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Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red/Archive 16

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Latest comment: 7 years ago by SusunW in topic BBC 100 Women
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Metrics how?

Latest comment: 8 years ago21 comments4 people in discussion

I'm afraid the metrics talk page is a little to TL;DR to me (although I have tried to read it a couple of times). How are we collecting metrics on new article creation right now? On what do we have a dependency (e.g. by way of a wikidata link, or use of a talk-page template). What, specifically, are we counting? thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:52, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Tagishsimon Install the gadget. (you may have to scroll up the page and look for the instructions under the heading Gadget.) In the left margin of your page under the Tools section, click on WEF:Person and complete sex or gender as female. It will automatically update the metrics. SusunW (talk) 22:13, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks. I tend to add to wikidata manually. Do I infer that our metrics count new links to en.wikipedia from wikidata, for instance_of=human & gender=female? --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:17, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
Tagishsimon yes, it is pulling from wikidata for people. Works, i.e. things created by women, still have to be manually input, but as long as the Wikidata is set up to human and gender=female, the automation is supposed to do it for you. SusunW (talk) 22:25, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks Susun. My next question has been put to wikidata here ... I'm yet to understand how dependable a wikidata link is (but I'm fairly new to the wikidata camp). --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:38, 16 October 2016 (UTC)
Tagishsimon I can begin to answer your query on how biographies are added to Wikidata here (although it will be interesting to see if there are further explanations on Wikidata). We have indeed experienced a problem with the time it often takes for Wikidata entries to be made on new women's biographies. For that reason, Edgars2007 has developed a bot (EdgarsBot) which creates Wikidata entries for all new articles with a category under Category:Women by occupation, adding at least "human" and "female" which allows our metrics and other tools to count them. Unfortunately, not all editors include the appropriate women categories but both those working on Wikidata and some of those involved in Women in Red try to add new entries or edit existing entries as necessary. All in all, we have discovered that our metrics counts are now pretty reliable for women's biographies although other articles about women still have to rely on human intervention. One reliable way of ensuring they are included in the metrics for a given month is to add them manually, either directly to the metrics list for the month or to the lists for the active editathons. If you run into any difficulties or need further assistance, just drop me a line.--Ipigott (talk) 07:01, 17 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks Ipigott. "under Category:Women by occupation" is the key; good work, Edgars2007. --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:24, 17 October 2016 (UTC)

Just to share a little of 'what I did next' FYI ... Petscan (does not work in Firefox for me) is an invaluable tool for interrogating wikipedia; it'll provide a list of all articles in a category tree which have no linked Wikidata item. Here's such a query looking at category:women by occupation and the next four categories below it. (The key tabs are the Categories, where the category of interest and the subcategory depth is specified; and Wikidata, where "Only pages without item" are checked) Running it an hour ago found 881 articles, the vast majority biographies, which have no Wikidata item.

Next, presuming one has a WiDar login, which seems to be gettable if you try to play the Wikidata Game, one can cause Petscan, automatically, to create & link wikidata items, with instance of=human and gender=female, so far for all articles for which there is not a similarly-named wikidata item. I'm doing this right now for about 480 biographies. This'll leave 400ish articles where Petscan reckons there's a similarly-named wikidata item, but where the two are not linked. I'll be looking at that next ... some time. I've yet to work out the most efficient handling for these; ideally the article and wikidata item(s) need to be compared and either linked, or a new data item created. Petscan offers a tool called Duplicity (via 'check wikidata' links in the body of the petscan report) which assists in making comparisons & linking/creating, so I may while away some evenings doing that.

I appreciate this is doing pretty much what EdgarsBot does ... it can't hurt to have some redundancy. Note also I attached a few more categories beneath category:women by occupation, so some of today's additions will previously have been invisible to EdgarsBot, and hence articles from prior months will be counted in this month's stats report.

I suspect there may be other categories than category:women by occupation which we might want to scan - I'm open to suggestions for these, but will in any case look out for them. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:11, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Tagishsimon for trying to improve the Wikidata coverage of our women's biographies. Allow me to share a few observations. First of all, despite what many of its proponents claim, many of the data on Wikidata are misleading or wrong. I sometimes even have to change "female" to "male" or vice-versa after seeing photographs of the wrong gender! Secondly, although the bot support for adding "female" on the basis of occupations is not a bad idea for our monthly stats, I have the impression that once there is some kind of Wikidata entry on a person, the key data (basic description, dates of birth and death, nationality, occupation) which would normally be entered manually can often be completely forgotten. In some cases, e.g. when articles are nominated for DYK, I add the missing data manually. Thirdly, from our Wikidata listings of redlinks (and thanks for your recent modifications and additions), you can see that many of the Wikidata entries fail to post key details even in cases where they are included in the linked articles. Furthermore, I am really concerned that the EN wiki is falling so far behind many other language versions in covering women's biographies. From Max Klein's Gender by language reports, you'll see that the EN wiki is not even in the top 10 and that for some languages, proportionate increases on a week-by-week basis are far higher than ours. I have been wondering whether it would be possible to create automatically EN drafts for approval/expansion based on some of the richer Wikidata entries in pertinent areas. I know many of the stubs on sports are created along these lines from sports listings. The only condition would be that editors would have to check the presentation before moving the stubs into the mainspace for further attention.--Ipigott (talk) 13:16, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
Just on the last question, Ipigott, of creating stubby articles from wikidata, it might be that Sander.v.Ginkel might be able to assist or advise. I think about 95% of new women biogs are coming from his industrial-scale sporting additions; I don't know what his technique is. Sander - we have several hundred thousand women with no wikipedia article, listed in wikidata and having massively varying number of properties per wikidata record. Might article creation based on this dataset be of any interest to you? thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:01, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
And on the prior data quality / completeness question: agreed. It's not good, it's slowly getting better, it has a long long way to go. I'm doing what I can, but small finger, large dyke. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:01, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Hi @Tagishsimon:, yes I'm always willing to help. My own interest is in sports people. What I do, I collect data of the people I'm going to create and put them into excel. In the second sheet I get a Wikipedia article with the data from 1 person. If I change one number, I have a Wikipedia article of another person. That is the reason I'm able to create many articles (doing about +/- 100 articles per day). I think with data from Wikidata, if there are enough properties, it's possible to create many articles this way. If people are willing to also create articles this way, I can help and learn the trics :). Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 15:14, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Timing problem here - I had not seen S.v.G's message before I answered. Perhaps we can adopt the Excel approach too?--Ipigott (talk) 15:17, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

