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Created Category:20th-century women singers last night; created Category:21st-century women singers today. Pinging Softlavender, as the two of us have already discussed the issue a bit. Also pinging Koavf as someone into whom I have run during my various recategorization runs, and someone whose input I would be interested in hearing, if he does not mind.

I've seen a preponderance of "20th-century women [x]" categories developed over the past year - writers, politicians, musicians, etc. There's also Category:20th-century sportswomen and the like. In the abstract, I have no problem with these (leaving aside, for the moment, the question of creating similar by-century categories for men), save that they are often created and left to die on the vine...hence a lot of my AWB work for the new year. That being said...I'm a bit concerned that:

a.) we're treading over some old ground here - a number of these categories were already deleted at CfD some years back, and we risk their deletion again if we don't decide that there is a rationale for their existence b.) some of these categories might prove to be less useful than others (again, I have no problem with Category:20th-century sportswomen in the abstract, but I'm not sure how helpful, in the concrete, it is

There's also the matter of balkanization, which I'm starting to see with women writers (e.g., Category:20th-century American women writers), but that's a matter for discussion at another time.

As I say, I have no dog in the fight, really; I just think it's time we begin hashing out these questions for fair, lest the issue complicate itself further. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 03:37, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

• Thanks for soliciting my feedback. I guess the only question that I would really ask is if the category schemes which are being diffused really need diffusion. Is Category:Women singers too big? Is Category:20th-century singers? If so, then split. Splitting by sex, nationality, century, and some sub-genre or movement are pretty classic categorization schemes. I think that @BrownHairedGirl: has been pretty active on this and may have something intelligent to say as well. ―Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:52, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, @Koavf.

In general, I think that ppl-by-occupation-and-century categories a nuisance for many of the sets so categorised. There are many such sets where nearly of our articles relate to the last hundred years or less, and dividing those by century is both useless for navigation and cluttering on articles..

By-century categories can be useful pre-20th cent, and esp pre-19th. However in cases where the set starts some time in the late 19th century or the mid-20th, by-century cats are pointless.

Category:Astronauts by century, Category:Computer scientists by century, Category:Submariners by century are examples of cases where by-century division would be pointless.

I am sad to see that Category:20th-century sportswomen etc have been recreated, despite having been deleted at a long series of discussions culminating in Wikipedia:Categories_for_discussion/Log/2010_March_7#The_last_sportspeople_by_century. I will take them back to CfD.

I think Justin asks one of the important questions above: if the category schemes which are being diffused really need diffusion. If we focus on diffusion, then in most cases the answer is no. Far too many by-century categories have been populated by mass copying from subcats to make huge, sprawling sets by copying from subcats. This is pointless: per WP:CAT, categories are about navigation, and these vast jumbled sets are useless for navigation.

I am appalled to see that Category:20th-century women singers is being populated in the same pointless way. It already has 2,100 articles which is far too big for useful navigation, and if fully populated it could amount to tens of thousands. Even worse, it is being populated by @Ser Amantio di Nicolao in his usual stealthy way, with edit summaries which give little clue what is being done. For example, [1] is one of hundreds or thousands of edits changing Category:20th-century women musicians→Category:20th-century women singers, with an edit summary which simply says recategorize. It would take a matter of seconds to set AWB's edit summary to [[:Category:20th-century women musicians]]→[[:Category:20th-century women singers]]. I warned SADiN about this last July[2], and there is no excuse for such a prolific editor to continue to make such widespread changes so stealthily.

Furthermore, this discussion is about widescale categorisation. It should have been located at WT:CAT, or at least notified there. I will leave a note there, as SADiN should have donld

I also see that Category:20th-century women singers is named "women", despite the top-level cat for women who sing being Category:Female singers. That disjuncture can be speedily renamed if the cat is kept, but it is a pity that the bots would have to add 2,000+ edits to epopel's watchlists just because SADiN didn't spend a moment checking naming conventions. Even more bizarrely, Category:20th-century women singers is not a subcat of Category:Female singers. Such sloppiness is inexcusable when thousands of articles are being recategorised. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 17:25, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

• See Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2018 January 12#20th/21st-century_sportspeople, which includes the 20th/21st-century sportswomen subcats. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:35, 12 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: what do you mean by "stealthy?" In reading what you wrote, I am unsure of what you're trying to say. Can you clarify? Do you mean that Ser Amantio di Nicolao is doing something that you feel he is trying to hide or are you implying that he doing something slowly? Stealthy in Miriam Webster. Thanks for clarifying, because I'm interested in this discussion, but your wording there is muddying the waters for me. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:10, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: I make no judgement about intent; I just note that the effect is stealthy.

