Jump to content

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red/Archive 7

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archive 1←Archive 5Archive 6Archive 7Archive 8Archive 9Archive 10

The Bias Is Real And Unfortunately Legitimate

Let me think of some significant female historical figures off the top of my head. Marie Curie, Margaret Thatcher, several First Ladies, Cleopatra, Mata Hari, and that's about it. Ask me to name some male ones, though. I can rattle off hundreds.

I remember the time when I went to one of Richard Dawkins' lectures, maybe 2-3 years ago, and in the questions segment one woman berated him for not including more female scientists in his mentions. I could have killed that woman for suggesting that Dawk is a sexist. He is not. The reason he didn't include more women in his speech on evolutionary biology is that the proportion of women involved in the study of evolutionary biology is unbelievably small!!

The gender gap is real, people. It's not a sign of a reference bias, it's a sign of a longstanding real-world bias against achievement by us women.

History has been overwhelmingly dominated by this: "Man discovers cure for bubonic plague! Wife boils turnips! Man happy to come home to boiled turnips after discovering cure for plague!"

Of course women don't have achievements to the degree that men do. We spent millennia being told that all we were good for was pumping out babies and boiling turnips. It's even more disturbing now that we have IQ testing and we come to find out that not only do women have roughly the same average IQ that men do, but we're actually surpassing them by a couple of points nowadays. Why weren't they boiling turnips while we discovered cures for the plague? Because we were told that our place was to sit pretty and do needlepoint.

If this project aims to rewrite history as a 50/50 split between men and women, that would be delusional revisionism. And it would sweep under the rug all of the undeserved marginalization that women have always gotten. We need to tell it like it is, in order not to have it happen again. No, we have not accomplished a lot. You can thank the patriarchal establishment for that. Yes, we are capable of so much more. No, the last thing we need is to lie to ourselves about the issue. Succubus MacAstaroth (talk) 09:39, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

@Succubus MacAstaroth: You are right, of course, that in many fields of endeavor, women have not historically represented a significant proportion of players but things are certainly on the move. In my opinion, it is important to trace the evolution of the part played by women over the centuries, especially over the past 100 years or so when they have become increasingly important in almost all spheres, even those traditionally developed by men. Today we see just as many women as men in literature, art, education, theatre, dance and sport while year by year they are taking up ever more leading positions in business, politics and the sciences. In that context, Wikipedia's 15% of biographies on women is still a ridiculously low figure. That's why it's important to do something about it. I don't think there is much chance of over-representation of women in any of the fields we have been covering until now. The real problem as I see it is that in general women are far more modest about their achievements, seldom blowing their trumpets as loudly as men. That's why it's often really difficult to find sources that are acceptable to the Wikipedia community which itself is dominated by men, some of whom continue to view articles about women with unnecessary suspicion.--Ipigott (talk) 12:08, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
I would agree and disagree as well @Succubus MacAstaroth and Ipigott:. It is both a reference bias and an outcome of patriarchy. I have written biographies in the last 2 editathons which acknowledged that in professional partnerships, the woman contributed as much to the architectural design/scientific discovery as her male partner, but that the male partner received the accolades. Even when he acknowledged her contributions, his were the only ones written about by others. While we could indeed arrive at 50/50 within wiki guidelines by covering people who were noted by significant coverage we would end up with a whole bunch of women who were noted for tea. While historically accurate, that picture would be of little value. Far better for us to improve that 15.89% to even 25% or 30% of role models and pioneers. SusunW (talk) 15:34, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
@SusunW: Arriving at a more egalitarian split by including a bunch of women who were noted for tea is exactly what I fear could happen. Thank you; that was a pithy way to put it. Succubus MacAstaroth (talk) 11:29, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I think it also comes down to acknowledging the different ways in which women participated in careers. For instance, in my area of Australian politics, there were only a tiny minority of women in politics prior to 1960, so those biographies are about 98% male. But at the same time, there were a huge range of towering women involved in political public life, who can sail Wikipedia notability standards but often be neglected in article drives because it was an era in which they tended not to be able to hold public office. A good encyclopedia will reflect this, and most actually do it better than us. The Drover's Wife (talk) 16:00, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
Totally agree The Drover's Wife but I can assure you, women in social works are often targeted for AFD for their work being "regional" and not important enough. Interestingly, the "regionality" was indicative of just what you mention and was no less important for being regional. Wiki's guidelines also have zero requirements that accomplishments must be national in scope. In point of fact things like the Birmingham bus boycott, weren't even regional. It was a local event that had national implications. Thus, regionality is a bogus argument in the long run.
One of the reasons the internet is so important is that it shows us that these were international phenomena. But it also allows us to highlight through local knowledge who was important to the historical development of their region. I have been surprised at how well we have been able to connect an international group of feminists and peace activists and in so doing discovered many, many important women who have not been covered in Wikipedia. SusunW (talk) 16:34, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
  • My 2 cents about these projects (WikiProject Women and WIGI): we need to know how we are affecting Wikipedia with our work. I had no idea how awesome and amazing it would be to be a part of this group when I first joined it. I'm constantly amazed and proud of the amount of work we are able to produce each month, and how well everyone works together. Even when we disagree, we do so nicely. Anyway, that aside, it's hard to maintain a high level of work without knowing if your work is affecting the world. Knowing that our contributions have an effect -- big or small -- is important to track and know. This project is so important because while women have been invisible, they have not been inactive in history. We need to write about these people. I've learned about so many amazing women throughout history by participating in AfD discussions. Sometimes people at Wiki don't recognize the importance of some women and some editors don't always write well... And as Ipigott pointed out, women are increasingly taking leading roles throughout the world. Wiki should reflect that and we need to know where we stand as editors when we are adding to Wiki. Great project, keep it up! Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:14, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
@Succubus MacAstaroth: The bias is real, but we can do something about it. That's the aim of this project; getting to 50/50 distribution is not the aim as it is not realistic. Raising awareness in general and article drives in particular will move the needle to a figure greater than 15.5% (the December 2014 figure). Once we replicate the WiR model from En-wiki to all other language Wikipedias we can consider this a movement. Right now, babysteps. --Rosiestep (talk) 16:55, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
I intend to write about this properly, perhaps for Signpost. Short version is: Don't get hung up over percentages, unless you can give a good reason that one percentage is "bad" and another percentage is "good". If you are concerned that the coverage of (in this case) women is lacking compared with (in this case) men, create content about women (or promote the creation of such content). That is what people do with all other subjects. If you are right you are filling a gap and addressing a balance issue, if you are wrong you are still filling a gap.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:45, 27 November 2015 (UTC).
@Rich Farmbrough: I think a Signpost article is a nice idea (full disclosure, I'm on the SP's Editorial Board in the role of personnel/recruitment). If there are questions about writing guidelines, @Go Phightins! and others on the EB are readily available. --Rosiestep (talk) 06:53, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
A short, open-access article on the topic that I found enormously useful is this. It addresses the actual bias in the percentage of historically notable figures that are women, what proportion of those notable women have Wikipedia pages, and (most importantly) how the content of those articles differ from biographies about men. It looks as though redlink lists have been effective at ensuring that those women who are notable have something written about them. The bigger challenge is to make improving articles as satisfying as creating them! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 02:52, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Evolution and evolvability it was an interesting piece. Some of this data, I have noted in the past. Often articles about women mention their husbands and children, but rarely do articles about males assume that marriage and family are notable events. But I think there is another reason that these are mentioned more in biographies of women and the fact that "divorce" is more prevalent in women's articles. Men's careers have not traditionally been interrupted by children, their names have not changed if their relationships change. Thus, those events can be peripheral to a discussion of their lives. I just finished a biography on a woman who had very little sourcing when I searched for her name, but, when I instead searched for her as Mrs. X, I found literally hundreds of sources. None of those sources would make any sense without having mentioned that she was the wife of X. In another recent article, a female physician took ten years to complete her residency. What at first seems like an inexplicable length of time, made sense once I discovered that she had three children during that decade. What the authors call the lexical bias doesn't actually seem to reflect a bias of content, but rather a societal and cultural phenomena. SusunW (talk) 05:06, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
SusunW, a very god point. I'd not thought of it in those terms! As you say, the measure is unable to separate the current representation bias, versus the historical bias of the restrictions that have been placed on women. Just as female historical figures have had various family commitments affect their achievements, historical males have typically had many of their achievements enabled buy the support of wives, which is rarely mentioned in their biographies. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 08:31, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Dealing with AfD

