women editors on Wikipedia, I think serious steps should be taken to develop a means of monitoring progress (if indeed there has been progress). We obviously need to distinguish between the proportion of active registered editors who are women and the proportion of new articles and edits to existing articles made by women rather than men. While the participation of women editors worldwide would certainly be of interest, I think the priority is still the EN Wiki as it as by far the largest and most representative of world coverage. It would probably not be too difficult to develop subsets of editors based, for example, on the creators of every 100th or 1,000th new article and on every 1,000th or 10,000th edit over a period of, say, three months. The individuals listed could then be invited to respond to a secure query on their gender (if it was not already clear from their profiles, etc.). If the same procedure were repeated every year, trends could be established. There may be some PhD candidates interested in the gender gap who could implement something along these lines as a basis for a dissertation. Maximilianklein and his friends have already produced some interesting analyses.--Ipigott (talk) 08:49, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Are you subscribed to the research mailing list? Aaron Halfaker has done some research into privacy issues with asking new editors too much. We can better talk to experienced editors, who are aware of any privacy issues and are OK with talking to us. So e.g. get their permission, and then ask them about their early editing experiences (reminded by a report based on the analysis they previously agreed to). The problem with every 1000th edit and so on is the enormous amount of vandal edits, which really just wastes time all around. We are after all not particularly interested in the people who come to editathons just to admire the "flora and fauna" but more interested in what keeps people going based on (or in spite of) early edit experiences. Jane (talk) 09:39, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Bridges

Latest comment: 7 years ago8 comments4 people in discussion

We had the discussion about streets. But is there a list as something like List of bridges named after women? Example the Dafne Schippers bridge link. Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 18:37, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

From wikidata, we can just insert a value for Bridge where there was a value for Street in the previous report - thus (Note I didn't change the column heading 'cos I'm lazy. It finds only 15 examples, not including Daphne's bridge, which presumably does not have a wikipdata item, or has an incomplete item. There are enough candidates to realise an article, though... --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:32, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
more such bridges (courtesy of MisterSynergy) --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:53, 2 December 2016 (UTC)
Interesting example of Wikidata's potential. Probably enough examples to start a list.--Ipigott (talk) 08:05, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Just a curious note. In Cádiz, Spain, La Pepa Bridge was recently finished, in 2015. In 1812, the first Spanish constitution (a very liberal one compared to other countries) was enacted and only two years later the king abolished it. People that supported the constitution were repressed, and public support for it was forbidden. So people invented a way to avoid repression, they named the constitution "La Pepa" (female name "Joshepine") and chanted "Viva la Pepa" (Long life to Josephine). The modern bridge is named after that female name. emijrp (talk) 09:54, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Something of a challenge to represent that in Wikidata, Emijrp! La Pepa, female personification of the Constitution of 1812. I think we should give it a go. I've been working on bridges for the last couple of days; we now have about 120 bridge records with a 'named after' value pointing to a women. --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:23, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
And verily Wikidata:Project_chat#Personifications --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:37, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I thinks it can get an article. Is it possbible to make it a Wikidata article (I only don't know how to create that one). I also found some more then in the Wikidata list: Betsy Ross Bridge, Women Veterans Bridge (Bridge in Warren, Ohio, link,link2). Thanks, Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 11:05, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
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