I am aware of the work by Sander.v.Ginkel and we have discussed this possibility before but the formats he is using are rather different. I was hoping we might be able to work with some of the Wikidata people ´(perhaps Harej and his friends) to devise a way of simply inserting the desired data in a pre-established textual format. In my opinion, that should not be very difficult. My problem is that I do not know how to retrieve the various data from Wikidata. But perhaps SvG can help with that too.--Ipigott (talk) 15:15, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott:, sorry, but I'm not using Wikidata with getting the data I'm using, so I also don't know. :) Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 15:18, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Yes, that's what I thought. So maybe someone like The Earwig could help?--Ipigott (talk) 15:20, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott:, @Tagishsimon: (and also @Lugnuts: as you are creating many articles as well, you might be interested) Here an example of how I created the weightlifters at the world championships bio's recently. Download the excel file via http://www.filedropper.com/weightliftingexample . In the excel file you see 4 sheets. The most left is the data sheet, on each row a weightlifter. The second sheet is for creating the Wikipedia page. The number in X1 denotes the row number of the data sheet (do you get it). When changing it you get another wikipedia page. Now select and copy the columns A-V. Go to note-pad and paste (there are many tabs). Press Ctrl+H. Replace the tabs (copy and past one) with nothing. And you Wikipedia page is there. :). Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 15:34, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Example-2, here a page so you can try it yourself. Download the exel file at http://www.filedropper.com/fbwiki-womensworldcup . Find a red link at 1991 FIFA Women's World Cup squads, 1995 FIFA Women's World Cup squads or 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup squads. Find the person in the first data sheet. Go to the sheet Sheet1 and put the row of the person in T1. Now you can create the article :). Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 15:40, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks SvG. (We could supply you with the data ;). I'll look at those, though I have openoffice not excel. I think getting data out of wikidata in CSV format for upload to a spreadsheet should be easy to do. Fishing around in wikidata to find appropriate sets of items, the properties of which amount to enough information to create an article might be more difficult, though. I suspect that's where our effort needs to be right now ... pointers to wikidata items with sufficient properties are what we need. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:49, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
And, Sander.v.Ginkel, right now your articles on women turn up on wikidata with only instance of=human and gender=female. You have much more data in your spreadsheets. We might want to think about whether we can get the spreadsheets to drive wikidata population. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:44, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
quick_statements might be a route. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:05, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Latest comment: 8 years ago26 comments6 people in discussion

I realize there has been considerable interest in presenting our lists of redlinks and that Rosiestep in particular thought it would be useful to enhance their presentation. But for those of us who are creating or tabulating new lists, the situation has become unnecessarily complex as we now have lists all over the place. First of all, they appear on our main page under Redlink lists. There is also a separate listing at Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Redlist index. Then they all appear once more in our Women in Red template. All the Wikidata country lists are also contained in Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by nationality/header which appears on each of the individual country listings. In addition, many of the crowd-sourced lists, also contain links to pertinent Wikidata lists while our editathon pages contain their own links of useful redlink lists. I have just been updating the editathon page for November's Women writers which now contains links to six different redlink lists. While I always try to see that all updates and additions are reflected throughout, it seems to me as if a degree of rationalization might be called for. It would also reduce the need for copying and pasting whenever a new list appears. Any suggestions?--Ipigott (talk) 12:01, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

Rosiestep: Maybe a first step would be to delete Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Redlist index as it is simply not being used. I'll leave any action up to you as you created the page. Alternatively, you could make a redirect, perhaps to the WiR template?--Ipigott (talk) 07:51, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Ipigott: I think a redirect to the WiR template is a good idea. I'm in the midst of a move with spotty wifi so I can't get to it myself. Hopeful someone else can do so. --Rosiestep (talk) 14:19, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Done.--Ipigott (talk) 20:03, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Digression on by-occupation lists
Slightly orthogonal to this, Ipigott, would you be able to do a report providing a count of occupations for wikidata women with no en.wikipedia article ... I'm interested to see the range of occupations and the number of women in each, with a view to providing more lists and better divisions within lists - e.g. offloading some of the 13k women writers into subclasses of writers, given that the listeria list-length limit is 5k. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:37, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Tagishsimon: That would be an enormous assignment as you can see from the few Wikidata redlink lists on occupations we already have. I've noticed your modifications to writers and have added additional lists on journalists and playwrights. The original list on writers did however have the advantage that it provided a central listing for those interested in all types of writing. The other problem in connection with a report on lists based on occupations is that a considerable proportion of Wikidata entries have no info under occupation/profession. Did you see my recent comments under "Metrics data?" on this page.--Ipigott (talk) 14:08, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Under 'Metrics how?". Yes. Still recovering from my wikidatathon mentioned there; final result was about 900 biogs appended or linked. I'll respond to your thoughts there later.
AFAIK, the original list of writers showed and shows only 5k of the 13k writers listed on wikidata, so it fails as a central listing. Presuming you take the view that 5/13 is problematic, a solution is to decant species of writers into subclasses. The alternative is that the list continues to show an arbitrary subset of writers.
I don't follow your 'enormity of task' train of thought. A count of occupations report, on its own, is trivial (if you have SPARQL under control; I don't). It will allow us to evaluate - even accepting the lack of occupation data in wikidata - those occupations and sets of occupations that might usefully constitute a redlist. It will also allow us to spot occupations which might be incorporated into existing redlists - 'matrons' into nurses, etc. Still. YMMV. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:36, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Next, as to what we might do with additional occupation lists, beyond setting out as comprehensive-as-possible view of missing women, there is still very considerable outreach to be done amongst other wikiprojects. There are 2,000 of these, albeit many are dormant - Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. We should, I think, aim to get appropriate WiR redlists onto their todo lists, and ping their talk pages. (Not to say that this has not been done, but, probably, has not been done is a systematic fashion.) --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:35, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Anyway, there we go: SPARQL query fyi --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:39, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
and comme ca for WP Law [1] [2] --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:39, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
  • First of all, Tagishsimon, congratulations on somehow managing to adust the metrics for October from 530 a couple of days ago to 1249 today. I reckon that must be a result of your adding women occupation categories to the articles in order to trigger "female" on their Wikidata equivalents. I also see you have been creating quite a few "manual" entries on Wikidata. Your work came at just the right time as October had not been progressing very well. Nevertheless, I think there may be a potential problem between our interest in improving stats on our overall progress on the one hand, and our need to provide lists of redlinks on topics of interest as a basis for article improvement on the other. Wikidata's limit of 5,000 article displays is not necessarily a disadvantage here as it is probably sufficient for most editors to be able to draw on a list of 5,000 as a guide for new articles based on the other wiki languages. The breakdown of a more inclusive Wikidata coverage of women writers into subsets targeting novelists, poets, playwrights and journalists may therefore be of more interest to a statistical approach than as an aid to the creation of new articles. (You will see I've included all of them on the Women Writers editaton page for November - so let's see how it works out.) I should also point out that I am first and foremost a content editor. I only get involved in technical stuff when I find there is no one else around interested in providing support. The only programming language I have ever used professionally is IBM 360 Assembler back in the 1970s. So it's really great to have people like you around who are interested in the high-level language stuff. If this seems critical, it's not my intention. I think it's really great you have begun to take such an active interest in Women in Red and I hope we will be able to rely on your assistance in the future.--Ipigott (talk) 19:57, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks Ipigott. I see stats, redlists and article improvements as being distinct things, and don't see a problem where you say you do. If we have a biography, it should be related to a wikidata item, and as a consequence should be removed from a redlist. My work over the past couple of days was to create several hundred missing wikidata items, where en.wiki had a biog and wikidata had no item; and to link several hundred biogs to existing wikidata items. That mainly represents the sportpeople backlog, arising out of sportswomen categories not being linked to the occupation category. As I noted, it creates a spike in the stats, but is otherwise beneficial.
Might I get agreement from you that if there are more than 5000 members of an occupation (and that's the case for actor 34585, writer 14514, politician 13407, singer 8853, journalist 8249, painter 6291), I can start/continue implementing minus statements in the wikidata redlink report for all cases where we have a second report. (So, deduct poets from writers, for instance). The writers report will continue to be full. In this way an individual is more likely to be listed on at least one report; but the writer-poet will only be found in the poets list, the writer-lawyer only found in the law list. The alternative is that we have writer and law lists, with members common to both; and a bunch of other writers not listed anywhere (because of the 5k limit). --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:11, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Thanks for consulting me but as you know, you don't need my permission to undertake changes you think will be useful. Despite what you say, though, I think there might well be a case for maintaining some of the lists as they are. I have actually never found the fact that "only" 5,000 redlinks are listed to be a constraint. I often scan quickly through them for country listings and then begin writing articles on some of the more interesting names. I think other participants probably work along similar lines. The main problem for me is that many of the most important women simply do not appear in any of the lists because they have no profession/occupation info in Wikidata. In connection with our Wikidata editathon on Food and Drink, for example, I spent quite a bit of time rectifying this on Wikidata for women cookbook writers from the Scandinavian countries. I could easily catch many of them from the Wikipedia categories. But I do have a suggestion. If you really think it is important to reduce the length of some of the lists by implementing minus statements, you could perhaps leave the original lists as they are and create new lists with slightly different names. Furthermore, there might well be people who prefer to work from subsets such as playwrights, poets or novelists rather than writers. But other might expect these to be listed under writers too.--Ipigott (talk) 07:44, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
Ah. Categorically, I do not want reduce the length of some of the lists by implementing minus statements. What I do want to do is to use minus statements to move individuals from an over-subscribed list into another list. The over-subscribed list continues to have 5k entries. This I have done, so far, for writers, and will do for painters, politicians, actors, singers and journalists. I am not intending to use minus statements on any list with fewer than 5k entries. And agreed; the state of wikidata leaves something to be desired, but we are where we are. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:24, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Back to the original purpose of this thread. I've made changes this evening which mean that, in addition to Ipigott's earlier change, we have to maintain redlists in two places: Template:Women in Red and Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Tasks. I think the Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Tasks/Wikidata Missing Article Report should be deprecated, since (some archives aside) it seemed only to be usefully transcluded to the /Tasks page. I've also refactored the lists on the /Tasks page to simplify; columns within columns didn't work for me. As normal, feel free to revert anything that displeases you. (We can return to transclusion a la /Wikidata Missing Article Report if it comes to pass that we want to generate two pages from the same data.) --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:48, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