To help support appropriate biographies and other women's articles, I think it would be handy to compile a "top ten" list of the most common AfD arguments and post the appropriate links to policy and guidelines to refute them. Also, there are clear guidelines at GNG, and in addition, if there are GNG guidelines that exacerbate systemic bias, then we can also work to modify those guidelines (I also know that guidelines are sometimes "gamed" - I've seen people make unilateral, undiscussed changes to guidelines and then totally screw up change articles to meet those changes, even though no one discussed them). Some ideas:

  1. The "regional" one is a good example; I'm from Montana, it's a small state, less than a million people. I've often had to argue the "merely regional" point on things like geographic features or even biographies of white males.
  2. Look at where "consensus" is creating a problem: One example is a "consensus" that Ambassadors are not inherently notable - and that hits a number of women's biographies.
  3. We also deal with the "she's just the wife of foo problem. How do we face this?
  4. There's the "just a socialite who did charitable stuff" argument; many women did remarkable amounts of unpaid work, and it was the only outlet available to them.
  5. WP:BIO1E also gets raised; yet Lawnchair Larry still has his own article.
  6. There's the "pre-Google" problem of WP:RECENTISM, I can't believe how much work it took to salvage Hilda Plowright, for example. How do we support these sources? Do we need to do up a guideline of pre-internet sources presumed notable even though they are not yet scanned and online?
  7. Ditto the articles with a lot of foreign language sources, such as those that SusunW works on.
  8. We should also help to eliminate cruft ourselves; Why does every porn star on the planet have to have a WP article? And we got caught up a little bit in that Tara Teng thing, I tried to vote "delete" on a couple that did appear to be non-notable.

So there are some of my ideas. Thoughts? Montanabw(talk) 20:23, 25 November 2015 (UTC)

Nothing in Wiki's guidelines prohibit regional coverage, as I said before. The argument against regionalism is that it's trivial, but we do not always know who is locally or regionally important, or even if a local event will go national. Some are planned that way, others (Rodney King), (Leelah Alcorn), (discovering oil) just happen. The ambassador thing is unfathomable to me. It is still not usual in most of the world for a woman to become one, thus, it is a notable event. Wife of is bull$*@^. There are tons of people on wikipedia who are on here for doing nada, peers, socialites/gentlemen, kardashian-hiltonites, etc. My least favorite type of article, but the hypocrisy factor irks me. Those types of folks get a pass, because they are presumed to do philanthropic work, but social activists who actually do work and are often unpaid are not??? The truth is, Wikipedia is NOT a collection of articles on the most worthy and important contributors to society. It is instead a collection of people that others want to know about because they have seen their name somewhere. I don't think it would matter if we had a list of sources, because it comes down in the end to how well an argument one can make to the cabal or deletionists. I don't know that I think they particularly target women, though the guidelines are clearly stacked against women, but I do think they would rather delete than coach or heaven-forbid fix an article. I find it exhausting, quite honestly. SusunW (talk) 20:55, 25 November 2015 (UTC)
@Montanabw: One thing which might have a positive affect at AfD is tying the Wikipedia entry to datasets. For example, if Jane Doe has a Wikipedia article to include some Authority Control number, e.g. VIAF, it'll be auto-migrated to Wikidata. Does that improve an article's chances at AfD? As for the pre-Google issue you mention, that one bothers me more than any other... not just for women's biographies, but also for indigenous peoples. --Rosiestep (talk) 18:15, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Rosiestep that is a huge issue. There is one particularly prolific nominator who repeatedly makes comments "see no further room for expansion", "sources appear to be archived", and the like. Why and where is that a criteria for deletion? SusunW (talk) 18:31, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
SusunW those are not criteria for deletion. It is hard to change mindsets. As long as that editor does not appear to be malicious, he can continue making those comments ad nauseum. --Rosiestep (talk) 18:36, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Rosiestep and therein lies the problem. He (and I say that only because his page says that) nominates many, many, many files. It is exhausting and wastes time that could be spent on other article creation. But he is not malicious, in that he never participates in defense or argument of his position. And, many of his nominations end up with improvement of the file, so it isn't completely wasted time, but seems to me there is a better way to "rally" the troops, if that is what the game is. SusunW (talk) 18:46, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
@SusunW, Montanabw, and Rosiestep:, I like this discussion because it voices a lot of my own frustrations. Another issue I think we see is when a woman is nominated for AfD and the sources don't cover her in depth, but there are a ton of them! Or sometimes the sources cover her briefly and then move on to her work. I don't understand how those don't come under GNG? I have fight tooth and nail. And yes, sometimes I find myself fighting for "marginal" subjects, but I think that each person was important to someone (or they wouldn't have an article) and I also think of all the sports bios we have and I don't see why we can't have women who've written bestselling romance or the like. :P I also make a policy to comment on bad AfD arguments--esp. the regional one. And yes, Rosiestep, I know who you're talking about above and I think he doesn't have database access which makes me suspicious of his claims. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 22:30, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Megalibrarygirl I knew you would know who I meant Sue, because he uses those same words over and over. ;) I wish I had a template to just retype arguments like length ≠ significant coverage, but rather depth and the WP allows chaining together information. Way too many people nominating (and voting or not voting or whatever it is that WP calls it) who don't really understand adequate sourcing. SusunW (talk) 22:45, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm struggling with Karen Arnold right now, and a lot of those problems apply. I also had so many 5 year old articles nominated in a week that I lost two just becasue I didn't get round to them.
I do agree with the "regional" issue. You can't piece together the story without all the players - that's the irritating part. I think the solution here has to be GNG - multiple independent reliable significant coverage. Sometimes that's not available, and the only way you can get it is to write the book yourself. (Note:Self-publishing won't count.) When there is all the information available, it's just scattered this is rather silly, especially when the person (in this case) is a nexus.
I'm getting BLP1E on people who have won an award for forty years of voluntary service.
More later perhaps.
All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:54, 27 November 2015 (UTC).

For funsies

I found this article on Gawker about the 10 best articles that were deleted on Wikipedia and shouldn't have been... deleted. It's silly, but maybe some holiday silliness is what we need! Happy Festivus! Megalibrarygirl (talk) 23:11, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for a Festivus laugh! In the same spirit, may I offer a page I stumbled over awhile back that consisted, in toto, of a statement of the following form: "AB was an X. He was born in Y and died in Z, but little is known of his life." As far as I can tell, it was never nominated for deletion.Alafarge (talk) 00:48, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
  • Ooh, the Chaneyverse! I'm actually involved in all of that! The freaky thing about all of that is how quickly everything seemed to unravel once people started taking a good look at the sourcing. As best as we can determine, there's an extremely small grain of truth to Chaney's articles in that he likely did some of the things listed but that most were either outright fake or had the details and importance so overly inflated and exaggerated that they were almost as good as fake. You can fall down the rabbit hole of this universe here and I did a summary of everything here. Tokyogirl79 (｡◕‿◕｡) 15:37, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

Women travelers

If anyone is interested in a mini-editathon before Women in Music, I'd be in for Women travelers having created Wikipedia:WikiProject Women/Women in Red/Women travelers, and having seen how abysmal this {{cl|Female travelers}} looks. Perhaps 30 December - 3 January. --Rosiestep (talk) 22:15, 28 December 2015 (UTC)

I'm working on one that surely would qualify. She was a philanthropist lobbying for the creation of Israel and she traveled to every state in the US, all the provinces of Canada, all the countries of South America, and most of the countries of Europe seeking funding and support in the 1930s and 1940s. SusunW (talk) 16:38, 29 December 2015 (UTC)
I didn't start this entry, but it was a bare stub until I got sucked into it a couple hours ago; Peggy Hull was the first US woman to be an accredited war correspondent, covered both World Wars, and traveled in her work, to Siberia, to France, to Mexico, to China, to Hawaii, etc., sometimes on her own dime. So she's a "woman traveler" in a sense.Penny Richards (talk) 02:59, 31 December 2015 (UTC)
@Penny Richards: she certainly is. Same with @Dr. Blofeld's Eleanor Creesy. --Rosiestep (talk) 03:11, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day 2016

