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New metrics section

I'm happy to see we now have a new metrics section, thanks to the work undertaken by The Earwig. While it represents a huge improvement and largely relieves us from manual updating, there is still room for improvement. During our editathons, a considerable number of articles are written on women's works, associations, historical incidents, etc. Until now, these have formed part of our monthly lists too. As far as I can see, the bot no longer includes them and even deletes those added manually. I realize Harej has plans for covering at least the works but in the meantime, should we not try to maintain some kind of list under metrics? The graph (now the right way up) is also useful for indicating month by month progress but I think the data for the current month (i.e. August for now) give a misleading picture as it looks as if interest in WiR has dropped almost to zero. I suggest we either decide to include only completed months on the graph or somehow indicate "month in progress" with a dotted line or similar. I do nevertheless think it is very useful to have the actual list of new articles for the current month.--Ipigott (talk) 06:41, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

@Ipigott: The bot should never remove articles other people add to the metrics pages unless they're redlinks. I hope this is clear from the language I used ("Reports bot updates these lists automatically, but you can manually add and annotate entries."). If it's happening, that's a bug, and I'll fix it. — Earwig talk 06:52, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
Oh, and for your second point, I agree. Currently trying to massage the graph software into producing something clearer. — Earwig talk 06:59, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
Okay, I tried making the last leg of the graph transparent. The software doesn't give me too many options here. Let me know if you prefer this or just leaving the last month completely off. — Earwig talk 07:21, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
@The Earwig: Thanks very much for your quick response. The graph looks better now. Before you take any further action, let's see if there are any comments from other WiR editors. I seem to have misunderstood how the bot updates. It's great if we can add items to the list manually. I think we should also have explanations at the beginning of the section, including a specific invitation to editors, asking them add articles other than biographies to the main list. The alternative would be to compile a separate list of non-biographical articles or any the bot has not picked up. I'll wait another 24 hours for further comment, in particular from Rosiestep and SusunW, then I'll add explanations.--Ipigott (talk) 08:11, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

A thought: the graph currently shows the derivative, the rate of increase, rather than the total amount of increase itself. What if instead it showed aggregate change over time, such that the slope is always positive, though by different amounts each month? (Unless a ton of articles were deleted or something.) Harej (talk) 11:09, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

@Harej:I think the graph is useful as it is, showing the rate of increase for the month. It already shows that some months have been far more productive than others. As I have suggested before, I think it would be useful to follow Max Klein's approach by showing the proportion/percentage of EN Wikipedia's new biographies each month as compared to the total number of new biographies. (Currenly he only displays the results of the last completed week and the overall totals.) The aim of WiR after all is to increase the proportional coverage of women on Wikipedia. In the meantime, it might simply be useful to provide a link to Klein's Gender by language page which is useful in its own right in that it shows the comparative progress on women's biographies in Wikipedia's different language versions. Personally, I think simply illustrating the actual number of new biographies per month in a steadily rising trace might give a falsely positive view of progress. It would however be useful if it also showed a trace of the total number of new biographies each month.--Ipigott (talk) 12:40, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
@Harej: Would it be possible to show all 3 of the graphs (derivative; total amount of increase; Max's) so that people could see the measurements displayed in various ways? All of them interest me, and so, as I'm not unique, I believe all of them would interest others, especially the academics who are using this information for research. In the meantime, a huge thank you to you and @The Earwig: for giving me back 10 hours/month of my time (and I'm not alone in this as @SusunW and Megalibrarygirl: have also done the metrics work) from metrics compilation. And a friendly FYI, I'm expecting to see a sharp rise in Olympian women articles in August so do please check to make sure they're accounted for, e.g. if the article creator forgets to put them in a cat which denotes they're a woman, hopefully, they'll get the female property in Wikidata... somehow{{how?}}. --Rosiestep (talk) 14:41, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott, Rosiestep, The Earwig, and Harej: I am thrilled with whatever we have that moves the process to automated rather than manual input. I have tested the gizmo Ian posted to input Wikidata entries and confirmed that indeed creating the entries puts them on the list without having to manually type them into the list. Like Rosie, I'd be interested in the various graphs, as long as it doesn't get too cluttered. Thank you Harej and Earwig for this. Truly gives us back our time, so we can create more. SusunW (talk) 15:06, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Women in archaeology

I've set up a task force in WikiProject Archaeology aimed at improving our coverage of women in archaeology, including tackling your archaeology redlist. If anyone here is interested in helping out please do, and let me know what's the best way to report back on our progress in turning things blue. Joe Roe (talk) 15:56, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

Joe Roe Very cool. I've been seeing notices on your adding of women to your taskforce. I wrote two others that I don't see have your banner additions Eulalia Guzmán and Hester A. Davis. There may be others, as I find the topic fascinating and am always glad to help in writing articles. You can always tweet updates to our feed [1] or post them here. If you want to host an editathon, feel free to post it on the [[2]] board. Rosiestep probably has additional ideas. SusunW (talk) 17:33, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
This is one of the areas we need to cover more specifically. I've added a few articles myself on Scandinavian archaeologists but we could do even more with an editathon.--Ipigott (talk) 19:51, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

If we can "sort" the Unsorted articles into the appropriate sections; and if we could add 3 WP:RS links next to each possible/all biographies; then I would welcome introducing this as a Key Focus Area at the United Nation's Women's editathon I'm facilitating on 12 Aug in NYC. If the names can't get sorted and the refs can't be added in such a short period of tim, no worries as we can work on these articles more specifically another time. --Rosiestep (talk) 22:09, 5 August 2016 (UTC)

That sounds like a great opportunity, I can certainly try. Joe Roe (talk) 22:39, 5 August 2016 (UTC)
I fully support Rosie's suggestion we try to cover some of the names in the UN editathon but I also think it would help to have more specific online editathon focus. I've suggested here we should include archaeologists along with architects in October. It will also give us more time to add names from the rest of the world. Perhaps Edgars2007 could once again help with a list of red links based on Wikidata?--Ipigott (talk) 09:49, 7 August 2016 (UTC)

This has started. If you want to win £10 every day for contributing a few articles about women from southwest England sign up!♦ Dr. Blofeld 16:32, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

Elizabeth Casson promoted to GA, Susanna Winkworth new article...♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:33, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Women in halls of fame categories

There is an important discussion going on here in connection with the proposed deletion of Category:Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame. Rosiestep in particular might be able to recommend how we go forward if the categories are really prohibited by Wikipedia rules.--Ipigott (talk) 11:30, 31 July 2016 (UTC)