Looks good.--Ipigott (talk) 07:20, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Time, then, for a page-size digression. Notwithstanding the above discussion, I have a separate concern about the page-size of some of our wikidata-by-occupation pages. Users with metered bandwidth - I'm one, on a satellite connection; very costly, metered, capped; and we have very many mobile users - will not thank us for 850k length pages. I'd like to start splitting longer lists into multiple shorter lists, e.g. Writers A-D, Writers E-F; or Writers (EU), Writers (US) etc ... clearly there are wikipedia data quality limits on how we can do this. On first letter of the label will always work. Anything else (by surname, by country) will only work on a limited set of records. For me the problem is acute enough that I try not to touch these lists at all during metered periods, but wait until unmetered late-night before emerging... --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:24, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

Personally, I find the crowd-sourced lists most helpful. I do like how the wikidata ones include birth death dates, but I feel that if the person is covered on another language wiki there is less importance in getting them a page on the wiki english site because for most readers the automatic translations would suffice. I'm not sure about the bytes, but graphically wikidata lists seem unwieldy to navigate. BTW, I appreciate all your efforts it can't be an easy undertaking.Fred (talk) 14:28, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
@Frederika Eilers: Whenever we are working on a new focus or are running an editathon, I always look carefully at both the crowd-sourced lists and those from Wikidata as I find they contain different sets of interesting names. The "crowd" (usually just two or three interested editors) often pick the names from established reference works or from reliable internet sites. They often are indeed completely new names for Wikipedia but frequently include the names of women already covered in other languages. I find the Wikidata lists particularly useful for identifying women who have played in important historic role in their own countries which sometimes has had international implications. When I write articles about them, I seldom translate directly from the articles in other languages but try to research all the available sources. I think you will find many of our EN articles drawn from Wikidata lists provide far better accounts than those in the other languages. As for relying on machine translations, you first have to be able to find the non-English Wikipedia articles (which for English-speaking users do not automatically appear at the top of a search as the EN ones do) but you then have to try to interpret the translated content. Your best bet at that stage, at least for notable people, is probably to search elsewhere for sources in English. So in a nutshell, I think we need to maintain both sets of lists.--Ipigott (talk) 07:47, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
@Tagishsimon: I was somewhat surprised by your giving so much importance to the size of the larger Wikidata lists and the problems of downloading. This is the first time anyone has commented on the problem. I thought that nowadays with TV channels, etc., being delivered through the internet, text and still photo documents were easily accessible at minimal cost to the user. If others have been experiencing a size problem, I would be interested in hearing from them. If it is really necessary to reduce the size of the lists (and I think we need more evidence before we go ahead), I would suggest we first look at the savings which could be made by eliminating the images. If we then need to go further, rather than selecting ranges based on the letters of the alphabet, I think it would be more useful to work on the dates of birth and death. The huge number of articles written about women born over the past thirty years or so are generally very scanty and poorly referenced compared those about older women. But before we go any further with this, I think we need to hear whether the editors who use the Wikidata lists see size as a major problem.--Ipigott (talk) 07:47, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
If your bandwidth is not metered & capped, it's easy to be surprised when reminded that the same does not hold for everyone. Welcome to UK rural broadband circa 2016. A comment on Wikidata:Request a query prompted my size comment here, and provides evidence that others (well, another) independently shares the concern. I'm resisting the temptation to think that you're saying either that you disbelieve my problem, or think that if, for some reason, it merely affects me, then we can let it pass. I suggest that usage caps and very slow bandwidth affect many users; those in the west using satellite and mobile connections, those in less developed countries using, again, satellite, mobile, metered DSL or dial-up. I recognise we are not talking about article-length, but I note anyway WP:CHOKING, probably worth a read. We are probably ingenious enough to split lists without losing listings. I understand the wish to retain the 5k lists: I tend to think that we should be marking these as L on the template as well as on /Tasks. The underlying principle should be one of avoiding inadvertent harm to users. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:55, 22 October 2016 (UTC)


We definitely need the names from both lists (crowd-sourced; Wikidata-generated) as they contain unique entries and overlapping entries. In their current state, they (and their citations) are definitely information silos. Harej is working on redlink/redlist data integration so adding him in case he wants to comment. --Rosiestep (talk) 13:43, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
I agree with needing both lists. I often use both to choose my subject and then find from creating one biography, other names to add to our crowd sourced lists. I would remind people to save their links in Wayback, as many times in other language WPs seems that the links are dead and weren't saved. SusunW (talk) 14:57, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
I don't think there's a question but that we'll keep both types of list. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:55, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Rosiestep. It is a bit messy. Women in Red has lots of data. It's amazing, and I continue to be impressed. Organizing all of this is hard work. Currently I am working on a new tool that will let you create lists of pages, and when you embed them on the WikiProject page, it only shows some at a time—and you don't have to do anything to make this work, it just does. I should have a proof of concept online very soon. Where I would like to end up eventually is having just one type of list – the origin of the information is indicated, but it is just shown as one list. (Subdivided by whatever topical criteria the WikiProject wants, of course.) This will make it easier to work through everything. Harej (talk) 21:58, 22 October 2016 (UTC)