SADiN has yet again made thousands of automated edits with an edit summary which does not clearly convey what he is doing. Using WP:AWB, the default edit summary is set at the start of the run, and unless modified on individual edits, that edit summary is used.

I use AWB a lot, and it takes seconds to make an explicit edit summary. Vague edit summaries are always deprecated, and they are especially problematic when large batches of edits are involved. That's the stealthiness: failure to covey through edit summary that he was placing all these articles in a single huge cat.

SADiN is v well aware that by-century categs are controversial, as evidenced inter alia by his post here. That makes it especially important that his work populating such categs should be transparent, and clearly convey what he is doing. All he had to do was type in the edit summary box [[:Category:20th-century women musicians]]→[[:Category:20th-century women singers]] or populating [[:Category:20th-century women singers]].

How long would that take him? 20 seconds? It's a trivial task before pressing AWB's "save" button 2000 times.

So why did he not do it? Vague edit summaries are a feature of stealthy editing, so it's theoretically possible that he intended to be stealthy. However, they are also a feature of careless or reckless editing, and I assume he was acting in good faith, so I assume that this was yet more recklessness. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 18:43, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I do have to say, however, in the case of Ser Amantio di Nicolao that you are making assumptions about intent which is bordering on not AGF. There are many reasons people leave vague edit summaries. In my case, I hate leaving edit summaries as I feel they slow me down while I'm working. I'm learning to be more patient, but my example can serve to show that vague edit summaries do not equal "stealth" or an attempt to hide behavior. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 19:57, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: meaningful edit summaries are one of the simplest and most important aspects of working collaboratively on Wikipedia. All edits with vague edit summaries are stealthy in effect, even if there was no intention to hide anything, so I'm glad to hear that you are using them more.
But that's a whole difft issue to SADiN's conduct. He consistently fails to use informative edit summaries on huge sets of tool-assisted edits. In this case, a decent edit summary would have added ~15 seconds to over 2 hours work. I think that "reckless" is the most benign and AGF label to put on such industrial-scale breach of such a basic principle. What word would you use? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:14, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I wouldn't use any words to ascribe motivations to how Ser Amantio di Nicolao uses edit summaries. I recognize that diverse groups of people working together are going to use the tools Wikipedia provides us in different ways. In addition, I would avoid loaded terminology (ie "stealthy" and "reckless") as you have in a discussion. I have had to spend time trying to sort this out with you via this discussion. I don't know you and your words make it sound as if you are accusing Ser Amantio di Nicalao of something. I hoped that wasn't the case and I can see that your choice of words comes from how you view best practices in editing. However, in the future, I'd advise against using loaded language. Ask the editor if it's unclear from their edit summaries. Thank you for taking the time for helping me understand where you are coming from. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 22:04, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: thanks, but you still miss the key point -- this is not about "best practice". It is about required practice for mass edits.

Access to powerful tools which perform mass changes is a revocable privilege granted on certain conditions, one of which is that they are only used for tasks for which there is consensus. Failure to use informative edit summaries hides the info about whether there is consensus.

In the case of one edit with unclear summary, it may be appropriate to let anyone ask if they want to know more. But when there is a series of thousands of identical edits, pro-active transparency is needed. The mass edits show up on the watchlists of hundreds (or maybe thousands) of editors, and in the revision history of thousands of pages. Doing something to thousands of pages on the basis that people can ask if they want to know more is a form of passive aggression which shifts the burden away from the editor doing the edit onto hundreds of other editors. Each individual query by each editor about each single edit would take significantly more time than it would SADiN to create a informative summary for the entire run.

And yes, I am accusing SADiN of misconduct, and I chose my words carefully to be as loaded as I considered appropriate; no less and no more. He is not a new editor, and he is not new to using tools such as AWB. These issues have been raised with him before, at length, so there is no doubt that he is well aware of the problems and has chosen not to resolve them. I do not know whether he has made a positive choice to act stealthily, but I do know that he persistently fails to very simple things which ensure openness. That is at best reckless. -BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 10:49, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

20th/21st-century female singers

I have done some preliminary number-crunching on female singers (see User:BrownHairedGirl/female singers), and the case against categs for 20th/21st-century female singers looks v strong.