Specifically, the policy concerns I raised were with WP:OCAWARD and WP:DEFINING. Thanks! RevelationDirect (talk) 20:11, 31 July 2016 (UTC)
@RevelationDirect, BrownHairedGirl, Ipigott, and Montanabw: Can someone explain to me how a nominator (who readily admitted there might be an error in judging the category worth) and 1 concurring vote ends up with a delete when all of the other discussion from 6 participants was to keep the category? I'm not even sure I want to open this can of worms, or know the answer. Just says to me why WP is broken. Way too many policers and not enough creators. SusunW (talk) 05:57, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
It wasn't the outcome I wanted, but was a good close. The closer's job is explicitly not to just count heads, but weigh policy-based arguments. In this case, most of the !votes to keep were of the WP:ILIKEIT variety, failing to address the reasons why award categories are usually deleted.
This discussion has not deleted any content. All it has done is to remove one piece of metadata. And it would be a bid mistake to think that CFD participants are not also content creators. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 08:30, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
It looks like a WP:SUPERVOTE to me. And given that 6 out of 8 people voted keep, I don't think it was appropriate for a non-admin to close it in the other direction (per WP:NACD, "Close calls and controversial decisions are better left to admins"). Might be an idea to take it to deletion review. Joe Roe (talk) 08:35, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
Clarification That comment meant that the causality with awards and notability can't be objectively demonstrated so we all have to use judgment, which can be flawed. Rereading my comment, I should have made that clearer that my view had not changed. RevelationDirect (talk) 13:11, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
Deletion Review 'I would discuss your concerns with @SSTflyer: first. The process for contesting deletions is located at WP:DRV. RevelationDirect (talk) 13:11, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW: Thank you for pinging me. Sorry about the 3 responses; I feel like I have several hats here: as the nominator, a CFD regular who can advise on next steps, and someone who cares a lot about coverage of women in Wikipedia. In that last capacity, I am concerned that I am distracting good editors that are improving the Wikipedia for women. To better understand how I am trying to improve Wikipedia, take a look at the bottom of this (male) biography; Oprah used to look similar. We obviously disagree here but I hope we can continue to see each other's perspectives. RevelationDirect (talk) 13:12, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
  • @Joe Roe: I think this was a serious error. As has been explained, many women in halls of fame are recognized posthumously. In many cases, e.g. June Tompkins Benson's, individuals did not receive awards during their lifetime. It is their inclusion in the Oklahoma Hall of Fame that is "defining". If you are familiar with the procedure, I think it would be sensible to have it reviewed.--Ipigott (talk) 13:20, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
I've asked SSTflyer to comment on it, as a first step. Joe Roe (talk) 13:42, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
Thank you Joe Roe I have no idea how to have it reviewed, nor any hope that a review would not just be a systematic piling on of nay-sayers. Increasingly, I am discouraged by the lack of desire by the community to build an encyclopedia. Instead the focus has become one of policymakers and bureaucrats who don't create any articles yet police and make rules for those who do. No matter the outcome of discussion, it is always taking time away from creating and increasingly focuses on deleting rather than improving. SusunW (talk) 16:34, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
SusunW, if you were sitting in front of me I would now say some very blunt things to you about your staggering assumption of bad faith. I create a lot of content, but I also engage in the housekeeping process of managing categories, which including merging or deleting inappropriate ones. The same goes for many other XFD participants, and I hope that you will desist rapidly from this sort of assumption that you are dealing with mindless bureaucrats. If you want to persist with that sort of smear, I could start being equally onboxious about people who snipe at those who do the thankless housekeeping tasks of weeding out unencyclopedic content, and removing excessive signpotsing from the navigation system.
If you are concerned about this taking time which could be used for content creation, there is a simple solution: leave this behind, and return to content creation. This CFD discussion has deleted no content, and it is a pity that some of the participants here seem to have confused a CFD with an AFD. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:55, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
@BrownHairedGirl and RevelationDirect: I apologize if you think my remarks were directed at you. They were general comments about the atmosphere of WP. I believe that both of you presented well-thought-out discussion. I can assure you, that I have actually taken the time in many policy discussions and various deletion nominations to look at the creation content of the participants. In one recent discussion, of the 40 or so participants, most averaged 10+ years on WP with an average article creation of 10. That being said, I sincerely apologize if my words seemed like an accusation to either of you. They were not intended as such. I am going back to creating articles. SusunW (talk) 17:37, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

: Good Faith@SusunW: Let me give summarize our interactions from my perspective:

  • I tag your talk page as the category creator even though I'm under no obligation to do so and that usually gets me one opposed vote.
  • You accuse me of sexism, obviously without glancing at my user page.
  • The discussion seemed to be confusing WP:DEFINING with WP:NOTABLE so I posted the guidelines on the Celebrating Women in Halls of Fame editathon
  • The conversation here asked how to overturn a decision so I linked to the process, even though I obviously disagreed with that goal.
  • In response you call me a "naysayer" and a "bureaucrat".
Honestly none of the bothered me; my standards are lower than BHG's. What I did find irritating was your explanation that you weren't calling me sexist, a naysayer and a bureaucrat when you were calling me sexist, a naysayer and a bureaucrat. If you're unhappy with me nominating the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame and the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame because I'm a terrible person/editor, at least own it. RevelationDirect (talk) 21:34, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
RevelationDirect I did not look at your user page, I admit that. I also did not look at any other of your nominations, as it did not seem pertinent. Your example in the Oklahoma WHoF discussion was that the nomination was similar to another category that had been deleted on Singapore Women's HoF. My question was simply why Women's HoFs. Had you given another example, I would not have asked that question. My frustration regarding the close of the debate, though I worded it badly, was not with you or BrownHairedGirl, it was with the closer, whose one sentence explanation did not indicate that the discussion had been fully read. Again, I apologize that my words were inadequate. I am herewith resigning from any more involvement in deletion discussions of any type. SusunW (talk) 21:51, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
Thank you for the reply and clarification. My intent is not to discourage you from participating in deletion discussions. RevelationDirect (talk) 22:06, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

The underlying question here is whether people are defined by an award, whether given during their lives or posthumously. The prime example of awards which do define people are the Nobel prizes, which give global recognition to people who in most cases had limited notability beforehand. (Sure, there are some people from whom a Nobel is just another tag on a household name, but a high proportion of Nobels transform the notability of the recipient). OTOH, most awards are given to people who are fairly notable anyway, and the awards do little to boost their notability. The forest of awards at Dwight D. Eisenhower#External links is a fine example of the clutter created by non-defining awards. Those awards are in no way defining of Eisenhower, and since most of them are handed out to people who are already highly notable, they probably don't define the other recipients either.

There two fairly simple tests of whether an attribute is defining:

  1. Should it be mentioned in the lead section of well-written article?
  2. Do reliable sources consistently note the person as having this attribute?

Both tests fail for Anita Hill. I was willing to accept the case made by SusunW which led me to believe that a significant proportion of the other articles would pass one or both of those tests. But most of the !votes to keep failed to even consider those questions. So it would have been quite wrong for the closer to have given any weight at all to !votes which failed to consider the central issue at stake. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:05, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

While those tests fail with Anita Hill, as I stated in my discussion she was one of the few members of the Oklahoma WHoF who were national figures, people like Ian mentioned above, June Benson and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jacqulyn Longacre have repeatedly been nominated for deletion because they are not national figures and deemed not worthy of articles in WP. Comparing someone of the stature of Dwight D. Eisenhower to Benson, Longacre or any of the other women, like Mona Salyer Lambird in the Oklahoma WHoF is disingenuous. Clearly these inductees don't have the problem of being overcategorized. They are notable for their accomplishments and because the state deemed they were such. They are not famous. Two totally different things. SusunW (talk) 16:02, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
This is not the place to have a re-run of the CFD. But my point is that most of the contributions did not even address the question of definingness.
There is nothing disingenuous about pointing to the consequences of overcategorisation by award. The example presented was intentionally an extreme case, but the point remains that the more non-defining categories are added to an article, the harder it is to find the categories which actually matter. That's why CFD has been busy for years deleting awards categories ... as the Eisenhower article shows, there is a lot more to be done. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:44, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
Regardless of the number of off topic !votes, the fact remains Susun, and then yourself, did make that policy-based argument. None of the delete !voters address that argument, which leaves 2 policy-based deletes vs. 2 policy-based keeps, with the central question unresolved. As I see it the obvious close for that CfD was no consensus. Joe Roe (talk) 17:31, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
  • "None of the delete !voters address that argument": I did, by pointing out that this Hall of Fame coincided with a broader push to research local women in academia so that it was a false causality to claim this award is what made them notable. It's more likely that both this award and increases prominence of local women are the result of a new generation of pro-female historians (who will self-identify under a variety of labels). Now whether or not that was a good argument is up for discussion. RevelationDirect (talk) 22:07, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
  • I don't know if this helps you in any way, but I just want to mention that I was planning to support the nomination just now (after I had spotted the discussion for the first time earlier today) only to find out that the discussion had already been closed. Marcocapelle (talk) 18:42, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
  • Future Article Ideas A lot of this CFD discussion revolved around encouraging the creation of new articles which I think is great, regardless of how this category turns out. For instance, Ipigott created June Tompkins Benson, the first female mayor in Oklahoma, during this discussion. The redlinks within the articles in Category:Women's halls of fame are treasure trove of new article ideas. 22:16, 8 August 2016 (UTC)
That's the sole purpose of this WikiProject—to create articles on notable women. We had an editathon on women in halls of fame last month. This month it is indigenous women and polar women, if you are interested. SusunW (talk) 22:25, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

If anyone is concerned about navigation, the {{Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame}} navbox at the bottom of each article should do the job better than a category. No content is lost during the deletion of this category. If you want to get back to creating articles, by all means do so. SSTflyer 02:23, 9 August 2016 (UTC)

This should go to WP:Deletion review. Even some of the deletionist regulars backed keeping. Navboxes are nice, but only when people remember to put them in. Montanabw(talk) 22:23, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

At AfD

This one may be worth a look for members of this project to help assess notability: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Blossom Ozurumba. Montanabw(talk) 05:30, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

FAC

Not sure if this is relevant, but there are a couple of biographies on women at FAC - I recommend folks taking a look if possible and offering comments. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 06:45, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

The LGBT Barnstar

So cool! Read about it here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red/Meetup/16. --Rosiestep (talk) 14:23, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Nature recognition!

