Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2017-01-17/Recent research

Female-Wikipedians but women-biographies?

Ottawahitech (talk) 19:33, 17 January 2017 (UTC)please ping me[reply]

Two analyses I'd really love to see:

As an extension from the title study above, whether WP editors who check a gendered checkbox (e.g., "She edits wiki pages") in their preferences are more frequent editors of gendered content (outside of solely BLP, but e.g., friendship bracelets, fashion designers, feminist writers). Put another way, how does gender identification correlate to topic area choice? (A question on sociology: Does the "homophily" term/concept extend to the practice of editing within one's own gender norms? Or is there another term?)
Re: @Ottawahitech's comment above, is there a definitive postmortem of the "American novelists ghettoization" fiasco? I've looked into it and the sensationalism around the Filipacchi op-ed and the mountain of ensuing media coverage (documented at Category talk:American novelists), but I haven't found an analysis of its origins. Since the case is used as a bellwether towards claims of androcentric bias on WP, I think we'd do well to understand how the category changes were endemic to editor culture, or a specific effort by specific editors. Was the introduction of the "American women novelists" category discussed before it was enacted? What type of on-wiki discussion happened prior to the Filipacchi op-ed? The op-ed's media coverage maps assumptions of questionable intentions onto the involved editors—what were those editors' intentions? Was the goal to separate all women novelists from the "American novelists" category, or did it start as an organic category (a recognition of gender in breakout subcategorization) that spun out of control once picked up by multiple editors? (Spitballing, but in the case of the latter, I could easily see the segregating/"ghettoizing" as inadvertent if editors, confused with "non-diffusing" category policy, did not know whether to categorize American women novelists in both "American novelists" and "American women novelists" categories—or either. But I'm more interested in the actual timeline of events.)

czar 08:07, 18 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Regarding #1, I independently found a fitting 2016 thesis (“Gender gap on Wikipedia: visible in all categories?” by Paul Schrijver) and only later realized that it was the one covered in the 2016-11-04 report... (Dataset: 75% of Wikipedia articles, 10% of total revision history) 75% of WP cats do not have gender parity (by edit count? by participant editors?), 35% of which is female overrepresentation. Abstract leaves a bunch of questions, so reading now. czar 08:34, 18 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Czar: #2 I believe part of the confusion was caused, unfortunately, by filipacchi’s not being familiar with how categories work on wikipedia (at least this is my impression after reading Amanda Filipacchi controversy). Apparently she thought that there were many editors involved in her ghettoization, and did not name the one editor who was the main experienced editor who ghettoized her against policy. Ottawahitech (talk) 21:34, 19 January 2017 (UTC)please ping me[reply]

@Ottawahitech, do you know where the subsequent on-wiki discussions happened? There might be a lead there as to how it all went down czar 21:39, 19 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@Czar: Sorry, I just cannot find the time (being hassled at the moment by a number of newbie and IP users) to properly search for all the discussions that took place on Wikipedia back in 2013 in regards to the Amanda Filipacchi controversy. I can vaguely remember participating in one such discussion on one of the women related wiki projects and I also remember a couple of other editors who participated, but (as usual, sigh) the interaction tool seems to be broken so I cannot find out where it was. On the bright side, women categories (which are wp: non-diffusing) are now less likely to be deleted,at least for now... Ottawahitech (talk) 13:29, 21 January 2017 (UTC)please ping me[reply]

I think what we should have learned about the female author categorisation storm-in-a-teacup is that we need a tool that reports the contents of the categories and its sub-categories (and sub-sub-cats and so on). If we had that tool in place, then the female authors would have appeared in the listing of authors and not appeared in a "ghetto" "different" category (which probably was created with good intentions). It's all very well to say that members of the sub-category are also members of the parent category, but I don't see why that is something likely to be understood by the public. I realise that the risk of a tool that returnes the closure of the category may return a lot of results if applied to some categories, but instead of thinking like technocrats, we need to think of our readers and how things look to them. Kerry (talk) 01:48, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Two things that I think have been missing ever since the female author categorization "problem" was publicized are: (1) a clear and sober articulation of the nature of the harm in the present system, and (2) a coherent alternative that addresses the various challenges that exist (including, among others, the goal of informing the academic study of female writing). I don't think there is anybody who would insist the current system is ideal, or would want to keep if there were a better alternative. I think everybody agrees that something better would be better, and that there are flaws with the present system. What I think the critics miss is that no non-flawed alternative has been identified. -Pete Forsyth (talk) 08:20, 23 January 2017 (UTC)[reply]

@User:Czar: You can find more about the Amanda Filipacci controversy at: Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2014_July_13#Category:Women_historians. 70.70.22.22 (talk) 18:39, 12 February 2017 (UTC)[reply]