@Harej: I hope you will give us a chance to review these developments before they are added to the WiR pages. Some of the earlier lists on writers, artists, etc., displaying only a few names, were not very informative. I remember you discussed improvements to lists in the May-June newsletter but I could not find any examples of your work. In connection with our interest in the improvement of articles about women in different areas of interest or in different countries, it would also be useful to have an easy way of listing stubs, especially really short stubs, so that they can be picked up for further work. The lists could be based on Wikidata with the same kind of information/display as those we are using for red links. I have not been able to find any project reports on Project X since June. Are any available?--Ipigott (talk) 10:08, 23 October 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia Asian Month (moved here after archive

Latest comment: 8 years ago23 comments5 people in discussion
NB. I wanted to reply to this thread and it had been archived so I moved it here ob 24 October. It was on Rosies page so it may read oodly. Victuallers (talk) 09:57, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

You'll be pleased to see, Rosie, that AddisWang has created Wikipedia:Wikipedia Asian Month/2016 WiR. I'll try to expand it with lists of redlinks, etc. When I've finished, I'll include appropriate announcements. I suggest the November editathon invitations should include women in food and drink and women writers with an additional line on WAM. Please let me know whether you agree with that approach as I remember you were once thinking of three fully-fledged editathons. Personally, I think the current WAM page with the necessary links to the contest pages is a more sensible option. It will avoid a lot of duplication. I've put together a draft invitation covering all three items here.--Ipigott (talk) 08:05, 20 October 2016 (UTC)

Ipigott: I love the approach and the invitation. I think we also need a WiR meetup page (#28) for Asian month which redirects to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Asian Month/2016 WiR as an event tracking mechanism. I can MassMessage over the weekend but have spotty wifi right now. --Rosiestep (talk) 14:26, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
If you wish, I can create an editathon page as a formality but I think it should basically be a redirect to the page AddisWang has created. I know you've been tied up with all kinds of other things for the past couple of weeks but our WiR editathon page for the Nigerian entertainers was not really a success. The Nigerians have announced further contests between now and the end of the year but given their rather closed approach, I am not too keen on promoting their contests on WiR. Victuallers has not been at all happy with the arrangement either. I think we are still hoping for a more collaborative approach with clear support fromWikiLovesWomen. This could perhaps be engineered in liaison with Dr. Blofeld's destubbing exercise on Africa which now makes special provision for new articles on women.--Ipigott (talk) 20:24, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
We're also accepting new articles on African women too, but no stubs, have to be minimum 1.5 kb prose.♦ Dr. Blofeld 20:40, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Good point Dr B and all up for Asian Month. The Nigerian project finished today. Dr B had a good go at it and I loaded lots of new pix but I don't think they understand the years of experience we have at running editathons. They may discover an even better way. They have IMO a strong loyalty to wikiloveswomen. Ive been chatting with Dr B. Our editathons have been working well renewing our enthusiasm each month but we need to think of doing something (much) bigger to refocus. The tricky bit is working out how to do it without overstretching our admin overhead even more. Our growing links with other languages I think is the key. Ian has been showing that we are continuing to move the needle but its moving v.slowly. Victuallers (talk) 20:58, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
Ummm ?????? I just looked at the scope of the user page - it says writing about Asian countries, I presume that is going to be notable Asian women when corrected? Victuallers (talk) 21:25, 20 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Victuallers: I see you are referring to Wikipedia:Wikipedia Asian Month. The page was drafted by AddisWang who is not a native English speaker. I think what he means is "articles relating to Asian countries" in the widest sense. They can cover geography, people, culture, history, religion, etc., providing articles are not about your own country or people living there.

On the wider question of how to make more rapid progress on the proportion of articles about women on the EN Wikipedia, I have made a number of suggestions on various talk pages. Unfortunately, there are so many discussions going on at the moment that many of the points seem to be drowned by new threads. Let me relist my ideas here:

  1. Closer contacts with the other language wikis which are progressing more quickly than we are on women's biographies. Overall that would include Korean and Japanese and for Europe Norwegian and Swedish. We might be able to get some good advice from them.
  2. Intensify our country focus. Through his drives and challenges, Dr. Blofeld has demonstrated how country-based initiatives can attract interest. We could no doubt do the same for women, possibly in liaison with the other languages. I suggest we could start with France, Germany, Spain and some of the larger Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico). In this connection, Anthere was quite successful in encouraging English/French collaboration on the French-speaking North-African countries.
  3. Consider drawing on Wikidata to automate the creation of draft stubs on the basis of the details on women in different occupations. Wikidata often contains a brief description, dates and places of birth and death, nationality, occupation(s) and images. It should not be difficult to create a framework for these to be inserted in an English-language textual framework with appropriate categories and name sorting. The automatic draft could then be expanded to at least a few lines by an editor/article creator. After a bit of practice, I would guess an experienced editor could handle five or six of these per hour.
  4. Last but not least, I think we should be givingn far more attention to how we can recruit and keep women editors. I have always considered this a top priority but most WiR participants seem to be more interested in writing articles. I think we could achieve far more by working through schools and colleges.

If anyone is interested in helping with any of these, we could no doubt begin working on them fairly soon.--Ipigott (talk) 10:21, 21 October 2016 (UTC)