@Rosiestep: Is there any way we can participate in the 15th anniversary celebrations with our editathons? The problem seems to be "location" as we are always everywhere. It just occurred to me it would be great to be able to associate our Women in Music editathon with the anniversary.--Ipigott (talk) 10:18, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

@Ipigott: The 15th anniversary celebrations will include activities in various geographic location. But maybe WiR could do it differently. How would you see us participating? --Rosiestep (talk) 15:45, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: Couldn't we just give our location as "Worldwide" in connection with the music editathon?--Ipigott (talk) 16:31, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
There are a lot of preparations happening worldwide for Wikipedia Day 2016 -- the 15 year anniversary on 15 January 2016. Our Women in Music editathon will be occurring on that day, but Ipigott brings up a good point: any thoughts on how WiR could join in the celebration? --Rosiestep (talk) 17:05, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
I am not remotely good at promotion, but what say we commit to 15 start class articles for the 15th? That would be a plus for both our projects and the anniversary. We could select 15 and highlight them for that particular day, asking everyone for their participation on those 15. SusunW (talk) 18:16, 20 December 2015 (UTC)
@Victuallers: You've been involved in lots of promotional events in the UK. Would you be interested in trying to set up something with music institutions over there? I see a "Tudor Music editathon" has been scheduled for 5 February? Perhaps we can tie our event up with theirs? Or maybe you have other suggestions?--Ipigott (talk) 15:54, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
I'll see if I can find time but obviously I have xmas to manipulate. Need to talk with you about March as I think we may be able to involve other languages. Victuallers (talk) 17:13, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Following up on @Ian's suggestion, please take a look at: Wikipedia:Meetup/San Francisco/Wikipedia Day 2016. Would you be interested in Skypeing in for a panel discussion on content gender gap at 2:00PM PST on Saturday, 16 January, as a joint representation of WikiWomen's User Group (@SlimVirgin, Keilana, and FloNight) and Women in Red? @Victuallers and I have experience with the Skype presentation format (Wikimania 2015), so I am confident we could do a good job using Skype for this presentation at the Wikimedia Foundation. This would a great opportunity for WiR and WWUG to collaborate and to update the attendees regarding Wikipedia's content gender gap -- history, progress, issues, vision. Perhaps each person could address a different component: e.g. establishing notability, DYK, AfD, metrics, events planning, Signpost article, historical perspective, collaboration, and so on. --Rosiestep (talk) 16:39, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Female Antarctic Researcher wikibomb

Hello all,

The Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research 2016 conference is hosting an edit-a-thon to improve the coverage of prominent female Antarctic researchers (Female Antarctic researcher wikibomb webpage). If you would be interested in helping out, or have any ideas, let me know! Similarly, feel free to let me know if you've any suggestions of people to cover. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 00:38, 21 December 2015 (UTC)

Hi there Evolution_and_evolvability! Great to see you are making special provision for women at your August conference in Kuala Lumpur. You mention 23 August from 6 to 8 pm. Is this just a launch meeting? If so, how long to do you intend your editathon to last? I'm sure we can support your physical event by arranging an edithon for the same period, perhaps from 15 to 28 August. Maybe we should extend it to cover Polar Women Explorers and Researchers? I see there are some interesting links here and here. @Rosiestep, SusunW, and Megalibrarygirl: What do other members of the project think?--Ipigott (talk) 15:47, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Hi, Ipigott, if I can help in any way, I will. :) I'll take a look at the lists and we can start a list if we need one. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 15:52, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
I don't have a problem doing the polar event, but indigenous people is on the board for August too. I suppose we can split the month, since Indigenous People's Day is August 9. We've never done a two-fer but I see no reason why it couldn't be done. I would also just remind everyone to check the calendar and discussions in the Idea's Café. SusunW (talk) 16:44, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
@SusunW: I'm in for a two-fer. I think by August, we'll have processes down and it'll be easier to do 2 in a month. --Rosiestep (talk) 00:06, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
@Evolution and evolvability, Ipigott, and SusunW:, a list is in the works for Antarctic women and of course also for Indigenous Women. As always, everyone is free and encouraged to contribute. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:29, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
@Megalibrarygirl: I'm on vacation so can't check this very easily... In addition to Antarctic women do we have something like Polar women or Arctic women? --Rosiestep (talk) 00:06, 23 December 2015 (UTC)
@Megalibrarygirl: This works like magic! In connection with indigenous women, I am currently trying to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Greenland. There is room for considerable expansion here. I'll try to help you sooner or later to add some names to your list. @SusunW: As we have so much time to prepare for both of these, I think we have a good chance of doing a good job with both. Apart from Indigenous People Day, are we tied up yet with any physical event(s) in connection with Indigenous People?--Ipigott (talk) 17:44, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Ipigott not yet. I just reached out to one of my Native artists this week and we mentioned it to Muriel Mary in New Zealand. There are multiple projects dealing with indigenous people, have not yet contacted them. Don't see it as a conflict at all, as clearly the North Pole has lots of indigenous inhabitants. SusunW (talk) 17:52, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Montanabw and others will surely know of notable women who are not yet covered. And I will peruse the Termination Policy article, as many of my first articles were about native women involved in tribal politics who pushed for reestablishment of their tribes and forced the termination policy in the US to end. SusunW (talk) 20:00, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

@Ipigott, Megalibrarygirl, SusunW, Rosiestep, and Montanabw: I'm glad at the enthusiastic response! The event is in the middle of the conference (event = 23rd, conference = 20-30th of Aug). The aim is to make start on some pages before the event, then take about 90 minutes at the event itself to create a load more, before a little ceremonial 'unveiling' at the end when drafts are put into mainspace and we see how many pages/characters/images/references have been added total. It would therefore be great to have online help both before and during the event!
@Ipigott: Antarctic explorers, policymakers, conservationists would be excellent additions along side any researchers added. I'm happy for SCAR's contribution to be part of a broader 'polar' month (I suspect that the SCAR community will largely add to Antarctic side of things). I'll check with others in the organisation committee, but I suspect they'll agree.
@Megalibrarygirl: Wow that was fast. You are a Wikimachine. I'd started up a redlinks list at the SCAR 6016 meetup page. The nominations are currently populated by the SCAR community at this page. Am happy to merge & transclude one page to the other if you are?
Thanks all for the responses, Looking forward to collaborating! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 22:55, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Evolution_and_evolvability, sure we can merge and/or transclude as needs be. Having a copy of the list here at WiR and at the event page is good. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 23:42, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Mayhaps we just do a month-long event and call it "From Pole to Pole" since Megalibrarygirl and I were already discussing how we make sure that people understand it is a global inclusion of indigenous people? Evolution_and_evolvability, totally agree that Sue is amazing. How she gets all these lists going so quickly and preps them for us is nothing short of miraculous. Ipigott I know there are lots of Scandinavian women who have worked in Antarctica, though not whether they are already on WP. In March, I do a blog on a woman each day and include each continent. Antarctica is always hardest, but it seems to me that I recall many of my women are from Europe's frigid north. :) SusunW (talk) 23:20, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
And I have to "Aw shucks" at all the "Attagirls" given to me by you all for working on the lists. I discovered not too long ago that really I liked putting them together and it's so satisfying to see our group knock off half a list at a time on the these editathons. ;) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 23:42, 22 December 2015 (UTC)
Yes, SusunW is right, that the Indigenous Women list is covering all indigenous people from around the world. For example, I've found tribal leaders in Ghana to add. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 23:46, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

@ Megalibrarygirl (et al.): I've transcluded the WiR list into the wikibomb event page. If I've caused any formatting/style problems that I've not noticed, let me know! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 10:14, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Very cool. And I put the event on the Idea Cafe calendar. SusunW (talk) 15:20, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
As the SCAR conference will be held 20-30 August, I suggest that WiR holds its editathon at the same time as the sponsoring organization.
Evolution_and_evolvability if you'd like one or more of us at Women in Red to Skype in for the wikibomb, please let us know as we're glad to participate in out-reach. --Rosiestep (talk) 16:59, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: Both ideas of hosting a synchronised WiR editathon, as well as having additional online help at the SCAR editathon would be splendid. One caveat to is that the SCAR event is 6-8pm Malaysia time (UTC+8), so that may affect your enthusiasm, depending on your timezone! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:31, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Notable American Women (1971)

