Stuart, we also know that there were women in the arts working in the Renaissance and I wonder how many "Master of <name>" artists were women. In fact, I once spent a long time trying to see if there was any evidence that Geertgen tot Sint Jans was a man, because certain aspects of his life seem quite confusing, but would make sense if "he" was actually a "she". (I have since learned he was recorded in his lifetime as a "he") This is what makes Wikipedia valuable though - we can improve our knowledge of history by updating such biographies as reliable sources become available. What Gerard is asking is that we bring Wikidata up to speed with the rest of the projects on the gender field for biographies. Wikidata is just a reflection of Wikipedia: it is still a wiki and it's OK to have mistakes, as long as we can keep on correcting them. I would rather have the existing data to query than no data at all, because otherwise how can I see the mistakes so I can correct them? Article tracking through Wikidata will become a whole lot easier than article tracking on Wikipedia through categories I think. Jane 2014-04-21 0:53 GMT+02:00, Stuart A. Yeates <syea...@gmail.com>: > 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 >
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