Wikidata:WikiProject LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group/Affinity Group Calls/Meeting Notes/2022-06-14

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Call details[edit]

  • Date: 2021-06-14
  • Topic: Leveraging Wikidata for Wikipedia – running a multi-language wiki project and the role of Wikidata in improving Wikipedia's content gender gap
  • Presenter: Will Kent (Wikidata Program Manager at Wiki Education) and Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight (Wikimedia Foundation Trustee; Visiting Scholar at Northeastern University; co-founder of Wiki Women in Red)
  • Link to original agenda with link to recording: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lM5fWZcQpvn4rA_olx4aNIp6DQjX2DV-LLgSY1Qm98A/edit

Presentation material[edit]

Orientation page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wikidata_in_Wikimedia_projects

Notes[edit]

  • Will Kent:
  • Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight:
    • Around 2010-2011, some veteran Wikipedias noticed there were far fewer biographies for women than men. You would see a sea of men’s names, and very few women’s names.
    • Starting in March 2011 (Women’s history month): decided to devote writing women’s biographies all month long. More people contributed in subsequent years. Biographies were created of all sorts of occupations, such as female historians and writers.
    • At the end of 2014, a group of academics published a research paper that gave a percentage of how many biographies were about women: 15.53%
    • 2 months later a Wikipedian approached her about submitting a proposal to Wikimania to discuss this percentage. It was accepted and they were featured speakers. They decided not only to talk about this number, but potential ways to map the situation and improve it.
    • Women in red: refers to redlinks in Wikipedia articles that if you click it, leads to nothing (as opposed to blue links). Goal is to convert red links to blue ones.
    • They thought they’d have 15 minutes of fame from it: but they were wrong: they weren’t limited to just writing in March, but could do it all year round.
    • What distinguished Women in Red is that they only focus on content. They don’t care about who the editors are, etc.
    • List of edit-a-thons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Women_in_Red_edit-a-thons
    • In 2015: Held first World Edit-a-thon during Labor Day weekend: focused on Asian-Pacific American women. Goal was to write biographies. Used list with different categories (academics, actresses): crowd-source list as some information came from Smithsonian edit-a-thon. 39 new articles created over a period of 3 days. What else could be done if they spend longer on it?
    • 2nd event was held September 2015: over 10 days (2 weekends): “List of women’s leaders” In that one, 183 new articles were created.
    • January 2016: An editor came up with a Wikidata generated list (January 10-31 2016: Women in music): Contained not just the names, but a list of redlinks. People added crowd-sourced names, but also started including redlists pulled from Wikidata.
    • They’re now doing “Women in music” in June 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Meetup/233
    • There is a tab that generates list based on SPARQL query, showing presence of female composer on Wikidata but not a page on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Composers
      • Contributors often have different preferences for who they want to work on: images, country, dates.
      • Each language pages have its own rules regarding notability and sources.
    • While started in English initially, by 2017 had expanded to many languages: now more than 30 of them. All drawing off the same thing: lists of missing women in Wikipedia.
    • Worked with group from OCLC (https://hangingtogether.org/libraries-think-they-are-notable-using-worldcat-holdings-data-to-fill-gaps-in-wikipedia/) to show number of library holdings as that could influence someone to work on specific pages.
    • All articles on Wikipedia can improve.
  • Will Kent:
    • Wikipedia is awesome because you can access Wikidata: pushing info from one source to another is a big deal since many editors only work on one or the other platform.
    • Also important: lists generated from queries: can customize them & display whatever you want using whatever features you want.
    • Orientation to Wikidata from the perspective of Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikidata  
    • Also have cool tools such as Listeria: takes SPARQL query and demonstrates lists on Wikipedia page: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Template:Wikidata_list

Templates tracking Wikidata: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Templates_tracking_Wikidata

Questions[edit]

  • Comment: Strong argument for keeping gender in Wikidata records.
  • Q: How do you balance the desire to do this type of work with the wish to respect the gender self-identification of the people you’re writing about.
  • Q: Will transgender women be captured in your query?
    • A (Will): Not the way these queries are phrased, but it’s easy enough to add additional values among the gender spectrum.
    • A (Robert): Some of the queries at Women’s in Red’s lists have been updated to include transgender women, but not all as there are hundreds of lists.
    • A: Information in Wikidata does include several identifications beyond male and female gender. The convention on English Wikipedia is that such information is only stated in an article if someone has themself explicitly stated their gender identification in a public way.  There has to be evidence cited of public self-identification; it has to be more than someone else saying it.
  • Comment: The Free Image Search Tool link that WIR offers right next to their SPARQL query for the auto-created lists is very useful too.
  • Q: Is there a tool to get the holdings data?
  • Comment: I'd like to add a shoutout to John Mark Ockerbloom who is on this call for the Library Resources Box template for Wikipedia articles that links people to library resources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Library_resources_box
  • Comment: Presentation on Listeria: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Listeria_presentation_LD4_Wikidata_Affinity_Group_2020.pdf
  • Q: I have recently been having the problem that when a Listeria list gets updated, the content gets duplicated. Has anyone else had that problem or is it just me?
  • Q: And we've run into size limits as well with Listeria, where new items don't get added to some of our lists.
    • A: We’re starting to have problems with longer WIR lists: many of them are crashing & not updating, so often splitting them by centuries, etc.
  • Comment: Here's an example of a dynamic list: https://listeria.toolforge.org/dynamic.html?#list=353&lang=en   Main downside is that they are not hosted on Wikipedia.
  • Difficult to sometimes divide these lists in a more granular fashion, such as university faculty.
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