I think it's fair to say that we've come a long way, and there's a lot more work to do!! All of these ideas have merit but you are right, sometimes ideas get lost in a sea of other talkpage posts. This is why I recommend we also communicate orally via semi-regularly-scheduled calls, 1 Saturday/month, Skype or Google hangout, with a pre-established agenda so that we stay on track and limit the time commitment to say 30-60 minutes. I'm available this Saturday at 8AM or 9AM PDT if that works for anyone else. If we're on for this Saturday, I would suggest we work on the Asian women editathon and how to promote this one across multiple languages. --Rosiestep (talk) 13:59, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
  • On the Asian front, I have already notified all the WikiProjects for Asian countries. I would suggest key players in WAM such as AddisWang could now simply be encouraged to notify the other participating countries that focus on women is being implemented for English this year and could be extended across the board (i.e. for all the languages specifically represented).
  • On improving our impact, maybe it would also help to have a WiR page dedicated to suggestions for improving the effectiveness of WiR (i.e. how to increase the proportion of women's biographies and related articles on the EN Wikipedia). That would allow everyone to come up with ideas and ways and means of implementing them. I would guess that just this month, around a dozen different editors have been making useful suggestions on a variety of topics. We could create it as Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Impact. It could serve as a basis for developing other pages on specific topics such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Impact/Attracting new editors--Ipigott (talk) 08:19, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Ian, I'd be happy to use your ideas as the basis of a discussion page. I like all of them. (Although I'm not an enthusiast for especially focussing on women editors. I don't object of course but the problem is too large to be fussy about those who want to fix the problem.) However I do feel strongly about the "atmosphere" of our project. We do not at present have an editor who is being disruptive or rude but we need to sanction anyone who spoils this project and supportive of victims. I do think chatting on Skype can be useful to deal with person to person issues that can build up overtime. I respect anyone who feels that they dont want to ... and we need to make sure that decisions are not being made de facto offline. On the subject of stub creation. I just gave a barnstar to Sander.v.Ginkel who is doing a good job. S/he could "the engine" of an editathon. S/he is trying dozens of women footballer biogs. These will have a positive effect on this months figures - we could agree that we would try and de-stub them after creation. I'm trying to encourage this in a vague way via tweets to footballer groups. Nuff said. Victuallers (talk) 15:17, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
@Victuallers: Thanks, Roger, for your words of support. If I have time tomorrow, I'll try to put some ideas together with some of the views already expressed by our participants. I understand your views on women editors and have to agree with you that most of the innovative ideas about how to address the problem of improving the coverage of women and their works have indeed come from men, including your own great proposal on "picking up more women" (now Women in Red). Dr. Blofeld has also helped things along by providing for synergy between all the WikiProjects on women and presenting the case for more attention to quality improvement. And most of the technical support has been from male editors too. On the other hand, I must say that in my professional work in the EU, I came to realize how important it was for women to participate in taking things forward in the area of GLAM and multilingual internet services. Some of the greatest achievements in Europe (such as the development of Europeana and the management of Europe's national libraries) clearly demonstrate how effective women can be. In my opinion, one of the major problems with the EN Wikipedia is that the vast majority of contributors are male. Men naturally want to write about men and are far more interested in topics such as military history, soccer, and politics, in which men have always played a leading role. I am convinced that if we succeed in encouraging more women to contribute to Wikipedia, we will see a significant development of fields in which women have excelled historically as well as in their recent impact in virtually every field of human endeavor. That is why I think it is vital for us to see how we can encourage more women to join Wikipedia as editors, not just for a few hours during an editathon but for the longer term.--Ipigott (talk) 21:57, 22 October 2016 (UTC)
Ian's gendered post (above) bothered me and some others who wrote to me via Skype, Slack, FB, and email, which is why I archived it off my talkpage. --Rosiestep (talk) 01:48, 25 October 2016 (UTC)
Thx Ian @Ipigott: (Sorry fopr delay in answering) - good idea. Not sure I should have opened this gender debate. The Europeanna head is excelent - she has moved this vast project in the direction of free licensing - although I believe they spent quite a sum (not sure they would want it quoting here) before they realised. However I think the key idea of WiR is that we don't care who delivers the solution. We could discuss this more but its an avoidable discussion. The major benefit here were your main proposals. If we could increase 16% to 36% or 56%$ then I think we would both agree that this should have a positive effect in gaining more Wikipedia editors in the future (and politicians, Nobel prize winners, astronauts, painters and ...). The latter categories are possibly the most important? Anyway send me a link when you have had time to create a talk space. Victuallers (talk) 09:57, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
@Victuallers: Yes, Jill Cousins has been doing a fantastic job. I remember at one of our early meetings around 2005 she said she would like to develop a site with a search function for European culture rather like the Google search. At the time, most people thought she was quite out of her depth but as you can see today, she's more or less succeeded. I think the EU funding and the support from the National Libraries has been well spent. I suppose you read their monthly newsletters: one set of impressive developments after another.--Ipigott (talk) 12:12, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: I am completely bowled over by your reaction to my plea for more support for women editors. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read what you wrote above. If that is really your view, then my time on Wikipedia would probably be better spent elsewhere. I thought it was only the male members of the project I needed to convince but I have obviously completely misunderstood our objectives. I can only apologize for upsetting you all. My understanding of the Wikipedia gender gap is obviously not shared by the other members of the project. (And now I suddenly realize why Women in Red is not mentioned on that meta page.)--Ipigott (talk) 12:40, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott: this was about one part of your post: who has had innovative ideas. The women editors felt you hadn't noticed women's innovative ideas as you only mentioned those of men. I didn't want to make a big deal out of this which is why I archived my talkpage instead of responding there; for me, it's easier to avoid confrontation than to speak up. But as the post resurfaced here, I decided you and others might appreciate the honesty, e.g. how do we move forward if we aren't honest with each other? --Rosiestep (talk) 16:12, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: I do not like any kind of confrontations on Wikipedia, especially not on WiR which I had always considered a friendly environment. I was in fact replying to Victuallers who had questioned the reasons for my interest in enhancing the number and importance of women editors, which he clearly did not like. I was simply trying to comfort him by emphasizing the important role men have played on the innovative front in WiR by explaining that far more women should be brought on board as in my experience they have performed as well if not better than men on all fronts. I had received very negative reactions to my stand from one of the other enterprising male members of WiR. It was therefore a real slap in the face when you yourself decided to remove the discussion from your talk page citing all the Skype reactions, etc. If the need to attract more women participants in WiR is not seen as a priority, then I have serious misgivings about the future of the project and would probably do better to concentrate on other priorities. I could perhaps spend more time on the other language wikis such as the French onei where I had promised Anthere I would attempt to support the African WikiLovesWomen in French. A change of scene would probably be good for us all. I had been really enjoying contributing to WiR but I now see I have been causing more problems than I have solved. Once again, my sincere apologies.--Ipigott (talk) 16:37, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
I have no idea what the roots of the issue are. But you are welcome to help on the French side if you need a change of landscape :) Anthere (talk)
Quelle rapidité de réponse, Anthere! Un changement de "paysage" pendant quelques semaines me ferait certainement du bien. Et j'aurai l'occasion de participer à la couverture de l'Afrique anglophone en langue française. Il faudrait que j'obtienne une version française de Firefox pour supprimer toutes les fautes d'orthographe.--Ipigott (talk) 17:01, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott and Rosiestep: I am completely torn asunder by this exchange. I would ask that no one act in haste. Both of you are valuable to this project. If we are to succeed, there must be a better way to resolve issues. Crawling back into my cave. Hoping against hope that we haven't lost one of our biggest champions, over a few misplaced words. SusunW (talk) 17:39, 26 October 2016 (UTC) Ditto, step back - this project is too valuable and this page is a haven in a wikiworld of snipe and harassment. Victuallers (talk) 21:23, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
  • Don't worry. In retrospect, and after a good night's sleep, this all seems to be a result of a series of misunderstandings. I certainly did not intend to offend anyone. If I did, please accept my apologies. I'm sure we can all continue to work together constructively in the future. Every day, I see positive new ideas emerging on the project. Let's hope we can take them on board and achieve even faster progress.--Ipigott (talk) 07:15, 27 October 2016 (UTC)
Very pleased. My only worry is that volunteers who have devoted person-years to this project have their words questioned for motive. Can we remember that everyone on this page has very very similar view on the important issues. Finding disagreement is possible - but its minor and re can allow it. Thanks Victuallers (talk) 08:03, 28 October 2016 (UTC)

Cross-listing for editathon outcomes?

Latest comment: 7 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Noob question for simultaneous editathons--if I've got an entry that fits more than one WIR editathon category, should I just pick whichever one seems most appropriate and post the entry to that outcomes list, or list both places? Thanks! Innisfree987 (talk) 18:12, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Good question. I sometimes list them in both and sometimes only one. Don't know if we have ever actually discussed it, or if we have and I just forgot. Since I am working on an Asian woman's book right now, it's a pertinent question. SusunW (talk) 19:00, 1 November 2016 (UTC)
Innisfree987 If it's not too much trouble, I would list them in both. The listings provide a fair idea of how we have progressed in each area. Double listing will not affect the metrics as duplicates are eliminated.--Ipigott (talk) 11:43, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
No trouble at all! And agreed, very good to know how many entries we have in a given area--glad to know we can do that without distorting metrics. Thanks! Innisfree987 (talk) 13:12, 2 November 2016 (UTC)
I think it's fine to list the article in every edit-a-thon which fits the article. So if you were to create a biography about an Asian woman cookbook author, you could add it to our 3 current edit-a-thons. :) Note, the bot which scrapes Wikipedia every month, searching for articles within our project's scope, will only list the article once on the Metrics page, in alpha order. Happy editing! --Rosiestep (talk) 02:26, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Book prize