• en.Wikipedia has 19,864 articles categorised as female singers.
• 94.3% of those women are still alive, possibly alive or died in the last 50 years

So the overwhelming majority of these articles relate not just to the 1880s-onwards era of recorded music, but to the mid-20th-century onwards. It makes no sense to divide that set by 20th/21st-century.

For classical and other genres which long predate the recorded era, it may make sense to extend by-century cats into the 20th & 21st-centuries, as per Category:Opera singers by century. But apart from such specialised cases, it would be much more useful to categorise singers by genre, because most singers of the recorded music era fall within genres which did not exist before recorded music: e.g. jazz, rap, rock, pop, country, blues.

So my current thinking is that it would be best to containerise all the gendered and ungendered cats for 20th/21st-century singers, 20th/21st-century musicians, 20th/21st-century [nationality] musicians, etc.

I won't open any CfDs on these until the closure of the current CfDs on 20th/21st-century sportspeople, and 20th/21st-century women politicians. Let's see what issues arise there before going further.

But in the meantime, I urge @Ser Amantio di Nicolao to desist from creating or mass-populating 20th/21st-century fooers categories. We need to see whether there really is a consensus in favour of such categories before using semi-automated tools to populate them, and per WP:AWBRULES#3, AWB should not be used for controversial edits.

Note that SADiN has a long history of misusing tools on a wide scale, by knowingly using them against consensus. See e.g. User talk:Ser Amantio di Nicolao/Archive 33#Lots_of_superfluous_cat-a-lots and User talk:Ser_Amantio di Nicolao/Archive 34#Applying_WP:SUBCAT_to_politician-by-country-century_categories, where SADiN abused AWB and cat-a-lot on a massive scale in breach of the basic categorisation rule of WP:SUBCAT. It would be helpful if SADiN could give an assurance that he will now seek consensus before making huge-scale controversial edits ... and do so at general categorisation venues such as WT:CAT rather than just on WikiProject pages. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:55, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

I find these discussions frustrating. I'm a librarian and the way I view categories are as a folksonomy. However, most editors treat categories in these discussions as if they have authority like taxonomies, which they do not. Categories, like all folksonomies, exist to make the experience of using and finding information easier. As editors, we need to decide whether or not the categories make it easier for the user or the editor. They can, in fact do both quite easily. They can even be redundant to some degree and should be when there are different ways of searching for information. I personally find the idea of having people categorized by as many was as possible to be useful. I feel that idea should be the ultimate test for any category. Is it useful? We can discuss nuance such as whether or not a category is bigoted in nature or using correct terminology, and that's also very important, but it isn't even as important as to whether or not the category is useful for editors and/or users in finding and organizing information. Finding and organizing information is the most important thing in regards to categorization and what we should focus on. In addition, this is Wikipedia, where we are urged to "Be bold," not to seek consensus for every move we make. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 19:57, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Hear, hear. As an historian, I agree with your assessment, Megalibrarygirl. The jumble of bureaucracy on WP is staggering in that it tends to disregard the actual reader and whether things are logically useful to the people who are using the material. SusunW (talk) 20:31, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

(ec)@Megalibrarygirl: the long-standing consensus is that en.wp categories are not a folksonomy; per WP:CAT, they are a hierarchical navigation system. And they differ significantly from a linnaean taxonomy, e.g. in not being mathematically pure.

Sure, "is it useful?" is the ultimate test for any category. But en.wp works by consensus, and there is broad consensus around which types of category are useful or not, and community-wide forums to form that consensus. We also need to avoid category clutter;the more categories on any page, the harder it becomes to navigate. (I think of them like road signs; less is more).

See WP:BOLD#Non-article_namespaces, which urges less boldness in non-article namespaces. And WP:AWBRULES is even even more specific: "Seek consensus for changes that could be controversial at the appropriate venue". All I have asked of SADiN is that the follow the conditions of use for anyone who is granted access this powerful tool. It's sad that it should even be necessary to ask. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:41, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

@SusunW: I'm a historian too, and I find jumble of bureaucracy an odd label for consensus. And I'm looking fwd to you explaining how an unannotated list of thousands of article titles is helpful to the reader. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:46, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Consensus on WP is more aptly described as decision formed by the volunteers interested in participating in any given discussion and may or may not be reflective of the actual views of the entire community. Time by its very existence is a measure of defining increments of history. SusunW (talk) 21:34, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I understand that Wikipedians view Categories as if they have authority. I'm telling you that an information professional like myself sees them as folksonomies, which is what they are. Plus, they don't need to have a linnean taxonomy. They just need to have authority to be taxonomies, which by the very nature of Wikipedia itself, they will never have. SusunW brings up a good point: many of the discussions for consensus do not reflect the actual wishes of the community. They instead reflect the loudest, bravest voices and the ones who were actually aware a discussion about the topic existed. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 22:12, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: I don't know who you have an mind when you claim that Wikipedians view Categories as if they have authority, but it's a straw man. That is not, and never has been, their purpose, nor am I aware of any guideline or policy which claims they are.