I couldn't figure out where to put this but User:Bonnie Montgomery created a listing of all names from the 1971 edition of Notable American Women at User:Bonnie Montgomery/Notable American Women (1971). I'm not sure if there's interest in using that as a checklist here but I'm just announcing it in case it wasn't already here somewhere. It's already linked at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women/Women in Red/Missing articles by nationality. -- Ricky81682 (talk) 01:25, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Seems like it might be worth some checking to see how many have articles or not. I do notice that a couple of other drafts by that user in that user's space have just been AfD'd, probably because the user has been inactive for 3 years. If we want to keep that list, should it be moved, and if so, where? Is there a bot which could easily check the names on the list to compare against article titles? 1bandsaw (talk) 03:29, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
I could later make the list clickable, so we could identify at least some of them. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 07:08, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
The linked list is available here. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 08:32, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
That's great, thanks, Edgars2007! 1bandsaw (talk) 22:04, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Del Categories Male translators/Women translators

Just came across this. Originally posted on wp:Women writers talk page by Ser Amantio di Nicolao on 31 December:

Category:Male translators is up for deletion, and the discussion has encompassed deletion of Category:Women translators. See Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2015_December_23#Category:Male_translators. I was not notified of this, and have only just discovered it myself by happenstance, which accounts for the late notification. --Ipigott (talk) 10:28, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for the alert.Alafarge (talk) 19:42, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

Collaboration - Women in Video Games

Also posted at: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games#Collaboration - Women in Video Games

Fellow editors,
I have been working on improving our coverage of notable women in the video games industry, but have made slow progress as an individual editor thus far. I am seeking your collaboration, as well of that of the editors at WP:WikiProject Video Games, to develop articles on some of the 20 women listed in two Fortune articles:

The influential women listed in those articles are:

Hope Cochran, Stephanie Barish, Holly Liu, Emily Greer^, Jessica Tams, Kate Edwards, Kiki Wolfkill, Amy Hennig, Lucy Bradshaw*, Jade Raymond, Kirsten Duvall, Tracy Fullerton, Chelsea Howe, Pauline Jacquey, Blanca Juti, Amy Jo Kim, Cathy Preston, Siobhan Reddy, Bonnie Ross, Margaret Wallace.
^ redirect to article on related subject; * link to article on similarly named person.

As you can see, we have articles on some, but not yet all.
To facilitate the collaboration, I will create stub or empty articles in Draft or Sandbox space. Editors can then add links to any promising sources to the Talk pages of those drafts. When we have enough, we can start working on the article text.
Thoughts? - Ryk72 'c.s.n.s.' 02:07, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

  • @Ryk72: This is an interesting subject/group and I don't know much about it. If you'd like to start something in Sandbox, that's fine. However, I'm wondering is we should start something like Wikipedia:WikiProject Women/Women in Red/Women in gaming, and have sections such as those started here, {{cl|People in the games industry}}? I think we could do a lot of good by hosting a 2 week virtual editathon for women in gaming, where we could create those articles mentioned above. It would be especially helpful if we could get some organization to sponsor an in-person event to coincide with our virtual event. Any ideas re: conferences/conventions associated with video gaming, which attract women in gaming? --Rosiestep (talk) 02:49, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
@Ryk72 and Rosiestep:, I agree. I have a few redlinks for professional women gamers to work on, too. I'll start another redlink list. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 14:36, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
List started: Women in video games. It will help provide visibility to the work. :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 14:41, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
I also just added several women video game music composers here, all are from Japan and many worked for Capcom. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:10, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Did you know that less than 16% of the English Wikipedia's biographies are about women?

It's an eye catching headline, although I do know people who would suggest that "Did you know that fewer than 16% of the English Wikipedia's biographies are about women?" would be less indigestible for those of us who still reckon we know - or at least once knew - the difference between "fewer" and "less". My younger son still does, alas for me.

More seriously, it would give a pleasing view of progress if someone could let us know in a nice prominent position on the main project page when thanks to this project, 16% becomes 17%. And 18%. And etc. I see that the 16% value dates back to July 2015 (I think...) Given the extent to which wikipedia new article selection is driven by the availability of sources outside wikipedia, it will be a long time before we reach 50:50, but for the incurable bean-counters among us it would still be satisfying to be able to track progress in the good direction. Regards Charles01 (talk) 11:29, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

The figures come from November 2015 see Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-12-16/WikiProject report and are generated by Wikipedia Gender Indicators (WIGI). Looks like the Dec 7 figures show 15.94% so still hovering at 16%. SusunW (talk) 14:07, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
Currently it's 15.91%, but there are 2595 people without assigned gender (that is 0.1959%). If somebody is interested in numbers:
biographies: 1,324,673; men: 1,111,164; women: 210,820; people without gender: 2,595; people with some other gender: 146. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 15:01, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
Interesting. I wonder how that compares with the same analysis for German or French (or other) wikipedias. (Which only deserves an answer if someone already knows how to access it!) Thank you, both. Success Charles01 (talk) 15:33, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
The French & German wikipedias are about the same as the English. dewiki:15.12% eswiki:16.81% frwiki:15.53% jawiki:21.93% svwiki:19.83% zhwiki:17.59%. Data is available here. I am working off the site_linkss-index.csv file, which has very slightly different numbers from those above, but not significantly different; and calculating "female"/(sum(*)-"nan"). The "nan" field appears to be a count of "null values" (no gender data available). - Ryk72 'c.s.n.s.' 16:01, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
Thank you. Regards Charles01 (talk) 17:00, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
And my method is putting this piece of code:
var date = new Date();
var month = date.getMonth() + 1;
var day=date.getDate();
var currentdate=date.getFullYear()+"-"+(month<=9?"0":"")+month+"-"+(day<=9?"0":"")+day;

function generator (site) {
 ts.log ( ""+site+"wiki = {biographies = "+ts.wdq ( "link["+site+"wiki] and claim[31:5]" ).pages.length+",withoutgender = "+ts.wdq ( "link["+site+"wiki] and claim[31:5] and noclaim[21]" ).pages.length+",men = "+ts.wdq ( "link["+site+"wiki] and claim[31:5] and claim[21:6581097]" ).pages.length+",women = "+ts.wdq ( "link["+site+"wiki] and claim[31:5] and claim[21:6581072]" ).pages.length+",othergender = "+ts.wdq ( "link["+site+"wiki] and claim[31:5] and claim[21] and noclaim[21:6581072,21:6581097]" ).pages.length+",timestamp = '"+currentdate+"',},")
}

generator("en")
here (in the box below "Your code here!"), then pressing Run (if somebody wants to play around with other Wikipedias). Today it is sometimes generating some errors, but you can always press Run once more. You don't need to understand what those claim, noclaim, 6581072 etc. means, you just need to change the code in the last line to look for another Wikipedias data (de=German, en=English, fr=French). --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 18:11, 6 January 2016 (UTC)
Thank you. Sadly you are no longer talking my language - any of my languages, but that is not through any fault of yours! Best wishes. Charles01 (talk) 06:44, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Year of Science

WikiEdu has just launched the Year of Science; @Ryan (Wiki Ed): is one of their coordinators. @Keilana: with WP:WikiProject Women in science is also involved in this, as are other editors in other capacities, I'm sure. WiR has been invited to participate by hosting edit-a-thons. Let's sort through this and see what we can add to our calendar. I don't know anything more at the moment, e.g. if there will be sponsoring organizations, etc., but there should be more information in the days to come.

Year of Science calendar: --Rosiestep (talk) 03:33, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

  1. January - (skipped)
  2. February - Zoology
  3. March - Chemistry
  4. April - Environmental science (potentially including earth science)
  5. May - Psychology
  6. June - Astronomy
  7. July - Plant biology
  8. August - Sociology
  9. September - Linguistics
  10. October - Computer science / technology / math
  11. November - Medicine
  12. December - Physics

Ryan mentioned these lists; there are a few redlinks here which we can incorporate into our redlists if we haven't done so already. I thought this might interest you, @Megalibrarygirl and SusunW:. --Rosiestep (talk) 12:14, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

Definitely of interest. Any additions to our redlink lists is good. I'll look at them ;) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:38, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
Very interested Rosiestep. Just took Elizabeth Rona to Good Article. Found her from the Tennessee Hall of Fame list. Manhattan Project, nuclear chemist, who was an expert in polonium extraction. These women are fascinating, IMO. SusunW (talk) 16:59, 9 January 2016 (UTC)
Just for the record, women scientists now have three general lists: List of female scientists before the 20th century, List of female scientists in the 20th century and List of 21st-century women scientists. SusunW has indeed worked wonders with the article on Elizabeth Rona, bringing it up to GA in less than a week. I've been making some suggestions below about how we should highlight such successes in reaction to the comments from Dr. Blofeld.--Ipigott (talk) 11:43, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Invitation to a virtual editathon on Women in Music

Women in Music
  • 10 to 31 January 2016
  • Please join us in the worldwide virtual edit-a-thon hosted by Women in Red.

