Re: [Gendergap] fyi: Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica
Hello Ryan, On Friday, September 02, 2011, Ryan Kaldari wrote: * Do you know what the ratio of male to female contributors is at Encyclopedia Britannica? No, unfortunately not. It'd be great to have that data and -- as we note -- to have a comprehensive listing of all biographies in EB. * 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? Unlike the WikiSym study, we are not able to draw connections between the contributors and their contributions. While the gender gap in contribution certainly inspired the work, we're focused on gender bias in content. As we note briefly in the paper, a member of the feminism task force said that much of a contribution there came from mail contributors. ___ Gendergap mailing list Gendergap@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
[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] 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
