Latest comment: 2 years ago23 comments12 people in discussion
I did not read Tripodi's paper, but I did listen to her interview and it did seem like she was interpreting her findings farther than the data might have warranted. I think one thing that needs to be taken into account is that the WiR edit-a-thons attract a lot of novice editors who are likely to be frustrated by much more mundane things than sexism—simply the difficulties of Wikipedia's mechanics. Also, since so much of the new women material is being churned out by novice editors, it may be more likely that their quality isn't as good, or they aren't written in a way that obviously establishes the topic's notability, thus more women articles are shipped off to AfD for further inspection. -Indy beetle (talk) 04:52, 26 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Also, since so much of the new women material is being churned out by novice editors, it may be more likely that their quality isn't as good This is very true. I actually find it highly problematic that there is such a drive for novices to churn out biographies on women, particularly academics: the inevitable result is a flurry of AfDs on women, which is bad for the subjects and bad for our reputation. A large proportion of the articles created through the UW WikiEd course that seemed to focus on "uncommon STEM leaders" are/were on women with no evidence of meeting BASIC, let alone NPROF, with many or most seemingly chosen either by scanning the UW people directory for minority names (there was at least one page made on a Latina with an entirely non-academic administrative position in one of the UW STEM schools--someone who by every indication is a low-profile private citizen and would be mortified to see a biography on herself), or by choosing obscure subjects who were very likely connected to the student editor (like an article on a current grad student at an east coast university who was name-dropped in two news pieces covering local activism). BLPs are the trickiest pages to create PAG-wise, and NPROF is probably the most opaque/complex SNG; throwing students who almost certainly aren't even interested in the subject into navigating this area is bad enough, but adding in the constraint of profiling a demographic (an intersectional one at that!) whose presence and treatment on/by Wikipedia is already lambasted by the (wiki-policy-ignorant) media just seems like a swiss cheese recipe that starts out with more holes than cheese. JoelleJay (talk) 01:04, 31 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I would agree that it is problematic for there being a drive for said novices to churn out these biographies. I used to think of the WiR activist model as a good method for procuring content on under-covered areas, but not anymore. Either experienced editors need to be encouraged to write more about women (which is not likely to happen, as no one is obligated to write about something they don't want to) or novices who want to create new articles about women should be encouraged to practice more by doing regular editing before creating an entirely new page (especially a BLP) by themselves. -Indy beetle (talk) 01:44, 2 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
It would have been nice to see a response from Tripodi to the accusations leveled here. I'm also shocked by the abysmal retention of new editors who joined through edit-a-thons. --Dutchy45 (talk) 08:55, 26 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I'm not shocked in the slightest. The bureaucracy and standards are significantly more difficult than they used to be. Buffs (talk) 15:14, 26 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I'm not shocked about the retention, but it's a somewhat different reason, Low editathon retention has been reported in "The Signpost" before. But the overall retention is also incredibly low. We might want tp start with the hypothesis that only 1 in 100 people in the world are attracted to writing encyclopedia articles for a hobby. There's nothing really strange about that idea anyway. Smallbones(smalltalk) 17:26, 26 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Thank you Smallbones for the article. I would also like to add my lack of shock. I've only ever attended one edit-a-thon, and it was a rather unremarkable affair. I was the only dedicated Wikipedia editor there aside from the organisers, and all the other people who showed up were students eager to get the extra credit one of their professors had attached to their participation in the event. They all seemed relatively disinterested in what they were doing and quite confused by Wikipedia's mechanics. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:25, 27 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I wrote to Ms Tripodi on 28 June, pointing out factual errors in her paper (different to those detailed above), regarding her analysis of the biography of Lois K. Alexander Lane, saying, in part:
You wrote:
"According to edit history, her biography was pushed out of the main space by a Wikipedian who deemed Lane 'a person not yet shown to meet notability guidelines'."
At the time of that edit, the article had never been in main space; it was in the Article for Creation process, and a request to move it to main space was rejected.
Also at that point, the article contained only two sources, used in seven citations, not the seven sources claimed.