For all those who regularly visit our talk page (rather than the main page), here is a reminder that today marks the official start of our music editathon. I hope many of you will be contributing with new or improved articles.--Ipigott (talk) 11:54, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

See, now this is three weeks. That's a heck of a long time for an editathon if there's not a month off in between. Exhausting. If it was every two months and say an editathon for 10 days, two weeks max I think it would have a greater impact. More people might contribute to one every two months if there was some sort of incentive too. A women in music topic could have the prize say to win tickets to see a woman musician perform in concert for best or most start class articles or an Encyclopedia of Women's Music or something which in turn could be used by them to create more articles at a later date. I know that a lot of people would rather not attach a value to article production though. I think some sort of experimentation with that and duration of editathons you could see which works best and what produces the most and best articles during a period, which is what matters most of course. Anyway, best of luck with this one!♦ Dr. Blofeld 12:00, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

Too many editathons

I don't mean to be a grouch but I'm being honest, I find the way that this project is run increasingly stressful for people involved in it. Just seeing the various related comments on talk pages, it's become too intense and bureaucratic for my liking. I think having an editathon every single month takes away the novelty factor and some people will still be tired from the previous one to suddenly change focus so soon. Even 6 in a year is a lot but I think one every other month would be far more appealing, at least to me. I no longer feel like contributing as having them so frequently just dampens my enthusiasm. It's great that a lot of content is still created and some people here continue to produce a lot, not to mention how well they're organized. But long term I do think a few people are going to burn out with producing for this. I know we're missing a lot of content but I really think the approach should be more relaxed and less intense. If you made it every other month I'd be more likely to feel like contributing, at the moment it feels like a chore and just doesn't appeal to me to want to mass contribute articles. I'm going to take my name down from the WP:Women general project as I don't think there's much else I can do with it if there isn't the support to run it as a proper project. It's probably best that you took down the GA?FA article of the week thing too as it's been there a few months now.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:28, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

@Dr. Blofeld: Thanks for your comments which deserve careful consideration. There is certainly no obligation for every member of WiR to take part in each editathon. In fact, an analysis shows that very few do so as only 22 out of 157 have taken part in more than one. With each new editathon, the majority of invitations are sent to editors who are active in the specific field being covered. Unless they express wide interest as members of the project, they are not systematically invited to join every editathon (at least not by me). There are in fact only a handful of editors who have contributed more than a couple of new articles to each event. Furthermore, we are currently in the process of compiling lists for future invitations and will probably soon be contacting regular contributors on their preferences. If you do not wish to receive future invitations on your talk page, please let us know. In regard to wikiproject Women, I think we should decide how to highlight our successes, perhaps linking from the Showcase section of WiR to the FA and GA sections of WP Women (and perhaps vice versa) as WiR creations are increasingly reaching GA standards and this trend is likely to continue. I also think it's a pity you have decided to leave WP Women as you have done so much to set it up, successfully consolidating cooperation among all the projects on women. When you talk of reactions on talk pages, I'm not sure whether you are referring to the talk pages of WiR itself or to those of our participants. Maybe some people are not happy about receiving so many invitations to our editathons. It would be useful if you could let us know of any specific examples of stress or resentment and we can try to sort things out. Finally, I am personally also among those who think we might be trying to achieve too much in too short a time. While there may be room for specializing in one area per month, possibly with the support of virtual editathons, I think we need to guard against involvement in more than one area at a time. Maybe your suggestion of just one major editathon every two months would produce higher quality results over time. I certainly would agree we also need ample time to prepare for demanding events such as Women's History Month which will soon be our top priority once more. It will be interesting to see how others react to your suggestions.--Ipigott (talk) 11:31, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

I know there's a few extremely enthusiastic editors here who want a permanent editathon, but I'm pretty sure most people couldn't keep it up so frequently. I'm not sure what the exact article count figures were but I did sort of notice something during the Women in Science one. I do think every other month would be healthier for those involved in organizing it, at least give you a few weeks of the off month to do what you want and relax more with editing before moving on to the next. I understand the great desire to even up coverage of women asap, but I think it's too intense at the moment with very little break. The problem is because you and Rosie put so much effort into this, I feel guilty if I don't contribute to one, and I've really been trying to reduce my workload for everything. Having them too frequently takes away the novelty factor and the special feeling of contributing to an editathon. I think you need that to attract more people to contributing to each one and quality and coverage will improve. If some people are thinking "oh this again, I only just finished contributing to the last one" it becomes less exciting to me anyway. I know that editors who are primarily only interested in women topics think the variation of topic is exciting though, but for some of us who have a range of interests, it would be good to take things at a more leisurely pace. But hey, you're the really prolific ones here, not me, it's entirely up to you how you run it. I'm just being honest with how I feel. If you think you're getting consistent results each month and are really enjoying organizing it full time, then it's your call.

On the WP:Women, I only put my name down and started it when I thought there was a chance of running everything under one project and this functioning more as a /Missing articles branch of it than separate project. But as there's no support for that and people would rather it function as an umbrella then there's little point in continuing with it. I thought in the long term I was doing something constructive towards creating a central, highly functional project, which I thought initially there was some support for. This project certainly works well enough to be independent, and the good thing is that I think it will last. But I think just take things a little easier. We're not going to get 30% bios on women in a year.♦ Dr. Blofeld 11:46, 10 January 2016 (UTC)

