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User talk:Andrew Gray/Archives/121

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Latest comment: 5 years ago by Lea Lacroix (WMDE) in topic Wikidata weekly summary #372


sports problem

Latest comment: 5 years ago8 comments3 people in discussion

Hi, Andrew! I was reading the threads about your analysis at GGTF and WiR, and I started to kind of pull the discussion off track there with my statistical nerdiness so I thought I'd ask here. I was just astounded that 46% of BLPs are athletes. I'm trying to reconcile this in my head, because I'm reeling. Can it possibly be that almost half of BLPs are notably primarily due to their athletic career? That is, this isn't Donald Trump being coded as a golfer and therefore part of that 46%? If 46% of wikipedia's BLPs are for people who are notable primarily for their athletic career, that's not a gender problem, it's a sports problem. --valereee (talk) 09:58, 18 June 2019 (UTC)

@Valereee: It's really quite a startling figure, isn't it? I vaguely suspected it would be high, but nothing like that level. There are 536k athlete articles in total - 33% of all biographies, and about 9% of all articles. (It's a higher proportion of BLPs than all biographies because of the strong recency bias)
One caveat is that our definition of "athlete" is a little debatable. The Wikidata ontology, which we're using here, considers dancers to be athletes, which I guess is something you could argue either way; ditto chess players, racing drivers, etc. I would estimate no more than 20-40k people fall into these "maybe or maybe not what we mean when we say athlete" groups; the headline figure is probably reasonable, give or take 5-10%.
The second caveat is the one you raise - are we picking up people who are really notable for other reasons? In theory the Wikidata "occupation" field should not be used for people unless it is a significant part of their life - my feeling is that there will inevitably be some miscategorisation here, along the lines of your golf example, but it's relatively low level.
I've done some tests by looking for people who have some kind of other non-athletic occupation listed as well. Other than things like "football manager", the most common non-sport-related single occupation was "politician" (2.5k) or "actor" (3.5k, and a third of those are dancers). Given that some athletes do go on to become politicians (or even vice versa), this seems like a plausible sort of number and suggests the classification is reasonably clean.
Looking at the breakdown by field, I make it 171k (association) footballers, 33k (gridiron) footballers, 32k "athletes" in the more restrictive sense, 31k cricketers, 26k baseball players, 20k rugby players, 20k basketball players, 19k ice hockey players. Those groups together give us about two thirds of the total - there will be some overlap for individuals who're listed twice, of course, but it highlights the sort of thing that drives the numbers - large well-documented team sports. And of those, by far the largest proportion seems to be (historic?) football players... Andrew Gray (talk) 22:51, 18 June 2019 (UTC)
As I asked at WiR talk, where does this 46% figure come from? I'm not seeing it at all. The Denelezh figures look like 22% "sports figures" to me, & that's not BLPs, but people born after 1800. So, no, it can't possibly be. We have to be careful with things like this, as the next thing you know, claims like this are plastered over the world's media, and believed. Johnbod (talk) 00:03, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
Johnbod, I actually think 'wikipedia has a sports problem' would be a better thing to be plastered all over the world's media than 'wikipedia is sexist.' --valereee (talk) 10:24, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
Not if it's 'wikipedia has a sports problem (that's twice as big as it actually is)'. Plus I think you'll find journalists and editors won't be very interested in that story. Can we confirm what the actual figure is? To avoid misleading quick skimmers, it should be corrected where you have posted it. Johnbod (talk) 13:27, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
@Johnbod: I haven't written this up properly yet - hoping to find some time soon - but it followed on from the gender work here, when I was trying to extend it with some numbers on occupational subgroups. (It worked for politicians and athletes, broke down for researchers, & as I was most interested in them I didn't push further). A worked set of numbers follows, to make it clear how I got there...
As you note, denelezh can't get us "living people". For all enwiki biographies, denelezh gives us 536,346 athletes out of 1,632,072 people - ~33% of all biographies on enwiki. The 22% figure you've got, I think, is the share of "all biographies with any sitelink" which are athletes. (Apparently other projects are less sports-oriented than we are, though "any sitelink" includes Commons & Wikisource so those will probably inflate the share for artists/writers). NB these numbers do include pre-1800 data, it's just that it's not shown on the breakdown lines.
To find the numbers for BLPs, I looked at the intersection of articles identified as athletes using the same process as denelezh (occupation tagging in Wikidata), and articles in Category:Living people. Overall, I got 64,871 matches for "female athletes", and 348,968 for "male athletes"; total 413,839. At the time I did this there were 906,720 entries in Category:Living people, so 45.64% of BLPs are identifiable as athletes, which rounds up to our 46% figure. (I was only looking at M/F ratios so this does not include anyone not coded as M/F, but I do not anticipate that would change the overall figures substantially - at most ±0.1%).
As valereee noted, there is still the underlying question of people who are counted as "sports" but who we're mostly interested in for other reasons. It's hard to say for sure how many of these there might be, but my feeling is that it's not overwhelmingly high; the relatively low rates of overlap between athletic and non-athletic occupation entries seem to support that. It would be quite reasonable to round down the overall numbers to take account of this, but even with a generous estimate for "people who are primarily famous in other fields, I wouldn't think it would get much below, say, ~40% of BLPs. I'll see if I can think of more rigorous ways to investigate this. As I said, these numbers did surprise me somewhat, but overall, I find them reasonably plausible. Andrew Gray (talk) 20:37, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, Andrew, but I must say I find it very hard to believe a figure this high. I wonder if there is a double-counting issue? Have you accounted for the lack of death dates problem? I suspect this affects athletes much more than other categories, for obvious reasons. What is the athletic % in the over-95 group for example, or over 100? One often finds people missing from Category:Living people btw - many editors don't add it. But thanks for doing this stuff, no doubt there are many wrinkles we will learn to identify. It's certainly worth nailing a correct figure. Johnbod (talk) 21:31, 19 June 2019 (UTC)
@Johnbod: Other than the issue of including people who're "not primarily athletes", there shouldn't be any double-counting based on people being athletes in multiple different ways - the methodology spits out a single list of distinct WP page titles/IDs and I've confirmed they're all unique.
WRT dates, I've only tested against the presence of Category:Living people and trusted to that being reasonably well maintained - at least, probably better maintained than the alternatives! I definitely agree that "we don't know if they're still living" may be an issue, particularly with all the "man who played two games for Partick Thistle in 1951 and then became a welder" type articles. I'll see if I can work out some way to isolate that group (say "born before 1940 or active before 1960, believed living"?) and run the stats seperately, though it may be tricky to do so. Andrew Gray (talk) 11:46, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #370

