This is great Tom, and something I have been waiting for (and vocalizing the need for on social media).
Lately all I have been doing is working on wikidata re: gender/women subjects these days. -Sarah On Wed, May 21, 2014 at 11:37 AM, Tom Morris <t...@tommorris.org> wrote: > Greetings Gendergap-sters, > > I wanted to tell everyone about a new game that Magnus Manske has > created, called 'Wikidata - The game!' > > http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-game/ > > As games go, it's not tremendously exciting - it's not going to be > peeling too many people away from their Xboxes or Nintendos. > > There's three sub-games: Person, Merge and Gender. You pick one and then > the system asks you questions... forever. These answers end up getting > pushed back into Wikidata. > > I've just been playing the 'gender' game. It shows you a Wikidata > object, with a description in a language, as well as possibly a picture. > Based on the description, you pick which gender best matches out of male > or female (for non-binary genders, you can open up the Wikidata object > by clicking on it and editing it directly). If you can't work it out, > you can skip it by pressing 'Not sure'. > > I've now done over 400 of these. The interface is designed to work with > touch devices so you should be able to do it with smartphones and iPads > and so on. > > But why bother? Why should we care about making sure Wikidata accurately > reflects the gender of its subjects? > > 1. It builds the future capacity of a replacement to the category > system. Currently, we have a category system that turns identity into > politics. We saw this on English Wikipedia with the "American women > novelists" debacle: articles about female writers being moved from being > in the main "American novelists" category into a gender-specific > category. Some of the women who were thus moved objected on the basis > that this was a form of ghettoisation of women's voices, and also > pointed out that men weren't being equally moved to "American men > novelists". > > The categories for discussion debates on English Wikipedia have become a > place where identity politics plays out: should we have an "LGBT > scientists" category? In come the people to argue that someone being > LGBT is somehow a non-essential or non-central part of that person's > identity. As it is for gender, so it is for religion and nationality. > The flipside to this argument is that having categories based on gender, > sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity and religion enables readers > to find people. The gay kid who thinks all gay men are stereotypically > effeminate men working as beauticians can be disabused of that notion by > looking through the 'LGBT sportspersons' category; the girl who has been > told that women don't go into science or engineering can do similarly by > looking in the 'Women scientists' category. Wikidata may give us a way > out of these kinds of conundrums by letting us slice up the world on a > great number of different axes. Want to see all the gay Buddhist > scientists from Morocco? Fire up some future Wikidata powered faceted > semantic search system that one day we'll maybe integrate into Wikipedia > and you can do just that. > > 2. It'll enable us to monitor how well we're doing on systemic bias and > the gender gap. Wikidata operates across different versions of Wikipedia > and other Wikimedia projects. On 'American women novelists', how well is > each language doing in covering them? Is English Wikipedia better or > worse at covering women novelists writing in English than French > Wikipedia is covering women novelists writing in French? If we can make > the machine readable data in Wikidata good and comprehensive, we can use > it to flag up shortcomings and systemic bias in how Wikipedias in > different languages handle these kinds of sensitive identity topics like > gender and ethnicity and nationality. Countering systemic bias and the > gender gap among article subjects isn't only an English language > problem: Wikimedia is a global movement, and finding weak spots and > opportunities to improve in all languages is something we should try and > do. > > > If you haven't played around with Wikidata, give it a go. Get yourself > logged in with an account and go through the OAuth process, then you can > start playing the games that Magnus has created and help build a system > that can be used to monitor and improve coverage across Wikipedias. > Wikidata is still at very early stages and you sort of have to have > faith in what it could end up being in a few years time rather than > being able to see immediate results now. But getting there might be > quite good fun. > > Yours, > > > -- > Tom Morris > <http://tommorris.org/> > > > _______________________________________________ > Gendergap mailing list > Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap > > -- Sarah Stierch ----- Diverse and engaging consulting for your organization. www.sarahstierch.com
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