While the volunteer making that rejection could have been more proactive in improving and then publishing the draft, they were correct that notability (in Wikipedia terms) had not been established *in the draft as submitted*. It is significant that the comment says "a person not yet shown to meet notability guidelines", as opposed to, say "a person who does not meet notability guidelines"
As a result, the article was improved so that notability was shown to exist, by the addition of a third source, the Adam Bernstein article "Lois Alexander Lane; Founder Of Harlem Institute of Fashion".
At the time of writing I have not had a reply (other than an automated out-of-office acknowledgement saying she would return on 6 July). Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:42, 26 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Experienced Wikipedians running editathons know to guide people to work on improving existing articles, rather than starting new ones. For new articles, it's necessary to very carefully verify the likely notability for any list of potential new articles, ensure that new contributors do not try to make articles on themselves or their relatives, and inspect the work as it is being done before it goes live. Just like writing articles, running editing sessions takes experience. . It's my impression that some editathons to add coverage of under-represented groups have not at first done this vetting adequately--and this is not to blame them, because they need time to learn; and, from what I see, they have been learning. DGG ( talk ) 03:27, 27 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I think I count as an experienced Wikipedian. I run editathons, and many of the participants have success in writing a new article, with virtually zero subsequent deletions. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:51, 27 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I did / am doing a survey of (so far) 350 articles of all types from the "random article" button. Including that was exploring the mix of male vs. female, recent (active in the last 15 years) vs non-recent, and also, because sports bios are by far the most prevalent category, sports vs. non-sports. The breakdowns are:
Sports on individual people: 32% All other articles on individual people 68%
Non-recent sports: Male 100% Female 0%
Recent sports: Male 83% Female 17%
Non sports, non recent: Male: 85% Female 15%
Non sports, recent: Male 47% Female 53%
IMO the last split best dials out the realities of history and sports and best addresses any Wikipedia systemic bias question regarding article topics. North8000 (talk) 11:51, 27 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
December 2015, proportion of articles by general type Some old data along the same line. There's some description at User:Smallbones/1000 random results with a link to the data. This is from the time we just hit 5 million articles. It might give you something to compare to. Are we making progress? There were 278 bios (out of 1001 randomly selected articles), with only 41 bios of women. "BDP,F (sports)" has obviously not made any progress: 0% in 2015, compared to your "Non-recent sports: Male 100% Female 0%". Contact me if you have any questions. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:47, 28 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
It's not even remotely shocking how many non-recent sports figures are men vs women. Women's sports prior to 1900, beyond a trivial nature, are a relatively unknown. That doesn't mean we can't have them, but there is scant information on them. If you want more, you need to produce more. I see no barriers to that other than history. Buffs (talk) 18:48, 28 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
Quoting: From January 2017 to February 2020, the number of biographies about women on English-language Wikipedia rose from 16.83% to 18.25%,
Some time ago I started the following table in my user page, to see how I am doing well with women compared to the rest of Wikipedia :-)
27/07/2021 60:(60+107) = 0.35928 (cf. 0.1899 in wp)
From the above I have an impression that Wikipedia is "underperforming" in terms of the relative growth rate of women's bio share despite all its editathons. I am wondering whether someone is skilled in presentations and can draw a timeline curve to see how well this ratio is doing?
P.S. I started tracking this, because one of my wikignoming jobs was the creation of surname articles. In doing this I've been consulting non-en-wikis and was unpleasantly surprized with big numbers of clearly notable foreign "women in red", so I started creating reasonable stubs for them in order to "protect" their entries in the {{surname}} lists I created. Lembit Staan (talk)
My own conclusions from the limited work I did are that
History has a bias - historically women has been less involved in the things that sources write about. And Wikipedia goes by sources
Sports dominates anything numerical in Wikipedia, and the low "did it for a living for one day" sports SNG criteria means that professional sports bios are heavily influential on any bio numbers. And professional sports is still numerically dominated by males, doubly sso if viewed over history.