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
Here's your quick overview of what has been happening around Wikidata over the last week.
  • Development
    • Beginning of wb_terms migration (phab:T221764)
    • Fixed a bug with phan on Wikibase (phab:T226083)
    • Enable bugfix for wbeditentity setting aliases to empty array (phab:T223303)
    • Fix an issue with pipe character on some special pages (phab:T223270)
    • Fix an issue with removed constraint still displayed on Lexeme (phab:T223372)
    • Make edits to EntitySchema pages autopatrolled (phab:T224495)
    • Work on creating better edit summaries for wbeditentity API endpoint (phab:T224010)
    • Deploy the work environment for new mobile termbox
    • Start setting up the technical environment for Wikidata bridge

You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

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The June 2019 Signpost is out!

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* Read this Signpost in full * Single-page * Unsubscribe * MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 15:51, 30 June 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata weekly summary #371

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
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WikiCup 2019 July newsletter

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The third round of the 2019 WikiCup has now come to an end. The 16 users who made it to the fourth round needed to score at least 68 points, which is substantially lower than last year's 227 points. Our top scorers in round 3 were:

  •   Cas Liber, our winner in 2016, with 500 points derived mainly from a featured article and two GAs on natural history topics
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Contestants managed 4 (5) featured articles, 4 featured lists, 18 featured pictures, 29 good articles, 50 DYK entries, 9 ITN entries, and 39 good article reviews. As we enter the fourth round, remember that any content promoted after the end of round 3 but before the start of round 4 can be claimed in round 4. Please also remember that you must claim your points within 14 days of "earning" them, and it is imperative to claim them in the correct round; one FA claim had to be rejected because it was incorrectly submitted (claimed in Round 3 when it qualified for Round 2), so be warned! When doing GARs, please make sure that you check that all the GA criteria are fully met.

If you are concerned that your nomination—whether it is at good article nominations, a featured process, or anything else—will not receive the necessary reviews, please list it on Wikipedia:WikiCup/Reviews Needed (remember to remove your listing when no longer required). Questions are welcome on Wikipedia talk:WikiCup, and the judges are reachable on their talk pages or by email. Good luck! If you wish to start or stop receiving this newsletter, please feel free to add or remove your name from Wikipedia:WikiCup/Newsletter/Send. Godot13 (talk), Sturmvogel 66 (talk), Vanamonde (talk) and Cwmhiraeth (talk). MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 20:11, 2 July 2019 (UTC)

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Wikidata weekly summary #372

Latest comment: 5 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
 
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You can see all open tickets related to Wikidata here. If you want to help, you can also have a look at the tasks needing a volunteer.

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