@SusunW: consensus, like democracy, is imperfect; sometimes v deeply imperfect. But the alternatives are much worse, such as one editor unilaterally abusing tools to spam thousands of into categories where they don't belong (as SADiN did, by ignoring WP:SUBCAT 'cos he doesn't like it). That's jungle law: the strongest wins. Consensus can change, and sometimes it does. But when a policy remains in place for over a decade it usually has some merit.

SusunW, of course time is is a measure of defining increments of history. But not everything needs to be explicitly timestamped, because sometimes the time is inherently stamped on the topic. "Women politicians" is one such topic: a one-hundred-year old phenomenon, roughly since my heroine Constance Markievicz broke the mold. "Rock singers" is another timestamped topic, which has no need of cluttering with by-century labels. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:38, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

Policy remains in place for decades because it has the political clout to do so, it has nothing to do with merit, i.e. apartheid, child marriage, colonialism, the crusades, the Cultural Revolution, nepotism, segregation, slavery, ad infinitum. SusunW (talk) 16:35, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Sure, @SusunW, out there in the non-virtual world, people with economic power and state violence can sustain diabolical policy long-term. But as I'm sure you know, I was referring to wikipedia policy, which is constructed between editors who are not differentiated by economic power and do not have gulags or riot police or partisan media to enforce their will on other editors.

If you want to proceed on the basis that long-standing en.wp consensus may be ignored because you think all en.wp processes are fundamentally flawed, then you are rejecting a core policy of en.wp. As we say in Ireland, good luck with that. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:03, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

Mischaracterization of my views doesn't mean that you win or are right. I tend never to think in absolutes. Nowhere did I say all en.wp processes are fundamentally flawed. I merely pointed out that your logic was flawed. Your badgering isn't likely to result in constructive dialogue, thus I withdraw from any further comment. SusunW (talk) 20:40, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: referring me to WP:CATS and insisting they are not a folksonomy implies that they have authority. Any form of categorization that is not an authority control, is IMO, a folksonomy. It may be a well-structured one, but it's a form of information organization that's created by a group of people working together, not by professionals. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 22:54, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: your personal definition of folksonomy is not that applied in the wikipedia article. Obviously, you are entitled to your own view on the meaning of words, but I am always unimpressed by arguments which rely on "I'm a professional", esp while contradicting the definition of the term's creator. In this case I'm v unimpressed by the crude binary logic which says that something which doesn't have all the features of an authoritative taxonomy must be a free-form tagging system.

If you would like Wikipedia's crowdsourced hierarchical categories to be replaced with a free-form tagging, you can open an WP:RFC to seek consensus for that idea. But until you get consensus for that, en.wp categories are not free-form tags. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:40, 15 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I'm just stating what I learned when I earned my MLIS. I don't think that folksonomies have to be free-for-alls, but I think we need to remember that they are free of authority and in that fashion, take everything we create as a category with a grain of salt, so to speak. It's more important that categories, tags and folksonomies be useful than anything else. That's my point. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 00:05, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: I everything with lots of salt, so at last we agree on something :)

But I think you are being too black-and-white about the authority thing. Authority is not a binary thing in info any more than in politics; it can be nuanced and partial. There is a lot of fertile ground between the poles.

And I agree too that categories should be useful. That's my main objection to these categories. None of the defenders of Ser Spam-a-lot's creation of huge-but-still-woefully-incomplete have offered any remotely plausible explanation of how an incomplete, imperfectly-sorted, wholly unannotated list of bare names is of any actual use for anything other than boosting Ser Spam-a-lot's edit count.

Do you want to try to explain an actual use of Category:20th-century women singers? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:48, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: really? You are calling Ser Amantio di Nicolao "Sir Spam-a-lot" on a public forum? This isn't acting on good faith as far as I can tell at all. When did we start making up schoolyard names for people we disagree with? This is inappropriate and derailing the discussion... again. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 00:56, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: I am not required to sustain an assumption of good faith in the face of clear evidence of bad faith, and on the spam point, the bad faith is blatant. Sir Spam-a-lot intentionally used tools to spam thousands of articles with categories which were superfluous 'cos the pages were already in a subcat (see WP:SUBCAT). I had an on-off discussion with him about it over several months, pointing out that while he was he was fully entitled to disagree with the basic consensus, he was not allowed to simply flout such a basic rule of categories on an industrial scale, and that WP:AWBRULES forbids its use against consensus.

