On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 7:11 PM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijs...@gmail.com> wrote: > > To be blunt, Wikidata gains the quantitative quality I am looking for when > only male and female > is added where applicable. Transgender issues with respect are edge cases.
Transgender issues are primarily raised because they're vitally important for people today, but they're not the only issues. Far more numerically superior are the issues of people writing under other-gendered pseudonyms; that's a systemic problem, in the GND data for example. "Lord Charles Albert" "Florian Wellesley" and "Currer Bell" were only outed as pseudonyms of Charlotte Brontë once she achieved a certain level of fame. Modern analysis suggests that there are probably thousands if not tens of thousands of other writers who never achieved that level of fame and never had their pseudonyms revealed. GND and similar library data commonly base their gender data on nothing more than the apparent gender of the name on the cover page (librarianship practice, unlike archival practise, takes such things at face value). To take that librarianship practise out of context and assert that that those thousands or tens of thousands of authors were men (rather than just publishing under male or ambiguous names) isn't going to get you sued, but that doesn't mean it's not the white-washing of generations of women writers. cheers stuart _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