Hi everyone,

I just though I'd let you know that the the Journal Nature has profiled the Antarctic Women Wikibomb event (with the WiR Polar Women Editathon)! This seems a good time to thank you immensely for the fantastic help of this community.

Open access icon Strugnell, Jan; Shafee, Thomas; Wilson, Nerida; Downey, Rachel; Stevens, Craig; Shaw, Justine; Baeseman, Jenny. "Profiles: Kudos for female Antarctic researchers". Nature. 536 (7615): 148–148. doi:10.1038/536148b.

We have also successfully applied for a WMF Rapid Grant to help out with the event on the 23rd (additional media coverage list here and twitter coverage here). I'll try to write up a report/update the day after the event!

Thank you all again, T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:57, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: We at WiR certainly appreciate the excellent work you have been doing on polar women. Congratulations on having an article published in Nature. Unfortunately I am unable to access the article but if it contains substantial coverage of some of the women who are still red-linked on Wikipedia, it could be used to support notability. Would it be possible for you to send us the URL of the article in draft form to help us identify those who have been covered?--Ipigott (talk) 17:57, 12 August 2016 (UTC)


It should be publicly accessible (it was for me, at least – although I looked behind the paywall, just to make sure that there wasn't more). It's just a short column, three paragraphs. Joe Roe (talk) 18:12, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
Yea, a "correspondence" a very short format, so I suspect you're actually seeing the whole thing! It's a really old format of scientific communication from when journal's were public letters between scientists. To my mind, it's important to keep Wikipedia efforts in the minds of the academic community and continue to build its reputation for increasing quality. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 02:06, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
I read it! Congratulations to everyone who's been working on these articles. We at Women in Red are so pleased you chose to collaborate with us in this important work. --Rosiestep (talk) 03:00, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Ha! A great radio interview with Janstrugnell (talk · contribs) on the ABC's The Science Show:

"Women in Antarctica making up for lost time". radio.abc.net.au. ABC Radio National Science Show. 2016-08-12. Retrieved 2016-08-13.

A nice 8-minute summary of the history of Women in Antarctica. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 04:20, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Just ran across this piece Women scientists in Antarctica in the spotlight thanks to Wikipedia project SusunW (talk) 05:01, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
Just saw the Nature piece. This is really great, congratulations Evolution and evolvability! Opabinia regalis (talk) 01:09, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia Asian Month

We will hold Wikipedia Asian Month on this November and wish to collaborate with Women in Red folks to improve the women articles in Asia. We will send you a postcard from one of the Asian communities if you create four articles that fit the quality criteria. --AddisWang (talk) 15:41, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

AddisWang Definitely willing to participate. We had been talking about doing women in food and drink and collaborating with other projects to include chefs of various regions. If you know of any notable chefs we could write about, that would help our plan. I have no doubt @Rosiestep and Megalibrarygirl: as well as others will be glad to support your efforts as well. SusunW (talk) 17:49, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
@AddisWang, Rosiestep, and SusunW:, I will do some digging for Asian chefs, etc. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:52, 22 July 2016 (UTC)
I suggest we stick with "Women in Food and Drink" as one of our editathons as so many of us are jazzed about working on it; and let's a second event, Asian Women. --Rosiestep (talk) 23:34, 22 July 2016 (UTC)

Sounds cool! Both "Women in Food and Drink" of Asia and just general Asian Month articles are fine with the Wikipedia Asian Month. Looking forward to work with you!--AddisWang (talk) 04:48, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

At AfD

A book translator at AfD. These do appear challenging to source. May want to alert some other wikiprojects that know about people who work at translating books. Input from people with more specialized knowledge may help: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Jane Assimakopoulos. Montanabw(talk) 05:46, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Australian women in academia wikibomb at ANI

Members of this project might be interested in this thread at ANI: Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Suspicious article creations - All new accounts creating pages about Australian academics. Joe Roe (talk) 12:29, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Automated metrics report ready for feedback

Hello! Sorry for the delay in getting this stuff all set up, but we're now ready for feedback on the new metrics report. I'll give a quick overview.

Right now, you can view a live demo at User:Reports bot/WiRMetricsTest.

  • Every day, the bot will add newly created articles about women to the corresponding month subpage.
  • Feel free to add any articles the bot misses. It will update the counters for you. You are also free to continue leaving notes and other formatting in the entries; the bot won't mess with any of that.
  • The bot alphabetizes the lists, fixes duplicates, and removes redlinks whenever pages are deleted.
  • There's a bit of a caveat if you need to remove an entry the bot added for some reason. If you just remove it, the bot might add it back the next day. Instead, you can <!-- comment it out -->.

On the main metrics page, you'll see a few new things. The monthly counts on the sidebar and the chart are automatically updated with Lua magic. The page also transcludes the current month's page list without needing human intervention.

At the moment, it finds these articles using Wikidata (specifically, all articles that have the sex or gender property set to "female"). However, this can be changed, and I suspect you'll want to track additional properties. When changed, the bot will retroactively add articles to old months.

To be clear, the bot doesn't edit the main metrics page at all, so you're free to rearrange things however you want. It creates new month subpages using a template that you are able to customize.

Please let me know what you think. (Ping: Harej, Rosiestep, Ipigott)

— Earwig talk 20:29, 28 July 2016 (UTC)

Earwig I really, really like the list, but I think I do not like that it comes directly from Wikidata. For example, I created Patricia Ann McGee on the 26th. She has no entry in VIAF nor ISNI, so the bot that creates Wikidata entries on new articles didn't migrate anything to Wikidata. I have tried to manually create Wikidata items in the past and it is unintelligible to me. I do not see her on your list. So are you saying that if we do not create a Wikidata entry, articles will not show on the list unless we manually add them? If we manually add them and a Wikidata entry is later created, will the list automatically switch to updates on the Wikidata entry or no? Sorry, but I am not very technical and am afraid I will create some sort of problem with keeping the metrics up to date. SusunW (talk) 21:14, 28 July 2016 (UTC)
Earwig I LOVE IT. So, if I understand you correctly, we can add an article by hand in a given month, e.g. January 2016, and the bot-thing will automatically update the list for January 2016. And we can add articles in the July 2016 list, and the bot will account for it only once, e.g. if it gets a Wikidata entry, it won't be counted twice. And we don't have to add it to the July 2016 list as the bot thing will magically find it, either through Wikidata or through some other search mechanism. Do I understand all of this correctly, or where am I unclear? --Rosiestep (talk) 01:34, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW: Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by the list automatically switching to updates on the Wikidata entry, can you rephrase that? To be clear, if an article is manually added somewhere and its Wikidata entry is later created, the bot won't add it to the list a second time. Anyway, I agree that this is a valid concern. Wikidata entries often take a while to appear in any case. Fortunately, we can add other data sources to the bot. I think monitoring categories makes sense, the difficulty is just in finding good categories to follow. Harej's original suggestion to me was all subcats of Category:Women, but this diffuses really far and weirdly; for example, it contains Category:Men's Softball World Championship. I think the several "Women by X" categories might be sufficient, so I'll look into it.
@Rosiestep: Yes, everything you said is correct. — Earwig talk 02:44, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
I'm having a bit of trouble even with the more limited categories. The sad fact is that Wikipedia's category structure is a bit of a mess. For example, Murder of Robert Eric Wone would be tracked, which is clearly out of scope; this is by Category:WomenCategory:Women by countryCategory:Violence against women by countryCategory:Violence against women in the United StatesCategory:Sexual assaults in the United States. So I'm having trouble refining this. — Earwig talk 04:25, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