Latest comment: 7 years ago5 comments4 people in discussion

Offering this book Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa by Kathleen Sheldon for the first person who can create or destub 50 biographies on African women for the Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon. It has a ton of articles on women and institutions which will fuel further article creation here!♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:26, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

how about reading 50 African women biographies?  Coolabahapple (talk) 02:54, 26 October 2016 (UTC)
@Dr. Blofeld: I accepted the challenge and created over the last 3 days even 200 stubs on African women. But jeah I know, many are stubs (just above 1500kb), with some of them longer like Oluwatobiloba Windapo. However as I want that other people are stimulated, you must offer the price to someone else :). Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 21:21, 28 October 2016 (UTC)
It is a Destubathon, aimed at reducing stub count not increasing it.. The entries will have to be 1.5 kb readable prose for entry in the contest. Windapo is 700 bytes, we need 1500. But your effort all the same is appreciated, WIR will be very happy :-). Place the entries in Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/The 10,000 Challenge. If there's any you can expand to over 1.5kb they can be entered into the contest.♦ Dr. Blofeld 07:13, 29 October 2016 (UTC)
Dr. Blofeld raises a valid point. Stubs are targets for deletion. I think it is as important to save the articles we have as it is to create new articles that will simply be deleted due to lack of sources and inadequate explanations of why an individual is notable. Montanabw(talk) 02:44, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata WiR redlist - format change proposal

Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion

I'd like to remove the index column from all of our wikidata-derived redlists - that is, the column containing the row number. I'd like to know if anyone has any objections or comments.

The reason for so-doing is this: diffs can be used to spot when an article has been added to wikipedia, but has not been linked to the corresponding item in wikidata. Here's an example diff of a table I maintain in my userspace, from the 17th October, in which the change from [[Jane Martineau]] to [[Jane Martineau (Q18559773)|Jane Martineau]] indicates the arrival of a new article; and here's the history for the new article, showing it was added on the 17th Oct. Note especially that the size of the diff is fairly small; it's easy to see what's been going on.

By contrast it's near impossible to see the wood for the trees when we have the index column, because a single change (e.g. addition or subtraction of a row) cascades right through the whole table, meaning the diff will be massive (and here's an example of that sort of diff).

It is useful to be able to spot instances of the addition of an article to wikipedia where appropriate wikidata linkage has not happened, not least since remedying the linkage removes the wikidata item from the redlist.

The downside of removing the column is that the table no longer shows how many rows there are. I think this is a very small price to pay.

Thoughts? thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:19, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

@Tagishsimon: I have no objection to this. I think you should just go ahead and do it.--Ipigott (talk) 09:00, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
I agree, no objection. Maybe, if possible, a sentence at the bottom could be placed like: "Total numer of articles: 3452". Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 09:46, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

New Wikiproject Outreach page

Latest comment: 7 years ago4 comments3 people in discussion

I've started a WiR project page on Wikiproject Outreach, fyi, with a view to bringing WiR to the attention of projects which might be unaware of the initiative. There's probably quite a lot we can usefully do by co-opting other projects and by providing them with resources to assist their work in redressing the gender imbalance.

As normal, please feel free to join this game, colonise the new page, etc. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:02, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

@Tagishsimon: I'm really impressed by all the helpful initiatives you are taking in connection with WiR. The more we can attract interest in the project by drawing attention to our lists of red links the better. Maybe it would also be useful to alert the country-based WikiProjects to the relevant red link lists by country.--Ipigott (talk) 10:55, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
Thanks; and agreed, it's on my nebulous todo list to put country-specific lists in front of appropriate projects ... I'm hoping I can get a wee bit more industrial in my approach to wikiprojects, but playing wikidata games has been a big distraction in the last month. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:27, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Huge increase in WiR biographies in week to 30 October

Latest comment: 7 years ago7 comments6 people in discussion

In the week from 23 to 30 October, 69.6% (1,600 out of 2,299) of the new biographies entered on Wikidata were on women. This was the highest weekly increase ever. It seems to be a result mainly of the special focus on women in the African destubathon. There has also been a surge in short stubs on women in sports and an improvement of bot efficiency in transferring key data from Wikipedia to Wikidata. But whatever the causes, the EN Wikipedia was by far the most productive in creating new women biographies. See the details at the gender by language site.--Ipigott (talk) 15:46, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

That is a stunning result. I suspect Sander.v.Ginkel may have played a role in that. As noted above WIR is very happy with this. These are good quality created stubs of sportswomen. I have already given her/him a WIR barnstar. 69% turns back history for one month at least. Thanks for putting the data together Ian. I'm also pleased to see an Editathon in Korea and one editor dressed in a #Wikiwomeninred Halloween costume (a red jumper) :) Victuallers (talk) 22:33, 31 October 2016 (UTC)

LOL! @Sander.v.Ginkel: Can you give me the list of Africa women stubs? I'll put them up on the women page underneath so people can further add to them if they wish. Great job!♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:43, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

This is great news! Thank you to all the hard-working organisers like Ipigott!Fred (talk) 15:42, 1 November 2016 (UTC)

Week to 6 November again!

And in the week to 6 November, from the 1126 articles 711 women's articles (see here). Thats 63.14%! This is great :) Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 11:21, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

You'd perhaps know best, SvG ... are you bulk-creating male sportspeople at the moment, or is your focus restricted to women? I've been sitting on petscan for the last month pumping your (and others) women-biog creations into wikidata, and as a lower priority looking for men-biogs which are not on wikidata ... we're probably doing better at creating wikidata items for new women-biogs then men-biogs right now, but the backlog of wikipedia men-biogs does not look to be increasing very greatly. It's difficult to get a very clear picture, but it does look as if the simple explanation is that there are more women-biogs being put together than men. Long may that continue. (And I see you were in Manchester. I was there, but many years before you, slightly further south on Oxford Road, and considerably stupider than you ;) --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Report bot kaput?

Reports bot hasn't meaningfully updated Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Metrics/November 2016 since 6 November. I've pinged Harej, its owner. --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:40, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Tracks

Latest comment: 7 years ago16 comments5 people in discussion

(added section header for this part...) --Rosiestep (talk) 21:24, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

