Re: [Gendergap] [Spam] Re: Sexualized environment on Commons
and sexual objectification here, so don't click if you don't want to see that: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Nude_portrayals_of_computer_technology First, I agree with Ryan that in the (various) deletion discussions I've seen around this and similar topics, there is often a toxic level of childish and offensive comments. I think that's a significant problem, and I don't know what can be done to improve it. Scolding people in those discussions often a backfires, and serves only to amplify the offensive commentary. But silence can imply tacit consent. How should one participate in the discussion, promoting an outcome one believes in, without contributing to or enabling the toxic nature of the discourse? I think I've done a decent job of walking that line in similar discussions, but I'm sure there's a lot of room for better approaches. I would love to hear what has worked for others, here and/or privately. Also, my initial reaction to these images is that they are inherently offensive; my gut reaction is to keep them off Commons. But after thinking it through and reading through a number of deletion discussions, the conclusion I've come to (at least so far) is that the decision to keep them (in spite of the childish and offensive commentary along the way) is the right decision. These strike me as the important points: * We have a collection of more than 20 million images, intended to support a wide diversity of educational projects. Among those 20 million files are a great many that would be offensive to some audience. (For instance, if I understand correctly, *all images portraying people* are offensive to at least some devout Muslims.) * Were these images originally intended to promote objectification of women? To support insightful commentary on objectification of women? Something else? I can't see into the minds of their creators, but I *can* imagine them being put to all kinds of uses, some of which would be worthwhile. The intent of the photographer and models, I've come to believe, is not relevant to the decision. (apart from the basic issue of consent in the next bullet point:) * Unlike many images on Commons, I see no reason to doubt that these were produced by consenting adults, and intended for public distribution. If they are to be deleted, what is the principle under which we would delete them? To me, that's the key question. If it's simply the fact that we as individuals find them offensive, I don't think that's sufficient. If it's out of a belief that they inherently cause more harm than good, I think the reasons for that would need to be fleshed out before they could be persuasive. Art is often meant to be provocative, to challenge our assumptions and sensibilities, to prompt discussion. We host a lot of art on Commons. On what basis would we delete these, but keep other controversial works of art? Of course it would be terrible to use these in, for instance, a Wikipedia article about HTML syntax. But overall, does it cause harm to simply have them exist in an image repository? My own conclusion with regard to this photo series is that the net value of maintaining a large and diverse collection of media, without endorsing its contents per se., outweighs other considerations. (For anybody interested in the deletion process on Commons, the kinds of things that are deliberated, and the way the discussions go, you might be interested in my related blog post from a couple months ago: http://wikistrategies.net/wikimedia-commons-is-far-from-ethically-broken/ ) -Pete [[User:Peteforsyth]] On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: If anyone ever needs a good example of the locker-room environment on Wikimedia Commons, I just came across this old deletion discussion: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Radio_button_and_female_nude.jpg The last two keep votes are especially interesting. One need look no farther than the current Main Page talk page for more of the same (search for premature ejaculation). Kaldari ___ 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 -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Sex Ratios in Wikidata Part III
On 9 June 2014 23:34, Lennart Guldbrandsson l_guldbrands...@hotmail.com wrote: Some language versions of Wikipedia do have gender categorization, such as Swedish and German Wikipedia. (The English categories exist but are not used very much.) Here's a link to the Swedish ones: https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:M%C3%A4n (men) presently 132 211 articles https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategori:Kvinnor (women) presently 32 693 articles This gives a rough proportion of 1 female for every 4 male. article subject. If my memory serves me, the German Wikipedia numbers are a bit higher (perhaps 1 in 6). The categorization was on Swedish Wikipedia a conscious decision to try and find out where we stood. Thanks - I knew about the German categories but not the Swedish ones. Interestingly, Wikidata reports: 32661 female on svwiki: http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/autolist.html?q=claim%5B31%3A5%5D%20and%20claim%5B21%3A6581072%5D%20and%20link%5Bsvwiki%5D 130801 male on svwiki: http://tools.wmflabs.org/wikidata-todo/autolist.html?q=claim%5B31%3A5%5D%20and%20claim%5B21%3A6581097%5D%20and%20link%5Bsvwiki%5D Wikidata gives 20% female, the Wikipedia categories give 21%, but they're in reasonably good alignment - almost perfectly matching for women, and about 1500 men not in Wikidata. I'll have a look at getting these mapped across tonight :-) -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Sex Ratios in Wikidata Part III