These are the stats we have tracked by hand:

  • 2015
  • 18-31 Jul: 1,002
  • Aug: 1,854
  • Sep: 1,590
  • Oct: 1,989
  • Nov: 1,787
  • Dec: 1,473
  • 2016
  • Jan: 1,430
  • Feb: 2,320
  • Mar: 2,342
  • Apr: 1,649
  • May: 1,955

These are Earwig's stats:

  • 2015
  • Jul: 1,502
  • Aug: 1,993
  • Sep: 1,641
  • Oct: 1,926
  • Nov: 1,785
  • Dec: 1,443
  • 2016
  • Jan: 1,826
  • Feb: 2,874
  • Mar: 2,699
  • Apr: 2,457
  • May: 2,520
  • Jun: 1,273

IMO, we can stop tracking by hand and rely on Earwig effective now. Any reason why we shouldn't, e.g. am I missing something? --Rosiestep (talk) 03:29, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

Note that the numbers on my end are a bit low, since they don't include articles from the manual metrics that will be picked up once the bot goes live. — Earwig talk 04:25, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
Earwig I think I understand, after Rosiestep's recap. I only have to add someone if they don't have a VIAF/ISNI entry and it won't create a duplicate. Manually adding to the list will be much easier than trying to add them to Wikidata and mucking it up. Totally thrilled to not have to manually input more than a few here and there. Thank you so much for this! SusunW (talk) 04:33, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
  • @Earwig: This is a really good start and seems to reflect very closely the figures captured by Maximilianklein in his page on Gender by Language. I'm glad to see you list all new articles in alpha order and that your figures substantially exceed those we have been able to compile manually. The actual number of new women's biographies is interesting but at the moment only provides half the picture as in WiR what we are really interested in is the overall improvement in the figures for women's biographies in regard to the total number of EN biographies. Maybe you could follow more closely Max's approach and also include the comparative figures and percentages for women's biographies as a proportion of the total number of biographies. (For the past few weeks, I have been including these in the introduction to our main WiR page.) While earlier in the year we managed to maintain a significant improvement in these percentages, they have recently dropped, the latest falling to just over 18%. Such a low figure will unfortunately not lead to any real improvement in the proportion of women's vs. men's biographies. We are now (for the past two weeks) at 16.37% with 226,220 women's biographies compared 1,382,156 on men. Maybe you could also include the total number of biographies on your graph so that we can more easily see which months have been most successful for WiR.
To return to SusunW's concern about the difficulty of adding articles to Wikidata, you can install the gadget recommended by Edgars2007. I installed it myself and have been adding my own new articles and many others to Wikidata without any trouble. The gadget improves your Wikipedia page interface and allows you to add your current document to Wikidata without ever leaving Wikipedia or the article on which you are working. I really think you should try it out. It makes life much easier.
What is still missing, is a means of adding articles on works created by women to the list as these are not coded female on Wikidata. Any ideas? Maybe these should be listed separately anyway.--Ipigott (talk) 10:12, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
Ipigott, my idea for that is to select for Wikidata entries that have a author/creator property assigned, where the value of that property is a woman. For example: Silent Spring, Q591623 on Wikidata, has the statement "author: Rachel Carson", and Rachel Carson (Q100948) has "sex or gender: female." Does that sound workable? Harej (talk) 16:01, 29 July 2016 (UTC)
@Harej: That sounds like a very reasonable approach. Do you think it would be useful to maintain two lists, one for biographies and one for works? It might make assessments of the proportion of new biographies on women easier to monitor while a separate list on works would also show independently the effort devoted to coverage of the books, paintings, music, etc., created by women.--Ipigott (talk) 07:37, 30 July 2016 (UTC)
Thank you Ipigott! I never saw that gadget link. I added it. Woe is me that we are coding these as female rather than woman, but I guess one would have to fix the whole database to fix that. SusunW (talk) 14:28, 29 July 2016 (UTC)

So, Earwig, where do we go from here? We'd like to migrate (merge?) your metrics lists into our archives. And do we just keep adding articles for July into our current list, and you'll do the archiving in early August? --Rosiestep (talk) 14:47, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

Hi Rosiestep—I miss your pings sometimes; my username actually has a "The" in front of it, sorry for the confusion! I've got the bot set up on Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Metrics. It's built off the old metrics so no data should have been lost in the switchover. Articles can be added now. Let me know if anything's not working right. — Earwig talk 10:32, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
Hi The Earwig - Ok, now I've got your name right! :) I woke up in the middle of the night, couldn't sleep, checked my Watchlist, and saw the metrics updates occurring, and I'm so jazzed about it. Thank you. I really mean that. That said, the June and July 2016 metrics seem overly light to me. For example, do they capture all the sportswomen articles which are typically created by Sander? Also, is it possible that there's a lag between the time a Wikipedia article is created and the Wikidata item is created, so the metrics will increase after the catch-up occurs? Also, does your tool only capture biographies, e.g. if I created an article about a school which some woman founded, and if I forgot to add it to the July metrics, would it never be accounted for in our metrics? --Rosiestep (talk) 17:53, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: There could definitely be lag with Wikidata, and the metrics will increase once those items are created. I looked at Sander's recent creations and most of them are in the list. A few are missing because they have Wikidata items that don't list their subject's gender. I hope over time as the items are filled out, the metrics will become more comprehensive. To your second point, yes, at the moment it's just biographies. It's tough to find those non-biography-but-women-related articles on Wikidata. The bot can also track articles based on their categorization, but the problem is that most categories are too broad and include many out-of-scope pages (see my comments near the top of this section). If someone can find a good set of categories that include articles about women, we can have the bot track pages from there in addition to Wikidata. — Earwig talk 21:59, 4 August 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep and Earwig: I've been looking quite carefully at the most recent additions to our metrics list and am pleasantly surprised to see that most relate to articles created over the past two or three days - which despite Earwig's explanations shows that the lag is much shorter than we might have anticipated. There seem to be two main reasons for this: many articles are updated in Wikidata when an EN article is added to existing Wikidata info based on other languages, and many more result from bots scanning for women's occupations in the EN categories. What is more difficult to ascertain is how many articles - even biographies - do not contain any occupation info or other women's categories. (BTW, I see that in most cases Sanders has carefully added categories showing the individuals are female and I also see that most of his articles are quickly added to Wikidata.) I'll try to look into this on AlexBot later. But by and large, the biographies at least seem to be added quickly to our metrics lists. We have recently had about 70 automatic additions a day.--Ipigott (talk) 10:02, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
@The Earwig: We also write articles about women's works, broadly construed. Are they being captured by the bot? --Rosiestep (talk) 13:43, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Priorities for September

We're already half way through August so we should be firming up on September. It has been suggested we should cover women in labor organizations as well as women in nursing for the whole month. Perhaps Rosiestep, SusunW and/or Megalibrarygirl could come up with better headings? Nvvchar also suggested women in mountaineering. Should we schedule this for September too or move it to another month?--Ipigott (talk) 08:11, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