I've spent months working on WikiConference North America and there are lessons learned from that. One is "programming tracks". WiR is a huge initiative now, and it has developed lots of tracks:
  1. monthly, unsponsored, focused editathons
  2. collaborations (with other on-wiki campaigns; with off-wiki sponsors; with other language wiki communities)
  3. presentations
  4. press/social media/podcasts
  5. redlinks/redlists
Yes, it's a lot of "programming", but we're volunteers so each concentrates on what suits him/her.
I think saying yes to every sponsored opportunity is good for WiR's goal of "moving the needle" as sponsors increase the visibility of our work. Focused, unsponsored editathons are also important priorities, as are Dr. Blofeld's and WikiLovesWomen and AsiaMonth and A+F campaigns. That said, long ago, we agreed that editors don't have to participate in every event; that has not changed.
WMF/WMUK/BBC did not reach out to Women in Red or suggest its participation. WMF reached out to me to help coordinate the WMUK/BBC in-person worldwide editathons. *I* asked in yesterday's phone call if WiR could participate, and they said yes. Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned WiR in the phone call and stuck with the discussion at hand (in-person editathons), but I saw opportunity and acted on it. I am mindful that WiR has become a multi-language WikiProject -seven languages are listed in our language bar- so working with sponsors is a global consideration, not just enwiki bandwidth. For what it's worth, the scenario with the UN in August was the same: the UN asked me to participate in an in-person event and during that call, *I* asked if WiR could participate virtually. These are big organizations and I think I acted appropriately in promoting WiR when I had the opportunity to do so. --Rosiestep (talk) 20:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
I guess I'm kind of like Rosiestep. I think we say yes to any initiative that will move the needle forward as long as it produces good content. People will choose or not choose to participate, and frankly, I have reached the point where I recognize that every event does not require me to contribute tons of articles. I split my time creating articles I deem important for each of the editathons. I've expressed before that quantity over quality is of negligible value to me, but it seems to me that an initiative aimed at identifying notable women globally surely will produce efforts to create valuable content. I also think we have to keep working on the technology piece to eliminate as much of the manual tracking as possible, but we are miles ahead of where we started on that front, IMO. SusunW (talk) 21:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
It's a very positive thing I think that the BBC are covering it. It's not just any old group covering it. So some kudos is certainly due. Rosie said before anyway that editors can opt for what they want and don't want. As Susun says though, it should also be about quality, not just a figure, so we need something which is going to improve existing quality and encourage decent new articles at the same time. Obviously eventually we want one million + GAs on women, right?♦ Dr. Blofeld 21:44, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
Adding one more "programming track" to the above list: redlinks/redlists. IMO, documenting a missing article is as important as creating it and/or improving it. --Rosiestep (talk) 04:08, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
  • I very much like Rosie's development of "tracks". That puts everything in a much better perspective. It also provides an excellent basis for presenting the various initiatives we are supporting or which are supporting us. Like Susun, I am more interested in quality than quantity but I also realize it is important to keep the needle moving forward. Now that we've had such a fruitful discussion, it might be useful to add a few additional explanations to our main project page on how we intend to go forward.--Ipigott (talk) 08:18, 9 November 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: Thanks. That makes things a lot clearer. Perhaps somewhere we should also mention all Dr. Blofeld's challenges and drives, many of which specifically point to missing articles on women. These recently seem to have triggered considerable effort on increasing our coverage. I have also been wondering whether we should improve the display of the main page. The icon "Tasks" currently points to a section which is redundant as the info is already presented under "Events". I suggest we replace it by "Red links" pointing directly to the important Red Link section. And now that the introduction is longer, it might be better to reposition all the icons right at the top of the page. Of course we can't do any of this ourselves. So if you agree, you should let Harej or his Project X colleagues know what we want.--Ipigott (talk) 15:08, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott: I've made some changes to the bulleted area of the lede for further clarification. Does this work? And BTW, spelling it out like this really brings focus to the many things we have been doing in the last 17 months. Adding Harej to the conversation regarding the other changes mentioned for the mainpage. --Rosiestep (talk) 16:32, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: That really spells it all out! The only problem is that the introduction now takes up over a screenful of information (at least on my screen). It might seem less overpowering if the line spacing could be reduced, at least for the part on tracks. But I don't really feel strongly about it.--Ipigott (talk) 16:58, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Part of the problem is shortcuts taking up valuable space at the top ... in turn, the use of (I presume) wikiproject X module formatting means we have little control over format issues, which is a bad thing ... exemplified by IPs comment, above, of the need to get Harej involved in what would otherwise be a minor edit. I'm not a fan of what appears little gain for maximum inconvenience; the straightjacket is very uncomfortable indeed, and I wonder why we volunteered to wear it :( --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:11, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
Tagishsimon - some history... In early July 2015, before launching WiR, Victuallers and I had conversations with Harej, who had just started up WikiProject X, re designing the project we were about to unveil at Wikimania Mexico City. We requested a cool, new layout, something different than the we'd see on other WikiProjects. Seventeen months later, much to everyone's surprise, including Harej's, Roger's and mine, WiR has become a booming project. The fact that WikiProject X has to be called upon to make changes to the modules doesn't work well for any of us, including the WikiProject X team, as the module model works best, I think, for stable projects. WiR isn't stable; it's constantly morphing. There have been previous discussions on the WiR talkpage about parting ways with WikiProject X and our members taking tech control of WiR, but that's never moved forward. If we had consensus regarding the way forward, and someone had technical know-how on how to make that happen, then we could ditch the "straightjacket". --Rosiestep (talk) 20:42, 10 November 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep and Tagishsimon: Since the early days, both Dr. Blofeld and I have repeatedly suggested moving away from Project X with all its constraints but Rosie was always very much committed to working with them. Initially some of what was promised looked attractive but it took about a year to develop Wikidata-based lists of red links which looked to me as the most useful facility. Other members of WiR liked the "Facebook approach" to membership registration and I believe some also liked the icons. Like Tagishsimon, I think it would be far better if we could edit all levels of our pages ourselves as we were able to do with other WikiProjects like Women Writers (which unfortunately has also recently moved into Project X). I must say in their defence that Project X has always been keen to help us resolve our problems, most recently introducing tools to handle our metrics (although these have twice broken down for several days over the past few weeks and were only restored a few hours ago). What I suggest is that we explore ways of maintaining useful features such as member registration and metrics assistance with Harej and his colleagues while working towards fully transparent, fully editable pages for the entire WiR project. A number of more technically oriented editors now take an interest in the project including Edgars2007 and Tagishsimon himself. They might not only be able to help us along but could suggest general improvements to the project and its web pages.--Ipigott (talk) 10:00, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
I concur. Facilities such as member registration and especially metrics are, for me, indistinguishable from magic, and I take my hat off to Harej and whoever else was & is responsible for them. It would indeed be ideal if we could retain those, whilst moving the pages back to a more old-school approach. I'd be grateful if Harej could give us some guidance on this, so that we can stop bugging him/her about trivial formatting issues. --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:53, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, for me if a page deals with content related issues or tasks I want to be able to edit it directly. That's the important thing I think with wiki is to be able to quickly alter/update and not have to figure out how to do it. But everybody here seems to have managed with Harej's system so far so something has obviously worked!♦ Dr. Blofeld 10:10, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Let's make it happen folks: keep the parts that we want to keep, and take control of the sections we want to control. I imagine WikiProjectX's design team would embrace a WiR hybrid model (cc: Harej). --Rosiestep (talk) 21:37, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Great website

Latest comment: 7 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion

I just found a great website with biographies about notable sportspeople from Estonia. There are many women listed who are not on Wikipedia. See esbl.ee Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 14:46, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

@Sander.v.Ginkel: That's just your area of interest. Can you cope with the Estonian?--Ipigott (talk) 17:43, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
It's a bit too difficult to create them. However, because I thinks it's valuable, I started creating Wikipedia:Requested articles/Sports/Estonian sportspeople. Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 21:00, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

BBC 100 Women

Latest comment: 7 years ago17 comments7 people in discussion

Hello all,

Maria Cruz (Communications and Outreach Coordinator, L&E Team, WMF) and I are coordinating an international campaign with Lucy Crompton-Reid (CE WMUK) and Ahmen Khawaja (BBC), during the period of 21 Nov 16 through 8 Dec 16 for BBC 100 Women. Components to this campaign include:

  • editathons:
  • In-person editathons in multiple cities around the world. The BBC will give press coverage on December 8th to the in-person editathons in many cities, e.g. where they have bureaux, but there will also be in-person editathons occurring in cities where there are no bureaux.
  • Virtual editathons in multiple languages around the world, e.g. Women in Red!
  • This campaign has similarities with others, such as Art+Feminism (March 2014, 2015, 2016) and UN HerStory (August 2016)
  • Social media campaign will be big! No hashtag yet for the wiki part of the event, but the BBC programming part is using #100women.
  • The period of time -21 Nov through 8 Dec- coincides with the BBC season dates.
  • The scope is women's biographies.
  • The focus can be on whatever the particular in-person/online community is interested in covering... e.g. everyone, anyone who meets WP:N.
  • The campaign includes creating new contact, improving existing content, images, etc.
  • While women are encouraged to participate, everyone's participation is welcome.