He adamantly refused to clean up his mess, so eventually I and some other editors did it.

I can respect ppl I disagree with, but I deplore the abysmal conduct of an editor who is charming to talk to, but ignores consensus in a consensus-based project, and serially abuses the privileges he has been granted.

Anyway, leave the antics of Sir Spam-a-lot aside. Can you explain the actual usefulness of Category:20th-century women singers? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 01:48, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm sorry, BrownHairedGirl. I cannot leave your language behind. It displays a flagrant bias against the person you are discussing. It shows that you are not neutral in your discussions about Ser Amantio di Nicolao. At a bare minimum, using someone's preferred username as opposed to a school-yard appellation is where we need to start. How can I engage with you if you cannot show the bare minimum of courtesy by not calling other editors names? I find this extremely problematic. This is quickly becoming a situation that I think may need to be resolved with arbitration if you are not amenable to rectifying your approach. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 19:29, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: I am not at all biased against SADiN as a person. I am very biased against the sustained disruptive elements of his conduct.

I stand by my choice of language, and if you want to escalate to dispute resolution, that's fine by me. However, I do suggest that before you consider further action, you rectify your own approach, in particular your slavishly uncritical defence of a spammer who misuses privileged tools and your disruption of this discussion in order to do. Beware WP:BOOMERANG, both for yourself and especially for SADiN. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 19:50, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

BrownHairedGirl, I am very uncomfortable with your tone. For example, your last sentence, starting with the word "Beware", feels threatening. Kindly, AGF. --Rosiestep (talk) 21:06, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@Rosiestep: if you take moment to read a step or two back in the conversation, you will see that I was responding to a threat from Megalibrarygirl. Kindly, AGF. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 21:14, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@Rosiestep and BrownHairedGirl: it wasn't a threat: it was a suggestion since I could tell this was going to derail. And it has, unfortunately. I am not going to be able to have the opportunity to engage in this interesting discussion because I feel it's not going to go anywhere. I had hoped to understand where BrownHairedGirl was coming from and now I feel I understand even less. I'm sorry if I made you feel threatened and I am withdrawing from the discussion and reclaiming my time. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 23:48, 16 January 2018 (UTC)

@Megalibrarygirl: you could have learned a lot more if you had not chosen to divert the discussion into tone policing and to repeatedly ignore the points of substance apart from asserting false binaries. I think it's a pity that you made that choice, but there it is. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 20:37, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I'm sure you're right: I may have learned quite a bit. However, WP:Civility is part of Wikipedia's code of conduct. I'd never met you before and the way you presented yourself makes me want to avoid further interactions with you. I understand that you are frustrated with another editor, but I wish that you had remained polite here on an open, public forum. I'm done here because I'm not going to engage you further unless I have to. I believe withdrawing to be the better course of action in this case. I do agree that I should have tried to work it out sooner with you before thinking ANI was the way to go, but frankly, I found your conduct extremely upsetting: in fact, it continued to bother me during my offline time. I admit I jumped the gun, though and I'm sorry for that. However, please don't ping me again unless you need something specific from me. I pledge to deal with you in a civil manner if we run across each other again, but here I am done. Megalibrarygirl (talk) 21:01, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, civility is required. But please remember that en.wp editors come from many different cultural contexts, and understandings of what civility entails vary widely. Texas is a long way from Connacht, in more than miles.

For my part, I found it deeply uncivil that in both our discussions on this page you chose to repeatedly criticise me for upholding long-standing basic guidelines related to our discussions, e.g. WP:SUBCAT, WP:EDITSUM and WP:AWBRULES. Another part of en.wp's code of conduct is WP:CONSENSUS, and your dismissiveness of consensus guidelines is not a helpful basis for discussion.

I too hope that things will go more smoothly if we meet again. Best wishes, --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:47, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Lists of the first female holders of political offices

I stumbled across this set of lists, for which I made Category:Lists of the first female holders of political offices.

The lists are incomplete and the sourcing is patchy, but the sample I checked seemed accurate. Still a few redlinks. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:12, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for making the category. I just browsed List of first female mayors, and ... er ... um ... it's a bit of an eye opener for those of us who were raised in the era when this kind of information was just totally missing from the history books. — Maile (talk) 00:42, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Sadly, my school history was equally devoid of womens history.