@Ipigott: think two is about all the events we can host in a month. If someone else wants to host one, we are glad to post it. How about if we move mountaineers to go with aviators? Explorers in different ways? Women in labor doesn't quite work, nor does working women. ;) Maybe "Blue Collar" women? SusunW (talk) 13:00, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Support Blue Collar editathon.
Plus, how about Women and Travel (vs. Explorers). It would certainly include explorers, plus women who travel every which way, e.g. aviators, mountaineers, dogsledders, nomadic women, women who headed west on wagon trains during the California and Alaska gold rush eras, women in the auto industry, women in the cruise ship industry, etc. --Rosiestep (talk) 13:55, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Maybe it's a transatlantic problem but for me blue collar certainly doesn't convey the idea of trades union organizers or major contributors. I see the U.S. had a Women's Trade Union League so how about Women in Trades Unions. Another possibility would be Women in the Labor Movement. I like the idea of Women and Travel but I'm not sure I would associate it with explorers, the auto industry or the gold rush. Would it help to be more specific, e.g. Women in Aviation, Shipping and Transportation on the one hand, and Women in Mountaineering, Exploration and Discovery on the other?--Ipigott (talk) 14:31, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott and Rosiestep: I am totally confused. For September the proposal was union organizers and nurses to focus on women who worked for a living and weren't part of the leisured classes. What are people who work in trades called in the U.K. Ian? Blue collar workers is the term usually used in the U.S. For December the proposal was aviators. I suggested we add mountaineers to the proposal for that month. Now it looks like we are discussing doing labor organizers, nurses and travel in September or am I misunderstanding? SusunW (talk) 15:19, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
I think we have been trying to deal with too much in this slot. As I said at the beginning, we had decided on nursing and labor organizations for September. Nvvchar had also suggested mountaineering but I too think that would be too much for September. Rosie then suggested extending mountaineering to travel, etc., but at a later date. The priority here is to find headings for Women in Nursing (which I think is OK) and also for Women in Labor Organizations which seems more difficult. For me, the blue collar people are the workers, not those active in the unions. Any other suggestions? If not, stick with blue collar. We can define it on the editathon page.--Ipigott (talk) 15:31, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
I think we are on the same page, Ian. Travel or exploration or whatever in December seems more doable to me. What if we spelled it with the British "Labour", isn't that always work related and not birth related? Women in Labour Organizations? SusunW (talk) 15:50, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
I am confused, too. I'll go along with whatever categories we choose for September. I remember now that we had talked about Nursing, but forgot which month. As for Women in Labour Organizations, in my mind, it doesn't seem to equate with Blue Collar Women. I like the idea of Blue Collar Women; does the name sound ok vs. offensive? Women in Labour Orgs sounds like union women, e.g. a subset of Blue Collar where not everyone is unionized. How about Women blue-collar workers? --Rosiestep (talk) 16:21, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Blue Collar Women is less of a mouthful in my mind. I agree that Organizations limits the scope, but I'm afraid if we just say Labour Women, people will think politics. I also like the play on colors, but I don't guess I care what we call it. SusunW (talk) 16:39, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
SusunW, I 👍 Like that. Wish we could generate some press.--Rosiestep (talk) 16:56, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
As a side note, the metrics, which have been bot-generated since June, are abysmally low. Whether that's a sign of actual activity (it's summertime in the Northern Hemisphere) or the fact that the bot isn't capturing all activity is unknown. As we're half-way through August, we'll need to rely on the bot for this month, too, but starting in September, I'll go back to working on metrics, probably leaving them on the metrics talkpage and at the end of the month, we can do a comparison of the bot-generated list, vs. what I pull together.
I bring this up so we consider if narrow focus promotes less participation which might lead to lower metrics, while the broader the focus, the more articles participants may choose to contribute. And the title of the event might make a difference... "dunno".
Another metrics-related strategy is to offer one "big category" event each month -artists, writers, scientists, etc.- along with events which are more specialized (e.g. photographers). I'd like to discuss this on a Skype call, if anyone has bandwidth for that. --Rosiestep (talk) 16:56, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Rosie, I'm pretty sure the problem with metrics is that it takes quite some time for all the new articles to be entered on Wikidata. I like the idea of having one major topic each month. Why not make a more detailed proposal?.--Ipigott (talk) 18:00, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Ipigott Thinking about this a bit... something we might consider launching in 2017... aside from artists, scientists, writers, could be women by continents (Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Europe, Antarctica+Australia+NZ women). Also, perhaps Pre-20th-century Women? Also, perhaps Women's Works Broadly Construed?
I agree that there's surely a lag with Wikidata, but clueless how long that lag might take. The graphical representation is pretty disappointing. --Rosiestep (talk) 19:50, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Megalibrarygirl should be back from vacation next week, maybe a skype call then Rosiestep? As long as we don't focus on only cultural type articles, I'm good with however you want to structure it. I always seem to gravitate to those involved in organizing, policy, and analysis, rather than the totally creative types, but no matter what the topic is, I can usually find someone interesting to write about. I think like Ian that the lag time is probably key to the metrics, but I also wonder what that lag time is? Do most people create a Wikidata entry or not? If they don't, how long before someone else does? Just my random thoughts. Stepping out for a bit. SusunW (talk) 18:19, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
SusunW, Sounds good. --Rosiestep (talk) 19:50, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
I agree with Rosiestep's suggestion that if we are going to offer 2 foci a month, it might work better to offer a large category and a subcategory rather than two very loosely related categories. E.g. "government and politics/women legislators" or "health and medicine/nursing". I find it taxing to switch topics after only two weeks, just as I'm building momentum and a feeling for the material — especially given the way in which one article will often offer an Ariadne's thread to another and yet another. So far my favorite topic this year is women scientists since it's running all the way through! Happy to skype on this. Alafarge (talk) 18:44, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
You could do "women in midwifery" - that would cover both nursing and labo(u)r! ;-) Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 13:08, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia for Peace 2016- Women Environmental Activists

Dear Women in Red Team,

we are currently in a volunteering project in Austria writing about winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize. There are a lot of women among the winners, however a lot of the articles are just stubs and not detailed enough. So I wanted to ask, if you could help us with expanding the English articles. This would in particular be important, because we are translating a lot of articles and therefore need articles in English in good quality. You can see the list of articles here:

Please write me on my user page on wether that would be possible.

We are still working on the project until the 21st of August. Maybe you could support us online?

Best regards,--EarlyspatzTalk 14:51, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Representation of non-English-speakers

Hi, Does anyone have a stat (even approximate) for what proportion of biographies are about people from non-anglophone countries? T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 09:03, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

@Evolution and evolvability: Some of the categories provide quite a good overview. I haven't really got time to do the sums at the moment but have a look at Category:Women writers by nationality, Category:Women artists by nationality, Category:Women scientists by nationality and Category:Lists of women by nationality.--Ipigott (talk) 14:30, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
@Evolution and evolvability: I'm thinking that someone with Wikidata knowledge could run a report and give exact numbers. Unfortunately, that would not be me, but maybe there's a page stalker? --Rosiestep (talk) 23:19, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
Thanks guys. A quick analysis of the category:Women scientists, indicates that (USA+UK+Aus+NZ+Can+SA) make up ~78% of biographies, and if you also include India, that rises to ~80%. I'll see if I can hunt down a wikidata person. I'll let you know if I find anything interesting. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 00:02, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
@Evolution and evolvability: I'd be curious if the analysis across various disciplines -artists, scientists, writers- varies in percentage. If you are able to gather those stats, please let us know. --Rosiestep (talk) 11:30, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

AfD redux

Need for new incentives

I'm beginning to think our "editathons" are no longer a driving force behind the project. The recent United Nations Women Project which came our way more or less out of the blue did amazingly well with some 650 new articles while our two widely advertised editathons, Indigenous Women and Polar Women only have about 30 new articles between them after running for two weeks. I also note that the vast majority of new articles on women over the past couple of weeks have been related to sport, especially the Olympics, despite the fact that we have given very little support to sports. I also see here that some of the other language wikis have recently been progressing extremely well on the coverage of women, especially in Korean (with over 74% of new biographies on women, Catalan (with over 46%) and Japanese (with over 40%) compared to 33.57% for English in one of our proportionally best months. Overall Korean is the most successful wiki for women with 24.88% of its biographies on women while English with a little over 16% is still not even in the top ten, solidly beaten by Japanese, Thai, Norwegian, Persian and Swedish.