  • If editors seem stuck in a rut, perhaps the nature of the work can be varied? I made a note of this editathon but don't, as yet, have any particular redlinks to fill. But I did once start an article about a female musician who was big in her day – Vahdah Olcott-Bickford. It bothered me that I didn't get around to putting this up as a DYK and, to have a second chance, I'd need to make it a GA. Blofeld knows all about the GA process, I gather, and so perhaps could advise or help out. Another topic on my to-do list is women in aviation which has recently been expanded from a redirect with possibilities that I started with the list of aviatrices. That doesn't have much to do with music but I need to strike while the iron is hot there too. Anyway, my point is that it's good to mix up the nature of the work to keep it fresh and interesting. Andrew D. (talk) 14:02, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
I don't want to downplay what anyone feels and can only speak for myself. Participation in the editathons, like WP itself is totally voluntary. One can write about women or the subject. I went back and looked earlier today and in most of the editathons there is a mix of biographies and women's works included in the results. Since the lists are crowdsourced, anyone can add works if they desire to the redlinks of things to be created. There's plenty of room in any editathon to participate in various ways. Some prefer administrative tasks, others prefer article creation, DYK promotion, etc. I don't see it as a limiting nor an exhausting situation and personally, I enjoy having a different focus each month. I also have no problem with more than one focus. As I have been involved in the 100 x 100 challenge (100 articles in 100 days), my commitment to create an article (and I don't do stubs so mine are start or above) was spurred on by the variations. Having finished that goal, I am still motivated to create, at a less intense pace, but I like having the various lists and editathons to choose inspiration from. Through all of it, I performed administrative tasks and continue to do so. Those I find tiresome, but necessary, so I do them. No one asks me to, I just do, because it is a way I can contribute. We each choose our level of involvement and its no reflection on the project or other editors. Some find a particular topic uninteresting and don't contribute, others see a topic they aren't interested in and vow to find someone or something about it that does interest them, still others only work on editathons because they are interested in a particular topic. I don't see any of that as a bad thing, as it seems like it allows a lot of freedom for individual choice. SusunW (talk) 17:13, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
  • Amigo, @Dr. Blofeld, I think we perceive this differently. I think of the editathons as opportunities to work on a specific focus area, e.g. music, with like-minded editors. I don't view editathons as an obligation to do anything by anyone. There may be very little cross-over between the participants in, say, the architecture editathon and the current music editathon. In essence, it gives different editors something to work on for a short duration. And some editors who want to concentrate on the content gender gap, have subject-matter variety within a collaborative setting.
I think limiting editathons to a few days is counter-productive as often editors have busy lives and aren't available during a constricted period, say 3 or 7 day, but give them 10 or 14 or 21 days, and they are likely to contribute 1 article. That's not to say that we've found a "sweet spot" as that varies greatly. For example, WiR's first editathon, Asian Pacific American women, lasted 3 days, while WiR's upcoming editathon, Black Women, will last 15 days. Why the difference? Because we're experimenting.
Same thing -- experimenting -- is going on with the invitation system. (a) We've been distributing invitations manually and are looking to switch to an automated (MassMedia) system with an opt-out option. (b) We started with a large, multi-bulleted notice, and have reduced it to 2 bullets for the current editathon, and perhaps the next invitation will have an even smaller footprint, e.g. supporting Gerda's "no need to shout" viewpoint.
Word has gotten out to various orgs that WiR is doing what it's doing and they want to collaborate with us. While we don't want to over-extend ourselves, why not participate to some extent when asked to do so? For example, WikiEdu's Year of Science has a different science topic each month of 2016. However, WiR isn't obligated to sync in with that calendar... we can run an editathon per quarter, or whatever, and we can schedule it for 3 days or 3 weeks. We discuss (on the Events page) and we decide.
Lastly, don't stop; keep the conversation going!!! WiR isn't doing everything right... surely we're doing a lot of things wrong... or at least imperfectly. So... How can we explain to invitees and/or project members that there's no obligation to participate? Should we stop inviting "members" and assume they keep an eye on the project page? Should we refer to the "event" as something different, e.g. not editathon? What about eliminating the "Participants" section on the editathon page... participate if you wish but no "sign up" area? (e.g. @Ipigott: has a better handle on the stats than I do, but I think there's a weak correlation between signed up participants and actual contributors.)
Thoughts? --Rosiestep (talk) 17:34, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
Why not set up a thread on "Are editathons too frequent", even an anonymous survey or something and you can see what the contributors really think?♦ Dr. Blofeld 18:08, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
I understand why it sometimes feels as if there are too many editathons, partly because I am running regular RL meetups as well as participating in WiR events. To be honest, I am not paying all that much attention to the date ranges; maybe it's important administratively, but because of the way my life works, I basically just deal with each editathon topic for a month (if I'm interested in it) regardless of whether it's formally 3 days or 3 weeks. I find this less stressful for my own time management and editing methods, and I assume other people have their own interference patterns to work around. Meaning there's likely no one best way to schedule these. Also, speaking to Rosiestep's point about language, I have stopped using 'editathon' almost entirely, because while it does create an aura of excitement, intensity, and challenge for some people, I find that for too many others it gives off a daunting vibe of grueling endurance slog.Alafarge (talk) 20:16, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
@Alafarge: Seems like a lot of editors, including you and me, write the articles any time during the month when we feel like writing them. I'm intrigued that you have stopped using 'editathon'. Would you be comfortable expanding on this? --Rosiestep (talk) 20:29, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
According to informal feedback I get at meetups, 'editathon' sounds like a lot of no fun to people, especially newcomers. (As Dr. Blofeld notes below.) Since part of WiR's goal, as I understand it, is attracting and sustaining the interest of a diverse group of contributors apart from the core, I think the language we use may make some difference, however slight. Both 'meetup' and 'virtual meetup' also place the emphasis on community rather than endurance, which I appreciate. Possibly we could also use the verb 'write' a bit more where we now use 'edit' since that is as much what we are doing as editing and is also a more appealing concept on the whole. I love that I am helping to write an encyclopedia. That I am editing it? Meh.Alafarge (talk) 15:59, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
You could just drop the "editathon" name, which makes it seem like we're all sat around a computer for 3 solid weeks editing away on the topic, in favour of just making it Women's xx month. What we would do is create a calendar centrally on here for the year and what would be on each month. Then notify editors to note the calendar. That way people know there's always a different topic each month and can freely contribute if they want to or choose to ignore it. That way things are more relaxed and nobody is compelled to edit in the dates given. just know that the month this is the topic and assume a more relaxed approach towards collaboration.♦ Dr. Blofeld 22:01, 10 January 2016 (UTC)
There is a calendar. In the Navbox under Administration if you click on Ideas, it takes you to the calendar and on-going discussion for future events. Alafarge what you said. It's a "virtual event", no one is having to maintain space or specific time frames, IMO. I do articles before during and after the editathons and if I don't really enjoy the topic or its out of my comfort zone, I pull redlinks from the other lists on WiR. I don't really get hung up with how things are organized as long as participating is not complicated. SusunW (talk) 00:34, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
I think it is important to remember we are addressing two communities in each of our events: the core members of the project (some of whom seem ready to contribute to whatever area of interest we choose) and those who are specifically interested in the particular area we are supporting. The latter are frequently also associated with "physical" editathons hosted by other organizations with whom we are collaborating. While some of our members might think we are overdoing the use of the word "editathon", it certainly seems to me that for those who join because they are interested in the particular field we are covering, the idea of participating in an editathon provides a stronger focus than just a "topic of the month". Indeed, many of them have not previously been involved in any of our work and may be completely unaware of WiR. In any case, the results we have been achieving up to now seem to me to provide ample evidence that we are achieving the level of progress in article creation the project was designed for. I suggest we continue along the same lines for the time being although in our next round of invitations, we could specifically ask each potential participant (particularly those who have already participated) whether he or she would like to be included in all future invitations (or maybe just those on arts, sciences, history or whatever) or would simply prefer to rely on the project's events calendar. The calendar could be enhanced by including a "focus of the month" for at least the next six months.-- Ipigott (talk) 08:20, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

I suspect the real problem is too many disparate things being called editathons. I like Ipigott's suggestion of a "focus for the month", I know the Georgian Wikipedia works that way and for some editors that brings a nice combination of collaboration and diversity of topic. I took part in one of the first editathons, at the British Museum in 2010 and I enjoy the sort of editathons where a group of experienced editors have the opportunity to pick the brains of an expert and perhaps take their cameras on a behind the scenes tour. During the era where our main problem was thought to be editor recruitment I took part in a number of outreach events where we showed people how to edit, I'd like us stop calling such events editathons and find a new name for them. I think most people have given up on that sort of outreach now, but I still think it has potential provided the audience is of people who have volunteered to help improve Wikipedia. As for how many is too many, in London I think we have capacity issues when we wind up with two editathons on the same day. ϢereSpielChequers 10:55, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

  • Other names for such activity which might be more appealing:
  1. colloquium
  2. teach-in or write-in
  3. thematic workshop
  4. writing circle
Andrew D. (talk) 17:08, 12 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank You

I don't say it often enough: thank you for what you do. You are an amazing group of editors, and I am proud to be in your circle. We are accomplishing amazing things: there are >9,000 new articles about women and women's works on the English Wikipedia since 11 July 2015 when we launched WiR. Yes, that is nothing short of amazing. At tomorrow's Wikipedia15 program in San Francisco, I'll be representing you and presenting on Women in Red. Two other WiR members, @Keilana and FloNight, will cover additional content gender gap topics. If this interests you, here's the YouTube stream link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uW1WSVmpvwk. --Rosiestep (talk) 06:37, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Rosie. Yes, do archive it, but I already pulled it up and see that the clock is ticking since I doesn't start until 4 p.m. in 5:46 hours. Thus I am deducing that is PST? SusunW (talk) 16:15, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
Getting excited for Wikipedia15 celebration to begin! I'm also facilitating the event so lots of things going on here at WMF. The YouTube will be uploaded to Commons by WMF in the next few days. --Rosiestep (talk) 19:27, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
@SusunW: It starts at 2 PM PST so I think it's showing you your time zone. Keilana (talk) 19:28, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
Keilana I'm not sure, so just keep popping back onto it. It's 1:30 my time now and the ticker says it starts in 2:34 minutes. SusunW (talk) 19:31, 16 January 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep, Keilana, and FloNight: thank you all. What I could hear of the presentation was great. About halfway through Keilana's presentation I lost sound, but then it came back. Then I lost it again in the Q&A. I'm hoping that the Commons version will not have that issue. Very much appreciation and respect for you all in making the presentation and drawing awareness to what we are trying to accomplish in the women's projects here. SusunW (talk) 02:23, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Invitation to take part in Wiki Loves Women's Writing Contest

While this is not a WiR sponsored event, Isla Haddow posted an invite in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women which is right up our alley. I'm reposting here for those who may have missed that invite.

