On 7/18/12 11:47 AM, Andrew Gray wrote:
The English Wikipedia categorises biographies by gender in some
circumstances (eg athletes), but not systematically in the way that
German does - there are no supercategories of "Men", "Women", etc,
designed to list all members of those groups, and plenty of biography
articles have no "gendered" categories. There are, of course, good
reasons to avoid this, and conversely good reasons to do it... but I'm
wondering why we do it this way.
I remember it being referred to many years ago as long-standing
practice, but I've dug around a bit in the discussion archives and
can't seem to pin it down. It's probably pre-2004, maybe even pre-2003
- anyone remember?
My vaguely informed guess as to why is that English-Wikipedia categories
have developed mainly as a folksonomy intended for navigation, as
opposed to a rational, top-down taxonomy intended for sorting things
into bins, which is closer to how the German Wikipedia does it. Not
universally true, but it's their general flavor.
Many of the "Women in X" categories, for example, are maintained by
WikiProject Women's History. They can be useful for navigation in
contexts related to the WikiProject or some of its goals. For example,
students looking for a subject to write about during a Women's History
Month assignment might find a category like [[Category:Women
astronomers]] useful for navigation.
From that perspective, why there aren't equivalent "Men in X"
categories is related to why there isn't a WikiProject Men's History, or
a Men's History Month: basically, men have not been as systematically
left out of many professions and histories, so there is less interest in
or need to focus specifically on "Men astronomers" in order to emphasize
their overlooked contributions. For similar reasons, we have categories
such as [[Category:African-American inventors]], but not
[[Category:White American inventors]].
I'm not sure if that's the best way to do it, but I think that asymmetry
in interest and navigational usefulness is why we have some asymmetries
in the category structure. As for changing it, I think it'll have to be
looked at on an area-by-area basis with involvement of relevant
wikiprojects, because some of the category systems are fairly complex
and/or brittle, and people have opinions about them. In sports, for
example, many people are already categorized into the leagues they play
in, and many leagues are single-gender, so that could provide an easy
way of adding people indirectly to a category without going through an
editing tens of thousands of articles.
Alternately (or perhaps, additionally), there are increasingly more ways
than the category system for encoding metadata, if the goal is to use it
for external sorting rather than navigation. For example, perhaps
Template:Infobox_person could have a gender field, which would then be
picked up by DBPedia and similar projects that extract infobox data.
-Mark
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