Where does WiR fit in?

  • I'll start a meetup page for this event after WMUK gets their page up (Lucy said that will occur later in the week).
  • We can include all the articles we create during the 18 day period.
  • We can also include improved articles, e.g. articles within the focus of Women in Green, such as these, Wikipedia:WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon#Women article achievements (cc Dr. Blofeld) which were improved during the 18 day period.
  • We can also include new and improved images (cc: Adam Cuerden).
  • WiR social media:

Thoughts? Suggestions? Comments? Ideas? Where do we go from here? --Rosiestep (talk) 19:54, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Am I right? there is only nine days notice - the BBC are usually a bit more organised than this. I think we should get the active UK editors involved. Good that Lucy is involved but we should not overlook those who are doing the work. Do we know why the BBC left it so late? We have quite a lot of committed plans and committed editors. As it is we maybe have time for one Skype phone call. Victuallers (talk) 20:24, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
That's very exciting, but also wow, what short notice. I will be gone for the first week of the campaign as we are traveling for the Thanksgiving holiday. I suspect others with ties to the US will have time constraints as well. I'll do my best to participate at least a few articles. SusunW (talk) 21:04, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Whatever you want pinterest-wise, just holler. My #100wikidays ends on 16 November, so I'll be a little freer to take up other projects then.Penny Richards (talk) 21:51, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
The emphasis is on the in-person editathons being held Dec 8th in different cities around the world that have a BBC bureau. The BBC will photograph/videotape them.
The virtual WiR editathon is an add-on to what's already been in the planning since October by BBC/WMF/WMUK. As I see it, we can treat it like August's UN event:
  • Document all the articles and images within the scope of Women in Red and Women in Green that we work on during the 18 days on a meetup page (which I just created).
  • Social media campaign to promote us and our work.
  • Talk about WiR at an in-person event if you are able to attend one. --Rosiestep (talk) 23:22, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
  • In a way, it's good to see there is ever wider interest in covering women on Wikipedia but I agree with Victuallers and SusunW that news of this event has reached us very late for the online editathon. There is quite a bit more we can do to firm things up. The Wikipedia article needs to be updated to at least announce this year's event. An abstract needs to be added to WiR/29. From 21 November, we need to see that articles created by our participants are also added to the WiR/29 list. It would be helpful if the BBC could also announce our online editathon. I see from here that there is a special interest in Gaza, Uganda, Nepal and Kazakhstan and that an event is being held in Mexico City on 24 November. The "marathon editing session" in London is no doubt a Wikipedia editathon. Perhaps Fiona Crack could be persuaded to mention Wikipedia explicitly and also refer to the virtual editathon starting on 21 November. In the meantime, I've done a bit of work on the WiR/29 page but I'm not too sure how the abstract should be worded. Perhaps Rosiestep could put something together. And one last thing: without wanting to cause any offense and in the hope that my comments will not be misinterpreted, I was wondering to what extent other participants in WiR should be consulted before announcements of new editathons are made public. This one seems to have come as quite a surprise to us all.--Ipigott (talk) 11:55, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
  • Ipigott - I'll create the abstract for the WiR page after the WMUK posts its meetup page. Regarding "to what extent other participants in WiR should be consulted before announcements of new editathons are made public", can you please clarify? --Rosiestep (talk) 16:49, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
@Rosiestep: I certainly don't want to put you under any pressure after all you've had to cope with over the last few weeks but I wondered whether the WiR members still had any say in which editathons we should include among our published events. In the early days we discussed these in some detail before adding them to the active programme but I've noticed that recently you have simply assumed we would all agree to additional editathons on United Nations Women, Wikipedia Asian Month, and now BBC 100 Women. I think we may be getting to the stage where the editathons we have planned over the months are being swamped by new priorities. In addition, we have all the drives and challenges from Dr. Blofeld which also attract our attention. Perhaps there is a danger that the focus we have tried to ensure is no longer seen as really important, given that the last minute additions appear to cover any women biographies people choose to write. I'm not sure whether our metrics are the primary goal or whether we really want to produce good new articles on the fields we have chosen for the focus of the month. I am rather concerned that with up to six different activities at the same time, we can hardly be expected to make much progress on the established priorities. But I certainly don't want to cause any upsets by bringing this up.--Ipigott (talk) 17:15, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

I have something in mind Ipigott, and quite the opposite of losing sight of the WIR goal, it would strongly reinforce it. Long term I agree though on perhaps a bot being needed to list articles on both the regional challenges and WIR to avoid it getting complicated. I will do my best to get the challenges working in WIR's favour, not a distraction from it.♦ Dr. Blofeld 17:45, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

But you haven't answered any of my queries.--Ipigott (talk) 18:43, 8 November 2016 (UTC)
I've been talking to WMUK this week to see how we could be better involved. This looks like a great opportunity and I want this to not be like our recent collaboration where we ended up with two project pages and volunteers confused about where anything was. We have a lot of expertise here but the information and consultation that is required isn't happening as smooth as it might. And if you think this is aimed at anyone then please remember this is a volunteer project and we share our successes/issues equally (I reckon) I intend to speak to Ian direct to see if I can assist. Victuallers (talk) 15:10, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
Some housekeeping: --Rosiestep (talk) 23:50, 11 November 2016 (UTC)
  • I asked the BBC producer if she could provide the 2015 laureates list as I can't access it on the BBC website.
  • I created a cat on en-wiki, Category:BBC 100 Women, and added it to all the bluelinks at 100 Women (BBC).
  • I created a cat at Commons, c:Category:BBC 100 Women, but didn't get very far adding applicable images. Hope someone else can work on that.
  • Regarding Wikidata, I see this and wonder if a bot can add it to all the applicable entries?
  • I added an abstract to our meetup page.
  • I added the WiR event to the GLAM meetup page.
  • Penny Richards created a Pinterest board; thanks!

I'll see what I can do, but without image releases by the BBC it can be very hard to find images that fit the Wikipedia requirements of free reuse, as none will have automatically passed to public domain from age. I can still do historic women, and, indeed, have some on the go, interrupted by a bad coldAdam Cuerden (talk) 05:15, 16 November 2016 (UTC)

I tried Firefox, Chrome, and Safari, but I cannot see the list of 2015 laureates from this link. But if someone else can access the list (maybe outside the US?), could you please add 2015's 100 names here: 100 Women (BBC)#2015? Thanks, --Rosiestep (talk) 22:07, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
I've started it Rosiestep. We'll see how far I get before my dinner guests arrive. SusunW (talk) 22:39, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
My guests have arrived. Only 2 rows to go, so if someone else doesn't finish it, I'll get back to it later. SusunW (talk) 23:56, 16 November 2016 (UTC)
Rosiestep I finished them. Did not link a 17 year old student with only a first name, a reindeer nomad, or a Syrian refugee whose real name was not used. Included them in the chart, but unlikely there will be sufficient links to establish notability. SusunW (talk) 04:00, 17 November 2016 (UTC)
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