Wiki Loves Women celebrates Wikipedia's 15th anniversary by launching the Wiki Loves Women #15Challenge writing contest to increase the number of biographies on notable African women on Wikipedia. Please join in and celebrate Wikipedia 15 by participating in this bilingual (English/French) writing contest to increase the number of notable African women on two language versions!

There are 3 ways to participate
It is all meant to be an easy going contest... no hassle... just for the pleasure of working together on a theme that still has such little coverage on Wikipedia (even after 15 years...)

1bandsaw (talk) 18:26, 15 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, 1bandsaw, I've started a WiR team. Want to join? Anyone else? :) Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:08, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm in! 1bandsaw (talk) 18:33, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

I started a team for myself, because each team can only do one entry, and I wanted to do someone more historical (don't usually do BLPs).Penny Richards (talk) 16:41, 16 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks 1bandsaw for posting this here!! I cannot wait to see what your teams are going to produce!!! Isla Haddow (talk) 06:52, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

How to deal with stub articles?

I'd like to determine the correct process for improving articles that are stubs or require expansion. For example, the article on computer scientist Carolyn Talcott could do with some additional work. Do these tasks just fall into the "needing expansion" pool? Or is there a "Women (not-quite) in Red" subproject that should be used? Tnx! jxm (talk) 17:53, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

It would fall under the umbrella project Women and possibly one of the subsets of that broad project. I don't think there is any formal process, unless one of the projects has something specific. I agree that it is a much needed focus area. SusunW (talk) 18:08, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
There are also other activities within WP that can help improve stubs, including WP:WikiCup and WP:Stub Contest. If you know of some important stubs that could use help, point them out to those folks, who are always looking for material that needs improving. DIY is also an option. 1bandsaw (talk) 23:21, 21 January 2016 (UTC)
Also, if you come across a stub article and it doesn't have a stub template, it's helpful to add one or more templates so that the article shows up in the various stub categories. --Rosiestep (talk) 01:18, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Hello! I am working on the subsection for red links by country. I use Wikidata to find missing female biographies that are available in other languages. The basic data retrieved is name, birth, death, occupation and an image if available. A column with the number of interwikis helps to check notability. After doing some tests (for example Chile) and before adding more countries, I would like to hear your impression. Are you OK with this approach? Thanks. --emijrp (talk) 11:07, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

Looks nice. I would suggest using {{Wikidata list}}, so it gets updated automatically by bot. It has almost the same functionality, except number of iws. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 11:43, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for the tip. The "nolink" option for wdq is not working properly I guess [1]. It is useful to print only red links, excluding all blue links. I hope it is fixed soon. --emijrp (talk) 12:50, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
No, it is working, but it is basically a bad idea to use it. When working with Wikidata, I try not to use it (it is extremely slow). You can try out SPARQL, it is much more powerful. Copy the template code from User:Edgars2007/Listeria test1. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:39, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
I see. Your test for Cuba worked fine. I tried Italy (which has many more biographies) and it returned nothing. With Nepal works fine. emijrp (talk) 16:54, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
Adding limit 5000 works, which is the limit for number of entries. Yes, not very good, but as I said - this is only a suggestion. Otherwise, you have to update all those lists manually. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 17:13, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
Great! I used a script to generate my tables, but this way is better. I will create lists of red links for more countries. emijrp (talk) 18:02, 17 January 2016 (UTC)
I understand none of these technicalities but am so very happy not only that you all do, but that you are creating more redlinks for us to work on. I love this project! SusunW (talk) 23:26, 17 January 2016 (UTC)

I am cutting down the lists length to 1,000 biographies per country. With an average of 500 red links per country, and knowing there are ~200 countries, this subsection will expand easily up 100,000 missing women biographies. Lot of food for editathons. emijrp (talk) 18:28, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

WiR redlist index: Archive 7

Welcome to WikiProject Women in Red (WiR). Our objective is to turn red links into blue ones. Our scope is women's biographies, women's works, and women's issues, broadly construed.

This list of red links is intended to serve as a basis for creating new articles on the English Wikipedia. Please note however that the red links on this list may well not be suitable as the basis for an article. All new articles must satisfy Wikipedia's notability criteria with reliable independent sources.

Women in Red logo

I absolutely love this idea, but I've got two pieces of feedback. One, in the Australian list, there are a whole bunch of redlinks appearing as "Q3478079" and similar numbers instead of the actual person. Secondly, is there a way these could be filtered by category? In the Australian list, there is a massive overrepresentation of minor sportspeople, actres Rhondda Findleton is the only person on the whole list I've ever heard of, and I'm much more likely to go write an article on a woman who nees an article in an underrepresented field than fringe-badminton-player-#64. If this could be filtered so it wasn't ragingly dominated by obscure sportspeople I could see myself doing some serious work on this. The Drover's Wife (talk) 21:35, 18 January 2016 (UTC)
I second that, @The Drover's Wife. At WikiProject Women writers, we have a Wikidata feed of missing women writers on en-wiki who have entries in other language wikis: Wikipedia:WikiProject Women writers/Redlinks from Wikidata. It would be helpful if similar lists were generated for other occupation groups (scientists, artists, entertainers, politicians, and so on). (cc: @Emijrp and Edgars2007) --Rosiestep (talk) 01:25, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
@The Drover's Wife: about QX problem. Yes, I also have noticed that. I know, why they are appearing in this way, but I have to play a little bit around to fix that issue. About occupations. See, this is wider problem, as very many biographies at Wikidata don't have occupation, yet. And also gender. Yes, it is possible to filter minor sportspeople out in separate page. But not now - there are some technical problems at the moment. @Rosiestep: yes, sure - it is possible. @Emijrp: it should be possible to add number of iws to the lists, I think. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:31, 22 January 2016 (UTC)

Women's History Month in March

Hi, I don't know if you plan on doing an event for March (of course, you probably are), but I'd like to note that at DYK, submissions for March postings of Women's History Month hooks should be submitted from mid-January to mid-March to ensure inclusion. Yoninah (talk) 22:46, 23 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi @Yoninah. Yes, March will be a busy month for us: Wikipedia:Meetup/Women in Red/8. We'll be hosting the online node of WP:Art+Feminism, focusing on women artists, their works of art, plus feminists, activists, and social reformers. I hope we push DYK to its limits with some wonderful articles. Thanks for the heads-up about timing! --Rosiestep (talk) 15:54, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
I'm also wondering if Gerda Arendt will set up that lovely table that she did last year for us. It was so easy to be able to track which ones needed to be reviewed, which ones were approved, etc. SusunW (talk) 18:14, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
I can set it up but everybody can please update. - I am on vacation right now, no internet or very sloooow, don't expect much right now. Btw, anybody can take care of the anniversaries of Precious, - the models are on the talk. Anybody can find worthy recipients for Impact, --Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:42, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
Gerda Arendt I will be more than happy to help keep it updated and do reviews. It's the technical part of creating it that causes me grief. SusunW (talk) 21:46, 24 January 2016 (UTC)

Problem with articles per day templates

There's a problem with all the templates on the main page for calculating articles per day for each month (under metrics, etc). Don't know who can fix this.--Ipigott (talk) 10:26, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

 Fixed. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 12:00, 25 January 2016 (UTC)

Hi all,

I've made a new template, {{preloaddraft}}, that may be useful for redlink lists, where if clicking the link preloads text into a newly created draft page. This could be useful so that people (particularly very new editors) can start with a template biography page (see example in action at WP:Meetup/SCAR_2016#To_create). T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 06:23, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