Hi all, I ran a few quick updates on Max's numbers today. As of 9/6/14: * WIkidata has ~2080k items marked as people * Of these, ~1893k have a gender property (91%) (Magnus's games are doing an amazing job at filling out these numbers, by the way - http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=213 ) Very quick and dirty statistics follow - note that since we have 9% undefined, the stats may change a bit as time goes on :-) * The gender breakdown across all these people is approximately 1603k male, 290k female - 84.7% male and 15.3% female. * enwiki is 15.5% female; arwiki 14.2%; dewiki 14.9% female; frwiki 15.2%; eswiki 15.9%; jawiki 18.2%; hiwiki 18.7%; zhwiki 20.1% * It's interesting to note that these numbers mostly seem a point or two better than the numbers Max got a month ago, which probably represents better data-logging rather than change in the underlying content * There are still very few items with a gender property other than male or female - perhaps 100-200 overall - but I suspect this number will significantly increase as we deal with the remaining items. Andrew. On 22 May 2014 18:16, Maximilian Klein isa...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Everyone, I just conducted some new research I though you might be intrigued by. It compares the sex or gender labels in use by Wikidata today - 13 in total. The percentage of articles about females by language. The best are Serbian Wikipedia, or Urdu Wikipedia, depending on the size you count. The Wiki's that have become most sexist in 2014 - English Wikpedia. And the Data Richness per sex value. - 6.2 Wikidata Statement per male, 6.0 per female. See the full blog here, and please ask me questions and suggestions - http://notconfusing.com/sex-ratios-in-wikidata-part-iii/ Max Klein ‽ http://notconfusing.com/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Sex Ratios in Wikidata Part III
On 9 June 2014 20:21, Nathan nawr...@gmail.com wrote: * WIkidata has ~2080k items marked as people * Of these, ~1893k have a gender property (91%) Can you define item in this context? Item here is a single Wikidata entry: http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q320 which may correspond to one Wikipedia article, one hundred Wikipedia articles, etc - but all on the same topic. (Potentially it may correspond to *no* Wikipedia articles - it's not strictly required, and in any case the source article may be deleted - but there's unlikely to be a statistically large number of these just now) Do we have any comparable data points by which to evaluate our progress? Perhaps a similar breakdown of other reference works, or if there is some sort of summary data available about biographies written (using LOC data?), etc. The new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography was about 10% female when published in 2004, though this was skewed by a limitation to include all entries from the original, including a lot of - to modern eyes - very non-notable men. http://oed.hertford.ox.ac.uk/main/images/stories/articles/baigent2005.pdf (It's since crept up to ~11%) Max has done some numbers based on gender assigned in VIAF entries, I think, but I can't immediately find it. Ben Schmidt did something similar based on first names of authors: http://sappingattention.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/women-in-libraries.html -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Liz Henry on women novelists, English Wikipedia, and labelling
The recent discussion on this (which never really came to a clear consensus): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_101#Actresses_categorization - Andrew On 27 April 2013 01:49, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: If people are concerned about sexism in Wikipedia categories they should be drawing attention to edits like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elizabeth_Gilliescurid=19682193diff=536982107oldid=536980531 While the rest of the world is moving away from gender-specific job names (like policeman and actress), Wikipedia is moving in the opposite direction. That seems like a much worse problem than categorizing women as women. Ryan Kaldari On 4/25/13 11:34 PM, Shlomi Fish wrote: Hi all, On Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:56:39 -0400 Sumana Harihareswara suma...@wikimedia.org wrote: Wikimedia community member Liz Henry blogs here: http://bookmaniac.org/journalists-dont-understand-wikipedia-sometimes/ and does a little bit of digging into edit histories. Just from these three samples, it does not seem that there is any particular movement among a group of Wikipedia editors to remove women from the “novelists” category and put them in a special women category instead. I would say that the general leaning, rather, is to stop people who would like to label women writers as women writers *in addition* to labeling them as writers, claiming there is no need for Category: American women writers at all and that it is evidence of bias to identify them by gender. ... The sexist thing we should be up in arms about isn’t labelling women as women! It’s the efforts to delete entire categories (like Haitian women writers, for example) because someone has decided that that meta-information is unnecessary “ghettoization”... Seems like good write-up and I tend to agree. It's too bad there was so much misunderstanding in the media about it. Regards, Shlomi Fish ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] [PRESS] Women Novelists Wikipedia: Female Authors Absent From Site's 'American Novelists' Page?