So the real world, looked at over history, has a male bias. You could call going by sources a Wikipedia "systemic bias" but other than that I don't think that Wikipedia introduces any gender bias.
BTW IMHO the fact that Wikipedia is such a mean and vicious battleground environment for editors does introduce a systemic bias against female editors. But that's a different question. North8000 (talk) 14:24, 28 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
A lot of the comments above are really interesting, and I don't have much to add on the statistics or gender bias lines, but this sentence really stuck out to me: Most had attended the event in the hopes of adding hundreds of women. They were dismayed to learn that adding just part of an article had taken the entire day. The reason people have these expectations is because Wikipedians are invisible. Most readers do not know how the site is written. Most readers who know have this fictitious impression that a small number of people can simply mash a few keys and pop out an article, rather than understanding that every segment of content that takes a minute to read took 10 minutes or an hour or ten hours of community action to build. Most readers don't understand how much upkeep there is and how much necessary logistical work behind the scenes there is. So it's no wonder that people are put off by the realisation of reality. And it explains so many other phenomena on this site, such as people's readiness to vandalism—they don't understand how long we spend on fixing it—or people's reluctance to contribute—"how many people do they need, I'm sure they've got enough". — Bilorv (talk) 16:26, 28 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
No doubt others have commented on this elsewhere, and it is alluded to in some of the comments above, but to what extent does Wikipedia replicate systemic gender bias versus to what extent does it exacerbate that bias? I suspect for many (most?) editors the first is a sort of natural, shrug of the shoulders, that's obvious, response. However, to my mind, there are ways in which the nature of contributing to Wikipedia in a long term, consistent manner, provides far more opportunity for men, in particular older, professionally educated men, the opportunity to contribute. Our culture/principle of volunteerism (which is venerated and defended with as close to complete consensus of any principle here) per se provides more opportunity for men; every single study shows a gender inequality with regard to access to free time. Access to technology, wages, income in retirement; all these mean men are more likely to have time and means to contribute. The more one moves away from the Euro-American world, the more stark these differences become. So, I find this response somewhat missing the forest for the trees; I'm not saying there's a simple solution, but I think we should welcome attempts which try to understand how Wikipedia processes exacerbate gender inequality, rather than simply dismiss the problem as beyond our capacities to confront (or worse, deny there is a problem). Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 03:49, 29 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
I think you've made a key point but in a way that hides your point. IMO Wikipedia is systemically biased against female EDITORS which is a different topic than the one being discussed here.North8000 (talk) 12:09, 6 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
If my point was not clear, my apologies. To clarify: this review criticises and claims to refute a paper about gender bias in Wikipedia, it includes claims that other research has not shown gender bias to exist (or not to be as bad as claimed) and makes no comment otherwise. For me, this reads as a defence of the status quo; ie, Wikipedia simply reflects the world's gender bias (inter alia), rather than also containing structures and processes which exacerbate that bias (eg the vast over-representation of military and sports related material, the variability of the SNG, are a reflection of Wikipedia's own built bias not simply a broader social bias). Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 22:21, 13 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
Update: I did / am doing a survey of (so far) 500 articles of all types from the "random article" button. Including that was exploring the mix of male vs. female, recent (active in the last 15 years) vs non-recent, and also, because sports bios are by far the most prevalent category, sports vs. non-sports. The breakdowns are:
Sports on individual people: 33% All other articles on individual people 67%. So sports is heavily influential on all biography numbers
Non-recent sports: Male 100% Female 0%
Recent sports: Male 82% Female 18%
Non sports, non recent: Male: 87% Female 13%
Non sports, recent: Male 52% Female 48%
IMO the last split best dials out the realities of history and sports and best addresses any Wikipedia systemic bias question regarding article topics. North8000 (talk) 15:10, 29 July 2021 (UTC)Reply
It always amazes me when people mess up the first part of the Donna Strickland fiasco. It takes all of literally two seconds of reading the deletion log, and even if you're unregistered and the log doesn't show up when you click on the red link, the link to it is right there to click on. Some crack reporting there. The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:14, 6 August 2021 (UTC)Reply
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