[Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica
http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/gender-bias-in-wp-eb Abstract: Is there a bias in the against women's representation in Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender representation, and article length. We conclude that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica
Thanks for sharing your research, Joseph! On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 9:54 AM, Joseph Reagle joseph.2...@reagle.orgwrote: ** http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/gender-bias-in-wp-eb Abstract: Is there a bias in the against women's representation in Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender representation, and article length. We conclude that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- GLAMWIKI Partnership Ambassador for the Wikimedia Foundationhttp://www.glamwiki.org Wikipedian-in-Residence, Archives of American Arthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SarahStierch and Sarah Stierch Consulting *Historical, cultural artistic research advising.* -- http://www.sarahstierch.com/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Commons Village Pump convo about female politicans category.
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Sarah Stierch sarah.stie...@gmail.comwrote: A Commons user began deleting the category Female politicians and it was brought up on the Village Pump. The user even asked what the point of the category was, which entertains me. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Female_politicians_cats_removed_and_asked_for_deletion... It's gotten to the point where someone declares the concept of female sexist, and then heads into the way of but there are categories for females with cats and males with cats. uh huh.. Accusations of sexism or whatnot aside, I think it's important to understand the instinct for Commons which applies here. The desire of Commonists is to move as many files as possible away from top-level generic categories like Female politicians and towards fine-grained categorization like, Female Minister-Presidents of North Rhine-Westphalia. (That example was a little hyperbolic, but hopefully you catch my drift.) Seeing something as generic as Female authors or similar immediately looks in need of cleanup to a lot of Commons editors, and not because they all want gender neutral categories only. ;) -- Steven ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica
Thanks for the article link, Joseph. I haven't yet finished the article, but I do have a couple of preliminary questions: * Do you know what the ratio of male to female contributors is at Encyclopedia Britannica? * Why the emphasis on female biographies? It seems like a weak indicator of gender bias (as reflected by the WikiSym study). Do we really know that women are significantly more likely to write about women than men are? If so, how much more likely? Ryan Kaldari On 9/2/11 6:54 AM, Joseph Reagle wrote: http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/gender-bias-in-wp-eb Abstract: Is there a bias in the against women's representation in Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender representation, and article length. We conclude that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica
Interesting! I don't know if you know about the categories that exist on some Wikipedias, for instance German and Swedish Wikipedia: namely the categories for articles about men and women respectively. On Swedish you can find the super-category here: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:Personer_efter_k%C3%B6n Män = Men Kvinnor = Women Those numbers suggest that for each article about a woman on Swedish Wikipedia, there are 4,29 about men. That is a little bit better than the German Wikipedia (1 woman, 5,85 men). As you can see from the interwiki links, some other languages also have these categories. English Wikipedia in fact have an impressive 1,65 articles about *women* for every article about men. All *38* of the women article towers of the 23 men articles :-) Time to fill in those categories? Best wishes, Lennart Lennart Guldbrandsson, Wikimedia Sverige http://wikimedia.se Tfn: 031 - 12 50 48 Mobil: 070 - 207 80 05 Epost: l_guldbrands...@hotmail.com Användarsida: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anv%C3%A4ndare:Hannibal Blogg: http://mrchapel.wordpress.com/ Date: Fri, 2 Sep 2011 14:39:30 -0700 From: rkald...@wikimedia.org To: joseph.2...@reagle.org; gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica Thanks for the article link, Joseph. I haven't yet finished the article, but I do have a couple of preliminary questions: * Do you know what the ratio of male to female contributors is at Encyclopedia Britannica? * Why the emphasis on female biographies? It seems like a weak indicator of gender bias (as reflected by the WikiSym study). Do we really know that women are significantly more likely to write about women than men are? If so, how much more likely? Ryan Kaldari On 9/2/11 6:54 AM, Joseph Reagle wrote: http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/social/wikipedia/gender-bias-in-wp-eb Abstract: Is there a bias in the against women's representation in Wikipedia biographies? Thousands of biographical subjects, from six sources, are compared against the English-language Wikipedia and the online Encyclopædia Britannica with respect to coverage, gender representation, and article length. We conclude that Wikipedia provides better coverage and longer articles, that Wikipedia typically has more articles on women than Britannica in absolute terms, but Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than articles on men relative to Britannica. For both reference works, article length did not consistently differ by gender. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