What new incentives can we introduce to encourage wider participation? Perhaps more time on identifying new participants, including new women editors, above all in the other major English-speaking countries (in alpha order): Australia, Britain (maybe divided into England, Scotland, Wales), Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Nigeria and South Africa. We could try to work with the WikiProjects and existing participants in these countries. We could also liaise with some of the non-English speaking countries such as Japan and Korea, calling on their support in sharing ideas on progress. I also think we could so more to attract interest in other Wikimedia projects, particularly Commons and Wikidata, as they too suffer from the same imbalance. Finally, Dr. Blofeld seems to have developed a highly successful method of attracting work on individual regions. Perhaps we could call on his assistance to have competitions centred on women's coverage in importance regions such as California and New York in the U.S., Indian cities such as Bangalore and Mumbai, Australia's New South Wales, South Afica's Johannesburg, etc. Any other suggestions?--Ipigott (talk) 08:30, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

I've mentioned running a contest for women on two or three occasions I think and barely more than one or two showed an interest. The women project don't seem interested in that sort of thing from what I've seen!♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:15, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

We've tried regional before and it doesn't seem to work. People want to write about what they know, or like for the most part. Doesn't remotely surprise me that small countries or regions like Catalan, Korea and Japan have better participation than a language group that is spread over multiple continents with thousands of different ethnic identities. I think that there are relatively few contributors who write about people and things from cultures other than their own. Dr. B and I tried it early on with WP Women and couldn't get people interested in working on all of the Americas. I got very little help on working on leading women in Latin America. I write a lot of material on the Caribbean, but it is rare that when redlinks for an editathon are in Anglo-Caribbean countries that others work on articles.
When disinterest was proposed earlier in the month, some of the most prolific contributors in the past indicated that summer vacation was a slow down factor for them. I think that is part of it. I think Rosie's been traveling a lot and people miss her guidance and input. I think the Olympics is a huge draw and we missed opportunities to work with those who suggested sport/Olympic related collaboration. By all means we might ask other projects who have narrowed their gap in coverage on women. Looking at the UN editathon vs. more narrowly focused editathons, also proves the point that people write about what they know/like. Any topic could be contributed. So people wrote on whatever they wanted and still felt they were contributing. Just says to me a broader scope may be the ticket, rather than a narrower one. SusunW (talk) 14:48, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
You make some good points SusunW but there have been major improvements in coverage of women from a wide range of countries thanks to our WiR lists of red links and emphasis on key areas of interest. I agree with you that English is a special case with its huge geographical and ethnic coverage but for our project that appears to me to be an advantage rather than a problem. Many of our participants have written biographies on women from a wide range of countries, not just their own. I was really impressed by the success of Dr. Blofeld's initiative on Wales, especially as it also provided an opportunity for better coverage of women. After just a few days, his West Country project seems to be doing quite well too. As for Catalonia, Korea and Japan, if there has indeed been such concerted enthusiasm for covering women there, then we might do well not only to investigate how they achieved such promising results but we could maybe find English-speaking editors in those countries who could help out with WiR, perhaps covering some of the more notable women from their countries. I agree with you though that a broader rather than a narrower approach seems to be a more dependable option for attracting wider participation. Yet one approach does not exclude the others.--Ipigott (talk) 16:55, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
So one possible approach — thinking about the Wales model — might be to have a series of U.S.-state-focused editathons, especially targeting some of the smaller or less populous states. I know that I have especially enjoyed writing about people from states I don't know as well as those I've lived in over the years. True, there are an awful lot of states — maybe a regional approach would work better? — and I'm not sure how we'd go about building WiR-oriented redlink lists.Alafarge (talk) 18:58, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
I like the idea of mixing in some categories with broad appeal. I think mixing in some more popular categories for some editathons could bring in new editors. Has the project been using the list of the most popular red links? Knope7 (talk) 02:30, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

Kevin Gorman, RIP

Kevin Gorman, age 24,[3], passed away a couple of weeks ago. He was a strong supporter of gender equality, anti-harassment initiatives, and focused on women philosophers, among other areas. I created Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Philosophers just now using his redlist. I knew Kevin and considered him a friend. We met in 2014 at UC Berkeley during an editathon, and then at various wikiconferences. He was bright, articulate, opinionated, looking out for the common "good". Perhaps some of you knew him, or were aware of his work, too. RIP, Kevin. --Rosiestep (talk) 14:08, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing Rosiestep and for continuing his legacy by using his redlist. RIP, Kevin. SusunW (talk) 15:45, 1 August 2016 (UTC)
I corresponded with him briefly about some mutual interests beyond Wikipedia back in November, when he signed up for some subscriptions I coordinate at The Wikipedia Library. He was a lovely young man from my understanding, and while he had a long list of health issues, he didn't seem like he was expecting to be gone so soon. I'll be glad to work on an article from his redlist, in his memory. RIP, Kevin.Penny Richards (talk) 20:16, 1 August 2016 (UTC)

Kevin Gorman and women in philosophy

Hello everyone; I'm sure many people will be aware of the sad passing of Kevin Gorman, and may be aware of his ambition to pursue a project on women philosophers. I thought it might be valuable to set up a small drive to create some articles on women philosophers; partly in his memory and partly to keep his good work going. If I was to put together a small project page (perhaps with a "This article was created as part of the..." talk page template) would there be anyone who might be interested in joining? Maybe we could target a certain number; perhaps 50 articles over the next year or something similar. If no one has the time or expertise, I'm happy to continue on my own, but perhaps my target number would be a little more modest. I've already kicked off, if people are interested, with articles about Josephine Donovan and Clare Palmer. Josh Milburn (talk) 01:03, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

I'd join in.Penny Richards (talk) 01:24, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, Penny! I've decided that, if nothing else, formalising the project may attract people (build it and they will come...) and I think it'd be worth doing even with only a very small number of participants. I've created a draft of the page at User:J Milburn/2016 women in philosophy drive; if no one objects, I will move it into the project space later this weekend. Josh Milburn (talk) 14:14, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

I would join, and if I may suggest, we should consider getting some representation in the Philosopher article which memtioned women in philosophy up until recently when it was taken out. -- Ollyoxenfree (talk) 03:38, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

We can start on this now but we could also formalize it with an editathon, perhaps in January 2017. See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Ideas#January 2017.--Ipigott (talk) 07:58, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
To editor J Milburn: Hi, everyone. Maybe people could add the briefest of linked mentions to their signature? Something like, "Till Aug '16, The Kevin Memorial Welcomes Edits," "Edit for Kevin, RIP," or, "Edit in the Memory of Kevin Gorman Here," maybe in small letters. I don't know if this would be Wiki-kosher.
I am never likely to make it back to stuff I want to work on due to my own medical issues (see my user page if you are curious), but that young man did an earnestly great job, so I wanted to see if I could...donate an idea while I was still focused here, I guess. There's always at least one way to participate, if you look for it. --Geekdiva (talk) 11:35, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
Yes, good idea, thanks; I'll put a bit more time into this this evening. Ipigott, I agree with your suggestion for an editathon, but have been following the discussions about effectiveness on this page with interest. I think this might be something which would work better as a slow "let's build up our coverage" than a quick "let's do this for this month". Josh Milburn (talk) 16:46, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
I would join in as well. Alafarge (talk) 18:13, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

@Penny Richards, Ollyoxenfree, Ipigott, Geekdiva, and Alafarge: I have now moved the page to Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/2016 Women in Philosophy Drive. Please feel free to join up, edit the page, advertise and, of course, write about women in philosophy as you see fit! Josh Milburn (talk) 23:35, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

@J Milburn: Thanks for taking this initiative. I've mentioned it in the introduction at the top of the main WiR page.--Ipigott (talk) 07:56, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
Hi @J Milburn: This was set up very fast; thanks for taking the initiative. I just became aware of it when I saw something posted on another editor's talkpage. --Rosiestep (talk) 12:15, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Kevin Gorman Memorial Editathon at WikiConference North America: Women in Philosophy