Nifty idea. I don't know enough about Wikipedia templates to comment usefully on the mechanics, but I do like how it appears to steer inexperienced editors to a protected space so they don't get prematurely speedy deleted when they save a work in progress.Alafarge (talk) 16:54, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
That's a good point, Alafarge, there's a lot of trigger-happy folks at AfD. >.< Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:06, 24 December 2015 (UTC)
Looks like a very positive innovation! This should go well with the idea of a campaign-specific draft queue, which is a project I'm hoping to start on between now and the new year, and get working in time for Wikipedia:Black WikiHistory Month, and then on a larger scale Wikipedia:Meetup/ArtAndFeminism. One thought: Should we fix the shade of red so it is the same as an ordinary redlink? And can we get the same functionality for names entered free-form using InputBox?--Pharos (talk) 02:59, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
Well noticed on the shade of red! I think #BA0000 is the correct colour. To my mind, the template's main drawback is that it's slightly harder to add new names to the list. For a standard redlink list you just need to know *[[]] syntax. Whereas using the {{preloaddraft}} template requires a bits of transclusion syntax that new editors may find unfamiliar:
*[[Person A]]
*[[Person B]]
vs
*{{preloaddraft | Person A | Scientist}}
*{{preloaddraft | Person B | Scientist}}
Nevertheless, I feel that the benefits probably outweigh the drawbacks and one can copy-paste the template transclusion without needing to fully understand what It's really doing. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 09:00, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
It's #C20: Help:Link color. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 09:27, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
Thanks! Have fixed. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 09:59, 26 December 2015 (UTC)
It should be technically possible to have an InputBox next to the list to make adding new names even easier than direct wikicode editing.--Pharos (talk) 16:32, 28 December 2015 (UTC)
Looking at Template:AFC submission/doc, I think we'd need to create a Template:AFC submission/campaign option to get the specialized draft queues moving forward.--Pharos (talk) 03:31, 25 December 2015 (UTC)
@Evolution and evolvability, Pharos, and Edgars2007: You know what would be awesome? If the preloaddraft template also automatically listed something on the redlink page to indicate that the article clicked was already picked, so we don't have multiple editors doing the same page by accident. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 15:44, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
Good idea, but don't think it's possible. But the link is automatically converted to blue, when page exists. If you're worrying about "edit conflicts", then users could add such notes by themselves. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 16:52, 1 January 2016 (UTC)
@Megalibrarygirl: As Edgars2007 spotted, once an article is chosen, and the created draft page is saved, then the "Exampledraft. " redlink will change to a "Draft:Exampledraft " bluelink. It doesn't solve the intermediate period when someone has started a draft, but not yet saved it (a fundamental editconflict problem of the wiki software). On the plus side, if there are ever any changes in the way mediawiki handles edit conflicts, this system should adapt to it! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 02:06, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
Oh! I get it @Evolution and evolvability and Edgars2007: That's awesome. I like that it changes it to blue.... I think we should adapt all our lists. Can we make templates for activists, musicians, general bio, etc? I'll happily adapt our current lists with the template. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:44, 2 January 2016 (UTC)
@Megalibrarygirl: I'm really happy it's of interest. I'll make up some draft templates for activists and musicians and post them here so that you can tinker. T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:30, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
Template:Preloaddraft/Activist (E.g. {{Preloaddraft|Alex redlink|Activist}}→Alex redlink )
Template:Preloaddraft/Musician (E.g. {{Preloaddraft|Alex redlink|Musician}}→Alex redlink )
Tinkering definitely required! I'm not hugely clear on what a 'typical' career looks like for either of these, so I'm not sure exactly what headers and infobox parameters to include. They should at least be a start though! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 02:46, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
@Megalibrarygirl and Rosiestep: Also, let me know if you particularly want any other template drafts made, I'm happy to put them together! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 00:46, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: Definitely, if you've any suggestions for artists with good pages as inspiration that's help things of what things to put in! T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 01:23, 24 January 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: Have added the new template! Template:Preloaddraft/Artist (E.g. {{Preloaddraft|Alex redlink|Artist}}→Alex redlink ) T.Shafee(Evo﹠Evo)talk 10:20, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

Black women's history editathon

There are only a few days to go before we start on this one. I am a bit concerned at the lack of interest up to now, apart from all the work Megalibrarygirl and SusunW have done on the list of red links. More specifically, only three people have signed up as participants, there appears to be no support from the "Wikipedia AfroCrown" who have not announced any editathons for February (or indeed for this year), and no invitations have been sent out. I realize everyone has been working on music and that it is difficult to support two activities at the same time. Nevertheless I think it is time to make a start.

@Rosiestep: Perhaps you could prepare the Wikipedia:Meetup/Women in Red/7/invitation and send it out to the basic list I prepared, using the automatic facilities. I would have prepared the invitation myself but I'm not sure how you want to include the Afro Crowd (if at all). I have also been preparing a list of other potential participants who have shown particular interest in the biographies and history of black women. If all goes well, I should then be able to send out the additional invitations tomorrow. Please feel free to add the names of any others who are active in the area.

I see, by the way, there are various physical events in connection with Black History Month. Should there not be some sort of tie-up with these? I've added a link to their "Template:BlackWikiHistoryMonth" which appears at the bottom of the page.--Ipigott (talk) 08:59, 26 January 2016 (UTC)

I think we will attract a large group of editors when the invitations go out, but agree that needs to be done ASAP. I am ready. SusunW (talk) 16:38, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
I've included our editathon on the Black WikiHistory Month too and I've prepared a draft invitation. I've also alerted Rosie on her talk page as she missed this message - so I'm pretty certain we should be able to get moving today or tomorrow. The only problem for me is the "Afro Crowd" included on the editathon page as they're not doing anything this year.--Ipigott (talk) 16:56, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
I agree with SusunW; I know I hadn't quite grokked that January was (gasp) almost over.Alafarge (talk) 19:32, 26 January 2016 (UTC)
Hi. I will relay the info on the african mailing list as well as on the team working in the Wikipedia:WikiProject South Africa/Wikipedia Primary School and on Wiki Loves Women social media accounts. Maybe it will add a couple of additional participants ?
By the way... I was looking at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women/Women in Red/Missing articles by nationality/Africa and I felt in love with your table pages of missing women. Who helped do the query in Wiki Data ?
@Anthere: Those were created by @Emijrp and Edgars2007: Aren't they amazing? And thank you for posting about our event on your other message boards. SusunW (talk) 14:23, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
Absolutely wonderful indeed. So here, there and also here and also there, but closed group :) Anthere (talk)
\o/\o/\o/ @Anthere: (I say it is the happy dance sign, my brother says it's martinis. Either way = happiness) Thank you! I posted my first article already because I have been chomping at the bit to write about her. SusunW (talk) 15:00, 27 January 2016 (UTC)
I did not get the ping for this page. Maybe when Harej moves us, the communication will improve. {sign} In the meantime, the invitations were created (they're smaller and maybe cuter) and delivered. We now have OptIn and OptOut participant lists which should help with future invitations. I've added WiR here, Wikipedia:Meetup/NYC#Remote participants. And there are now 17 signed up participants on our event's page, so things have picked up in the last 24 hours quite nicely, I'd say. And @Anthere: thank you, thank you! WiR needs a social media campaign... twitter, FB, and so on... and none of us have jumped on that the way you have. Can we clone you? --Rosiestep (talk) 03:45, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

Sofia Moshevich

Can anyone help out with this article on Canadian pianist/researcher on Shostakovich? I have declined a speedy & done a bit of work with JSTOR reviews but I fear it is still failing to demonstrate sufficient notability. Thank you! Espresso Addict (talk) 23:48, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps Big iron can help with this one?--Ipigott (talk) 10:45, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
Thanks, Ipigott! You've found an excellent reference that has supplied much useful history. Hopefully this will be protected from deletion now. Cheers, Espresso Addict (talk) 14:17, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for bringing it to our attention. It was fun to research. I found other stuff in Russian. It looks as if her parents (or relatives) Sophia and Abram died in the Shoah. I see she has two sons (one mentioned at Toronto University) but cannot find any trace of a husband/partner.--Ipigott (talk) 14:50, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
I suspect the creator might be one of her sons? It's great to find a place where editors will actually help out; you'd be surprised (or possibly not) how many projects are actively deletionist of articles within their purview. Does this project do any form of automated deletion tracking? There are clearly notable articles on women up for speedy most weeks, and I don't check often enough to be sure how many have been deleted. Espresso Addict (talk) 16:10, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
Nice! I saw this just before I went to bed last night and thought I'd check on it today. Looks like Ipigott covered you. Espresso Addict we do get notices through the umbrella project Women Wikipedia:WikiProject Women#Alerts but I know of no organized effort to review them. SusunW (talk) 16:57, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
Thanks! I have watchlisted the alerts, though speedies don't make it to the summary of course. Espresso Addict (talk) 21:22, 28 January 2016 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://wiki.riteme.site/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Archive_7&oldid=1241382978"