For what it's worth, this issue is apparently discussed in the categorisation guidelines, which recommend Both male and female [subjects] should continue to be filed in the appropriate gender-neutral role category... in cases where we only have one gender-specific category; they should only be moved out of the main category if we're doing a complete gender subdivision (as is the case with, eg, most sporting topics) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categorization/Ethnicity,_gender,_religion_and_sexuality#Gender Of course, guidelines do not always govern actual practice on the ground! A. On 25 April 2013 15:52, Leslie Carr lc...@wikimedia.org wrote: Salon has also picked this up - http://www.salon.com/2013/04/25/wikipedia_moves_women_to_american_women_novelists_category_leaves_men_in_american_novelists/ On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 4:13 AM, María Sefidari kewlshr...@yahoo.es wrote: The New York Times also has an article about this: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/opinion/sunday/wikipedias-sexism-toward-female-novelists.html Kind regards, María Enviado desde mi dispositivo móvil El 25/04/2013, a las 01:21, Sarah Stierch sarah.stie...@gmail.com escribió: From The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/24/women-novelists-wikipedia-female-authors-american_n_3149345.html Attention female authors: you may be being segregated from your male peers on Wikipedia. On the online encyclopedia's American Novelists page, women authors are hard to find. Instead they have been filed primarily under American Women Novelists. Vanity Fair contributing editor Elissa Schappell made this observation and posted on Facebook Wednesday: Women Writers take heed, you are being erased on Wikipedia. It would appear that in order to make room for male writers, women novelists (such as Amy Tan, Harper Lee, Donna Tartt and 300 others) have been moved off the American Novelists page and into the American Women Novelists category. Not the back of the bus, or the kiddie table exactly--except of course--when you google American Novelists the list that appears is almost exclusively men (3,387 men). The explanation on the pages is that the list of American Novelists is too long, therefore sub-categories are necessary. Idea: What about, American Novelists with Penises American Novelists Who Are Vastly Over-Rated and Over-Paid or American Novelists Who Aren't Being Read But Should Be (Here you'd find a lot of women, people of color...) Want to see where you're sitting for eternity? Take a peek. A disclaimer at the top of the American Novelists page reads, This category may require frequent maintenance to avoid becoming too large. It should directly contain very few, if any, articles and should mainly contain subcategories. Schappell suggests that Wikipedia dealt with this space issue by moving the female authors off the page. The Huffington Post reached out to Wikipedia for a response to Schappell's claims but so far has not heard back. This is far from the first time that someone has expressed ire over the second-class treatment of female authors. VIDA, an organization dedicated to women in literary arts, pointed out that in 2011 the New York Times Book Review printed reviews of 520 male authors' books and only 273 books written by women. In a recent blog post on The Huffington Post, author Liza Palmer wrote about thedouble standard that exists in the literary world: All too often, when a woman writes a book about family and relationships the reader will sigh that she felt the narrator's inner monologues were whiny whereas when a male writer contemplates these same topics he is being introspective. If a female writer uses humor in her dialogue she will be dismissed as snarky, whereas if a male writer uses humor, he has a biting wit. So called chick-lit writers get pinned with predictable endings, while male writers writing about the same topics have endings that are satisfying. Perhaps it's time that Wikipedia realized that both men and women are great American novelists and should show up when you search for them. -- Sarah Stierch Wikimedia Foundation Program Evaluation Community Coordinator Donate today and keep it free! Visit me on Wikipedia! Attached Message Part ___ 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 -- Leslie Carr Wikimedia Foundation AS 14907, 43821 http://as14907.peeringdb.com/ ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap
[Gendergap] Editathon at Oxford, 26th October
Hi all, If you're a student or staff at the University of Oxford, you might like to know that they're organizing an editathon at the Radcliffe Science Library on 26th October. Building on the Royal Society event tomorrow, it's focusing on women in science: http://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/ENGR If you've any questions, please let me know and I'll pass them on to the organisers. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] [Wikimediauk-l] Ada Lovelace Day organised by Wikimedia UK - 19 October 2012, London
Hi all. Just to let you know that the Royal Society have shuffled some rooms around and found a lot more tickets for the evening panel session, so if you're in London on Friday evening, please do come along! http://royalsociety.eventbrite.com/ to book. - Andrew. On 17 September 2012 16:49, Daria Cybulska daria.cybul...@wikimedia.org.uk wrote: Dear all, It's Ada Lovelace Day on 16 October and it's most suitable for Wikimedia UK to get involved. The day exists to celebrate the contributions of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. As you may know, Ada Lovelace is considered the first programmer, due to her work on Charles Babbage's analytical engine. As such, she's someone we can very much hold up as a role model. Wikimedia UK is organising a Women in Science themed editing event for Ada Lovelace Day on Friday 19 October 2012 and would like to invite you to attend! We have organised a group 'Edit-a-thon' to improve Wikipedia articles about women in science, held at the Royal Society's library, London, 2:30-6pm. We had a very high response from the academic community, and we filled many more spaces than expected! However, there are still a couple of places free for people who would like to help train new contributors - please get in touch if you are interested. There will also be opportunities to get involved online, which we will publish at our Wikimedia UK event's page (see below). Following the Edit-a-thon there will be an panel discussion with Uta Frith from the Royal Society and other female scientists on women in science (the focus will be much broader than just the representation of the topic on Wikipedia). The panel discussion will take place from 6:30pm - 8:00pm, and you are most welcome to attend - there are still free places available, so please feel free to register here http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/wikipedia-workshop/ Wikimedia UK also has a page for the event, which you can see here http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace_Day_2012 Hope to see many of you there. Best, Daria -- Daria Cybulska - Events Organiser, Wikimedia UK +44 (0) 207 065 0994 +44 7803 505 170 -- Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). Wikimedia UK is an independent non-profit charity with no legal control over Wikipedia nor responsibility for its contents. ___ Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediau...@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: http://uk.wikimedia.org -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
Re: [Gendergap] Ada Lovelace in Sweden
On 26 September 2012 09:56, Axel Pettersson axel.petters...@wikimedia.se wrote: Feel free to add articles to write or expand under Artiklar att jobba med on http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Skrivstuga/Ada_Lovelace_2012 and sign up for tickets at http://adaskrivstuga2012.eventbrite.com/, På plats if you intend to come to Stockholm to participate and online if you want to help out from other places. Great! I promise I will try and do at least one of them in English for you :-) Anyone else organizing an event? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