I'm working on the Kevin Gorman memorial editathon taking place at WikiConference North America in San Diego October 7-10. The date isn't nailed down, but it's most likely to be scheduled for the 10th. The editathon is focused on women in philosophy in honor of Kevin's mission. There's a work list based on his here. Please add as you see fit! More details as they're available re: date and time if you'll be in San Diego and can participate (or volunteer!) in person. Thanks! JSFarman (talk) 22:34, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

I had very much the same idea of you and have recently set up (with other project members) Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/2016 Women in Philosophy Drive; perhaps we could try to coordinate/merge the two projects? Josh Milburn (talk) 22:42, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
Sorry- I see you're aware of the drive. Feel free to move the talk page list onto the project page; it could be helpful for people who want to take part but don't know where to start. Josh Milburn (talk) 22:43, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
It would be great if we could get a Wikidata-generated list of missing philosophers for English language Wikipedia. Thanks! --Rosiestep (talk) 11:32, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
You can request that at d:Wikidata:Request a query. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:37, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
Perhaps our friend Edgars2007 could simply create it for us as he so kindly has done before for women in other fields. To avoid such inconveniences in future, Pigsonthewing - perhaps with the help of Harej - could try to make things easier for us all by creating a template or simple script which would do the job automatically. We could then fill in details of women in different occupations as necessary.--Ipigott (talk) 15:50, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
I've added the names from the talk page list to the project page. Thanks for that Josh Milburn (talk).JSFarman (talk) 02:37, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
A request at the page suggested would result in an editable query, so you can just change one (or more) of the parameters to get a different set of results. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:58, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata redlist of women philosophers

This came up again and I don't know whom to ping: how do we request a Wikidata-generated list of missing women philosophers? Thanks. --Rosiestep (talk) 05:21, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

@Rosiestep: The Wikidata list is now available.--Ipigott (talk) 09:51, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
Ipigott thank you. JSFarman FYI. --Rosiestep (talk) 14:06, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

Women and Religion - 2nd November 2016 at the University of Edinburgh

Hi, this is just to make you aware of a Women and Religion event we have scheduled at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. The event page is Wikipedia:University_of_Edinburgh/Events_and_Workshops/Women_and_Religion_2016. Our focus on women is in line with our Athena SWAN work and coincides with our renaming of two New College rooms after important female theologians. We would like the list to include important women involved in a wide variety of religious traditions, and they absolutely need not have a local connection so we would love to see if this would be something that Wiki Women in Red would be willing to help & support. Best regards Stinglehammer (talk) 11:52, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi Stinglehammer. Thanks for keeping us informed. At the very least we can announce your event. Perhaps others would like to do more?--Ipigott (talk) 07:50, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
Hi Stinglehammer. Thanks for staying in touch and for notifying us about this event. As our collaboration with your university during Spy Week was so fun, and because I'm very supportive of Athena SWAN, I think we could consider supporting this upcoming religion event, too, even if only for a short duration, e.g. a week. The heavy lifting on our end involves promotion (creating/distributing invitations/announcements to our mailing list), creating the event page, creating the talkpage banner, and, of course, the redlist. Do you or your team have bandwidth to assist with these components? What, if anything, is the connection between Athena SWAN and religion? Other thoughts, comments? --Rosiestep (talk) 16:57, 20 August 2016 (UTC)
@Stinglehammer, Ipigott, and Rosiestep:, they can use our Women in Religion list. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:04, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: thanks for the feedback! The connection religion has with Athena SWAN is us – we are the School of Divinity and have a general religious studies department in the University (although historically tied to Christianity). Bandwidth is tight, but we would be willing to assist as we can.Caorongjin (talk) 20:08, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
@Megalibrarygirl: with regards to the Women in Religion list, I have already link to it in our list. However, as we have local expertise in certain areas, we figured we would begin with our own custom hitlist and expand from there. Caorongjin (talk) 20:08, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
@Caorongjin:, we will support you. --Rosiestep (talk) 21:47, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: thanks! Caorongjin (talk) 09:35, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep, Ipigott, and Megalibrarygirl: Yes, huge thanks. A week on Women and Religion would be great. Looking forward to it. Sorry for not getting back to you sooner - v busy week. I hope I also already mentioned that we are doing a Reproductive Medicine editathon with WiR@WVU Kelly Doyle running from 21st to 28th September which we'd love for Women in Red to be involved with. We're also doing a Samhain editathon (Gaelic festival for the dead) for Halloween (running 31st Oct & 1st Nov) celebrating the lives of the dead along with Celtic history & folklore with carved turnips and faerie coffins. We also have our Edinburgh Gothic editathon coming up on 12 Nov to mark Robert Louis Stevenson Day and celebrate all things gothic (gothic writers, gothic artists, gothic films, gothic musicians, gothic architects). Finally, we're looking into doing a History of Medicine editathon again in February 2017 but also a History of Nursing editathon around 4th November so we're speaking to Edinburgh Central Libraries about Wikisourcing the WW1 diaries of Ethel Moir which can be seen here especially now that her contemporary Elsie Inglis is to have a street named after her to mark the 100th year since her passing. Struggling to get a date set for the nursing editathon just now and I see you are thinking of going with nursing in September, is that right? The Reproductive Medicine editathon is definitely going ahead anyway so if that is of interest to you then do let me know. Cheers Stinglehammer (talk) 17:39, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Polar Women

Hi,

We have been creating some drafts over the past few months for our Women of the Antarctic Wikibomb (WP:Meetup/SCAR_2016) linked to the WiR Polar month (WP:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Meetup/20)

It would be great if any editors could accept any of our submitted drafts (as follows) that are ready or let us know where we need to do more work or if the women are not notable enough.

We are still learning about WIkipedia editing and so any help or advice would be most appreciated!

Many thanks! Janstrugnell (talk) 03:02, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