Several women, including on WikiProject Feminism on the English Wikipedia, have recently expressed concern about the number of photographs of women's body parts that Wikimedia hosts, particularly regarding the issue of permission. It's far from clear in many cases that the women have given consent. It's also sometimes unclear that the subjects are above the age of consent. Another concern is what a woman is meant to do if someone uploads an image of her without her knowledge. Is she supposed to write to an anonymous person at OTRS? Does she have to give her real name? How does it work? Any information from the Foundation about the legal situation, and what Foundation policy is, would be very helpful. Sarah ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
Several women, including on WikiProject Feminism on the English Wikipedia, have recently expressed concern about the number of photographs of women's body parts that Wikimedia hosts, particularly regarding the issue of permission. It's far from clear in many cases that the women have given consent. It's also sometimes unclear that the subjects are above the age of consent. Another concern is what a woman is meant to do if someone uploads an image of her without her knowledge. Is she supposed to write to an anonymous person at OTRS? Does she have to give her real name? How does it work? Any information from the Foundation about the legal situation, and what Foundation policy is, would be very helpful. Sarah The matter is discussed at Commons:Photographs of identifiable people https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people Fred ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 21:00, Fred Bauder fredb...@fairpoint.net wrote: The matter is discussed at Commons:Photographs of identifiable people https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/wiki/Commons:Photographs_of_identifiable_people Fred Thanks for the link, Fred. It seems that page deals only with images where the subject is unidentifiable. Even there, it's not clear what a woman is meant to do if she finds an inappropriate image of herself on a Wikimedia project. But if she's not identifiable -- if it's a body part -- it seems there's nothing at all she can do. Sarah ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 21:33, Sarah Stierch sarah.stie...@gmail.com wrote: I also think (after working in the fashion and photography private sector for almost 10 years before non-profits) that model releases are as important as OTRS copyright releases when it comes to sexual content on Wikipedia. Whether nude photos, cock shots, or booty shorts. I'm sure most of the people who have nude photos or sexual photos of themselves on Commons have no clue. And if they do know, do we have a reasonable system in place for them to complain? As things stand, it seems they're expected to write to an anonymous OTRS volunteer. Are they expected to give their real name, and how do they prove the image is of them? It would be good to hear from someone how this works in practice. Sarah ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
If someone sees an image of themself which they want removed, they can 1. email OTRS. whether the request is received by a volunteer and/or anonymous person shouldn't matter. The OTRS policies do matter, esp. the privacy policy. For added privacy, they should email oversight-en-wp or the commons oversight email address (?). If the complaint includes unresolved legalities, the OTRS ticket (i.e. email thread) will be sent to the legal team, who are not (afaik) anonymous. 2. create a wiki account and nominate the image for deletion. 3. use the laws available to them. Are they expected to give their real name, It depends on the option they take and how do they prove the image is of them? If their complaint reaches someone sane, it is unlikely they will be asked to prove anything. A simple assertion should be sufficient to cause the OTRS volunteer to investigate the upload. Often the photo was uploaded by an account with very few edits, and the image would be deleted without much fuss. I would like to throw this back in a positive direction. The task of deleting poor quality photographs (and metadata/provenance/paperwork is part of quality) is made much easier if we have good quality photographs of the same topic. Nobody cares about deletions of bad photographs when those photographs are no longer used. They do care when it is the only photo of its kind, because it is a precious resource. As Sarah Stierch points out, our images of sexuality and reproduction are crap, broadly speaking, and our paperwork/processes are self-evidently not good for attracting high quality photographs. What processes should we put in place to encourage good quality photographs of this kind. e.g. should we set up a separate OTRS queue to process the paperwork for these photographs? Should it be managed by verified non-anonymous women only? -- John Vandenberg ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Question for the Foundation about photographs of women
On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 9:22 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: I would like to throw this back in a positive direction. The task of deleting poor quality photographs (and metadata/provenance/paperwork is part of quality) is made much easier if we have good quality photographs of the same topic. Nobody cares about deletions of bad photographs when those photographs are no longer used. They do care when it is the only photo of its kind, because it is a precious resource. An excellent point, John. I wonder if there are organizations that (1) are concerned about gender issues on Wikipedia, and (2) have the ability to generate a substantial collection of high quality images to illustrate this sort of thing to the commons. If so, there might be a great partnership/project opportunity there. -Pete ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
