On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Charles Matthews<charles.r.matth...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > Bryan Derksen wrote: >> David Gerard wrote: >> >>> 2009/7/30 Carcharoth <carcharot...@googlemail.com>: >>> >>> >>>> <sob> >>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_births_by_year >>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Animal_deaths_by_year >>>> That is ridiculous category use. >>>> >>> Hey, someone thought it was useful ... >>> >> >> Once upon a time I went through a whole bunch of "famous animal" >> articles and added birth and death year categories. Someone followed >> along behind me and dutifully removed them all as I went. I guess this >> is how that particular dispute wound up being settled. >> > So those categories need to be animated, rather than populated?
Disneyfied? :-) I think what some people want is more a way to take a category such as "Famous animals" and its subcategories, and run a dynamic query that returns a list of all the members of those categories sorted by dates of birth and death. A dynamic version of a list. I know I'd love it if that could be done for all biographical articles, so there was some super-list (and very big one at that), which could be sorted by name, dates of birth and death, and other biographical data. That would be more a biographical database than a list, but the potential is there for Wikipedia to be a massive biographical database, but extracting clean data is difficult sometimes, because of how the system is currently set up. The classic piece of data that we don't track, and which I usually drag up in these debates, is the number of articles on men and the number of articles on women. Now, you might say that you can't query an ordinary biographical dictionary to find out these things, but Wikipedia *should* be able to do more than other resources. It seems a simple question, doesn't it? How many biographical articles do we have on women, and how many on men? But it is one of those questions that defies analysis because the data isn't there. We can give approximate answers about historical periods, and about nationality (as far as that is meaningful). But gender? No, we don't document that for some reason. Which is strange, because "famous women in history" and "Biographies of Notable Women" are big topics if you search for sources on those topics. I'd like to know, for example, how many featured biographies we have on women from history (and possible contemporary biographies as well)? I might do just that and make another userspace list. While searching for lists of famous women, I found this: http://www.dailylit.com/books/wikipedia-tours-famous-women-throughout-history "Welcome to our _Wikipedia Tour: Famous Women Throughout History_. Each day we’ll send you a link to a new article about a famous woman on Wikipedia. The introduction to each day’s article is included in the installment so you can choose to read just the introduction or the full article." Wow. I never knew things like that were out there. >From this, is seems there was a list at one point: http://july.fixedreference.org/en/20040724/wikipedia/Famous_women_in_history That article was moved on 23 September 2005 to "List of famous women in history". It had 542 edits at the point it was deleted on 24 September 2006 following this discussion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_famous_women_in_history One of the comments there: "Please leave it - debate criteria if you will, but it's a very useful resource for educators". Does anyone feel that something went wrong there? Surely the data on which articles are about women and which are about men should be present somewhere so people can query and produce such lists if they want them, for educational purposes, such as in the first link I provided? Maybe that is more the domain of wikibooks, but even so, it requires the basic information to be present somewhere in the articles about whether the subject of the article is a man or a woman. I have no idea how many entries were on the list when it got deleted (looks to be several hundred), but the tour of 45 articles (undoubtedly hand-picked) took people through the following: http://www.dailylit.com/books/wikipedia-tours-famous-women-throughout-history Hatshepsut Cleopatra VII Boudica Hypatia of Alexandria Theodora (6th century) Hildegard of Bingen Eleanor of Aquitaine Christine de Pizan Joan of Arc Elizabeth I of England Artemisia Gentileschi Christina of Sweden Catherine II of Russia Caroline Herschel Mary Wollstonecraft Sacagawea Sojourner Truth Victoria of the United Kingdom Harriet Beecher Stowe Julia Margaret Cameron Elizabeth Cady Stanton Susan B. Anthony Florence Nightingale Mary Cassatt Marie Curie Emma Goldman Gertrude Stein Margaret Sanger Hellen Keller Virginia Woolf Georgia O'Keeffe Martha Graham Amelia Earhart Margaret Mead Hannah Arendt Rachel Carson Simone de Beauvoir Babe Zaharias Rosa Parks Ella Fitzgerald Rosalind Franklin Anne Frank Valentina Tereshkova Margaret Thatcher Madeleine Albright [Why on earth couldn't they give a list somewhere? I had to click through all of them...] I'm wondering how that compares to our list of 200 core biographies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Biography/Core_biographies Nine (9) of those 200 articles are on a woman. We do have lists of women: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_women Some quite good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-21st-century_female_scientists http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_mathematicians http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Nobel_laureates Those are good lists and resources, but I still think some basic tag should enable identification of gender of the subject of a biographical article (including transgender and other options, of course). But how on Earth can something like that be done now, at such a late stage? Going back to that website: http://www.dailylit.com/tags/wikipedia-tours That's really quite impressive. Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