Janstrugnell I have no idea how to review a document which has been submitted to AfC. When I started working on WP, I was told never to submit documents there. If someone wants to ping me on drafts which have NOT been submitted to AfC, I'll be happy to review them and collaborate. I can move them to main space without going through AfC. Maybe Montanabw knows how to get them unstuck from AfC. SusunW (talk) 15:45, 9 August 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW and Janstrugnell: I don't know the procedure either. But I have edited four of them anyway and simply moved them into the mainspace. Please let me know, Janstrugnell, if this is acceptable to you. I noticed a while back Keilana had dealt with the last batch along similar lines. I must say I am impressed with the well-referenced work you and your friends have being doing on these women.--Ipigott (talk) 09:18, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
Okay Ipigott then I will review a couple per day given time in my schedule. SusunW (talk) 14:23, 10 August 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW and Ipigott: Thanks so much for your work on this! I really appreciate it! We are enthusiastic novices! We are doing our best but I am sure we make mistakes. (I had to ask how to 'ping' someone! There is a whole wikipedia terminology I am still learning. Thanks again for all your work! Janstrugnell (talk) 08:32, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
@Janstrugnell: You seem to be progressing well on Wikipedia. Some of your articles have been very well researched and were almost ready for the main space before anyone else did any work on them but most of the remaining drafts listed above really need additional sources to show that the women's achievements have been more widely recognized. If you can find press reports, book reviews by recognized critics or coverage in national biographies or encyclopaedias, the articles could be promoted without much risk of deletion. There may also be a case for promoting some of the university "professors" who have published papers in recognized journals but even here third party sources would contribute to notability. I realize it can be frustrating to have prepared drafts which are not deemed worthy of promotion but it is sometimes better to abandon them in favour of new articles. Why not pick one or two of the better sourced names from here? Not all the women on your SCAR list seem to be sufficiently notable for inclusion in Wikipedia at the moment. You have nevertheless contributed to many of the original red links which are now blue. Keep up the good work and let me know if you need any help with anything.--Ipigott (talk) 17:48, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott: Thanks so much for this! Yes, I wasn't sure about the notability levels of those entries either. Thanks for taking a look at them for me. What do yo think about this one? Is Laura notable enough?
Thanks again! Janstrugnell (talk) 05:11, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
@Janstrugnell: De Santis suffers from the same problems as several of the others: very little coverage in third party sources. I also did searches in both English and Italian but only found references to her books and papers and thanks for assistance. What is needed is outside recognition of the importance of her contributions to research. BTW, I also linked to news items relating to you and your efforts on our main WiR page under Press and on the Polar Women page. Enjoyed listening to your ABC interview.--Ipigott (talk) 08:52, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott: Thanks for this! What about Susana Agusti? Evolution_and_evolvability worked on it and I thought it might be up to scratch now? Janstrugnell (talk) 07:05, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
@Janstrugnell: I've done a bit more editing on Agustí and moved the article to the main space.--Ipigott (talk) 08:34, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW and Ipigott: Thanks so much for this. What do you think of this one? Edith_Farkas Janstrugnell (talk) 22:01, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
Janstrugnell definitely notable. Sources are independent. Give me a minute or two and I can take it live. SusunW (talk) 22:06, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW and Ipigott: Thanks so much for making that one live SusanW. What about this one? Is Joanne notable enough? Joanne_Johnson Janstrugnell (talk) 00:58, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
@Janstrugnell: Johnson is based almost entirely on primary sources. It would be dangerous to move it to the main space without some third party reports or assessments.--Ipigott (talk) 07:44, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott: Okay! Thanks for looking at this. Someone seems to be editing at the moment (no username, only IP address) but I can't see anymore references added yet. Janstrugnell (talk) 15:20, 19 August 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW and Ipigott: I just stumbled across this one! First women born in Antarctica. V. interesting! https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Solveig_Gunbj%C3%B8rg_Jacobsen&action=history
@SusunW and Ipigott: What do you think about Alison Murray? Is she notable enough? Alison_Murray_(scientist) Janstrugnell (talk) 14:56, 21 August 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW and Ipigott: What about Hina Baig? I have my fingers crossed! Hina_Baig Janstrugnell (talk) 12:30, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi @Janstrugnell:. I expanded the lede a little bit to establish notability and then moved Hina Baig to mainspace. I also linked her to a couple of other articles so that her article isn't orphaned. Thanks for working on it! --Rosiestep (talk) 13:49, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

Upcoming editathons: Women in Nursing & Women Labor Activists

For all those who regularly check our talk page but perhaps forget to look at the main page.

You are invited...

Women in Nursing editathon & Women Labor Activists editathon
Hosted by Women in Red - September 2016 - #wikiwomeninred

--Ipigott (talk) 07:29, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Difficulties experienced by our newbies

About a dozen editors have signed up as WiR members over the past few weeks, some complete newbies. I've been adding their names to our mass messaging list and checking out what they have been doing. Several of them seem to have experienced real trouble and are upset that their first articles or edits have been deleted. See for example User talk:Clarissa Rios, Herahussain contributions, User talk:Lizzie656, User talk:Oluwa2Chainz, etc. If anyone can help out with any of these, we may still be able to encourage them to continue on Wikipedia and help with our project.--Ipigott (talk) 05:49, 28 August 2016 (UTC)

We need to jump on these situations fast and mentor these folks. Some just make newbie mistakes and need some hand-holding, others run headfirst into the trolls. (And a few might be NOTHERE and need some serious education!). Montanabw(talk) 03:35, 30 August 2016 (UTC)

A couple of radio interviews

A couple more radio interviews with Janstrugnell and me, including shout-outs to the stalwart work of Women in Red!

Anyway, some fun listening. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 00:59, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

Hi @Evolution and evolvability and Janstrugnell: - so happy to hear about all this great press. Good job. --Rosiestep (talk) 15:00, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
@Evolution and evolvability and Janstrugnell:. You've been doing a great job for the women of Antarctica. I'm not sure whether you intend to continue with your enterprise but it might in any case be useful to compile a List of Antarctic women in which you could include the names of all the women explorers and researchers covered in Wikipedia. You could adopt the format of lists like List of Australian women artists (possibly with country-by-country breakdowns as in List of women photographers) or you may like to adopt a tabular approach as in List of female explorers and travelers (although compilation takes much longer). You could of course draw on the blue linked articles at your Wikipedia:Meetup/SCAR 2016 but I think it would also be useful to include all the pioneers and explorers such as those in Category:Female polar explorers. If you are interested, I could help you along or even make a start on the list. Thanks to Megalibrarygirl, we are also progressing well with Women in Antarctica and Timeline of women in Antarctica.--Ipigott (talk) 08:08, 4 September 2016 (UTC)

I see that this category was deleted last December despite considerable support. There have been a number of articles on women translators recently but none of them contains any "women" categorization. As a result, they are not automatically included in Wikidata. Rosiestep: I don't know whether you think it would be worthwhile to bring this up for discussion again. If not, would it be in order to tag women translators as Category:Women writers? Personally, I do not think this would be the right solution as most translators do not consider themselves to be writers. I suppose I could always try to enter them on Wikipdata manually.--Ipigott (talk) 08:53, 23 August 2016 (UTC)

I'd vote to regain that category and if someone else wants to bring up for discussion, I will support! --Rosiestep (talk) 23:01, 23 August 2016 (UTC)
If someone could help me with the procedure (maybe Montanabw), I would be happy to start the discussion.--Ipigott (talk) 08:39, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
Judging by the debate there, which tossed both the male and female categories, you are going to be dealing with a three-sided problem: 1) The issue of creating equivalent "male" and "female" categories so as to avoid the problem of "ghettoizing" women. 2) Reversing a previous "consensus" that the categories are to be tossed, even though a lot of the major parties and leaders in category work were not aware of the debate (such as Ser Amantio di Nicolao). 3) Finally, to create "male" and "female" categories, there is also the question of whether Category:Translators should be fully diffused, as it is currently, or non-diffusing: There is an article titled List of translators which, in theory, should hold everyone who is in any translator category, but that isn't the same. (as an example of a fully non-diffusing main category page, see Category:Horse breeds, which is kept the way it is so that we have some notion of how many horse breed articles exist on wikipedia, and it's about 400 or so). Oh, and 4) Trolls. My take is that we have a situation that crosses multiple category areas and I am not clear if the CfD crowd has created a "consensus" that is at odds with the actual policies and guidelines on categorization. Put simply, while I think the goal is worthwhile, it's going to be complicated and don't go into that neighborhood alone. Montanabw(talk) 17:42, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
My interpretation of the discussion is that it all started when someone questioned Category:Male translators. It was more or less agreed that the category should be deleted but then it was suggested that if Male translators should be deleted, then Women translators should be deleted too. But that was hardly a logical solution, given that we have Women writers and over 40 subcategories at Category:Women writers by format. I really can't see what is so different between a woman translator and say, a woman lexicographer or a woman critic. By the same token, if women lexicographers can be considered a subcategory of Women writers, then women translators can probably be considered women writers too. So unless anyone else wants to argue in favour of re-establishing Women translators, then I'll just go ahead and categorize them all as Women writers.--Ipigott (talk) 08:18, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
The problem was a general one, seen in the writers' categories, that where there was only a women's category and a general one they were diffusing the women into a "ghetto" of a woman-only category and removing them from the main one. So, the solution was to either go both or none. There is ample precedent for non-diffusing categories, but when you are dealing with some of the very literally-minded people in category land, good luck explaining that. Montanabw(talk) 03:38, 30 August 2016 (UTC)
@Montanabw: Just seen this today. Yes, I certainly remember not too long ago that there were press articles complaining that all the women writers were disappearing from the main categories -- so I fully agree that the women categories should be non-diffusing. As for translators, I've spend quite a bit of time on the Americans and Brits ensuring that they were at least somewhere among the women writers. Maybe I'll have time to go through the other countries later. I simply don't relish fighting with some of those who say they are supporting our project but then go ahead deleting categories and articles.--Ipigott (talk) 10:33, 7 September 2016 (UTC)