I hadn't actually looked at that list of mayors. 11 of the first 20 have no article. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 11:37, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Two AfD's for women academics

Jacqueline Maria Dias and Bernadette Louise Dean have both just appeared on the "Academics and educators" AfD list. XOR'easter (talk) 02:19, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Academics are such a difficult one, because it's often hard to distinguish them from every other academic for notability. The stuff about Dias taking on national leadership roles might have gotten her over the line except it's completely unsourced (and nothing whatsoever about that in Google). I don't really see a basis on which one could save Dean. It's a shame: it's great to see academics from places we don't normally have much coverage, but this is far from the first time I've seen an Aga Khan University academic nominated and struggled to see a basis on which to save it. The Drover's Wife (talk) 02:45, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

The Drover's Wife Dias appears to hold an named chair, the "Nurudin Jivraj Professorship". this clearly states she revised the national nursing curriculum. The problem is there is little independent information showing her qualifications, but the Award of Excellence in Education also indicates she established nursing curriculum in Syria and Afghanistan. On Dean, I think she may not meet prof but she meets GNG. There are multiple documents which state that she was the primary reviewer and textbook author on a revision to the national curriculum to remove hate speech and add gender diversity. Controversy erupted over her changes, which attempted to secularize the primary school textbooks and she was forced to leave the country.[3], IJT organizes APC over proposed changes in curriculum, [4], [5], [6] It's really late here and I just saw this. I'll try to circle back to them tomorrow. SusunW (talk) 07:48, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

I have added one independent reference documenting Dias' work on curriculum development. The problem with press coverage in Pakistan is that most of the newspapers are in Urdu. It looks to me as if she deserves an article. We are low on coverage of prominent Pakistani women in nursing.--Ipigott (talk) 11:40, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Dean fled Pakistan in 2015 after receiving death threats (allegedly) from the IJT. This was widely reported and I've added a paragraph about them in the article. If you are interested, feel free to look it over and add your thoughts to the AfD for her. I'll look at the Dias page later or tomorrow if I can. Smmurphy^(Talk) 01:01, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Also, does anyone know the Urdu transliteration of these names? Smmurphy^(Talk) 01:02, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Music fans?

Any pop music fans inspired to do some draft clean-up could pull Draft:Noga Erez out of the AfC queue--she looks to be notable but the entry has no inline citations, just a list of links. It's a shame, the draft has been hanging out since last July. (I'll try to work on it eventually if no one else does, just trying to work through some things that can be moved out of the queue more quickly.) Innisfree987 (talk) 20:38, 13 January 2018 (UTC)

@Innisfree987: Have done a little clean up and re-ordering, still needs more but it's a start. :) Lirazelf (talk) 14:12, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Reports about WiR in the press

I'm rather confused about how all this works (or fails to work). I see that at the top of this page, there is a banner stating "This WikiProject has been mentioned by multiple media organizations". If you open "show", you find a list of articles, the most recent of which is over a year old. If you click on it, you reach Wikipedia:Press coverage. On the other hand, if you click on the "Press" icon on the main WiR page, you reach Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Press which provides a list of several more recent articles. In addition, recent press reports are frequently mentioned in discussions on this talk page and/or in the "Announcements" on the main WiR page. Unfortunately, although it contains a number of interesting links, WikiProject Women in Red/Press is rarely consulted; it has an average of only one page view per day. How can we sort this out? We should try to make it much easier for researchers to access all pertinent press reports on our project without having to look at various different pages or sections of pages, or indeed reverting to Google. I think we also need to make sure that we carefully track new press articles mentioning WiR and make sure they are properly listed. Perhaps as a librarian, Megalibrarygirl might have some suggestions.--Ipigott (talk) 16:40, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Not sure what that's about, Ipigott. Sounds like the module isn't linking properly. Rosiestep who do we reach out to for module help? Megalibrarygirl (talk) 20:38, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Harej set up the modules, so pinging him, although not that he's a WMF employee, not sure if he can work on this? --Rosiestep (talk) 21:13, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

I don't think it's the models. It's a matter of organization. Not all the press reports we find are included in Wikipedia's central press pages. The problem for me is that there's a prompt for press reports on the project on our talk page (immediately below the archives) whereas most of them can be accessed from the Press icon on the main WiR page. In other words, the situation is confusing for readers.--Ipigott (talk) 09:20, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

Recent Australian editathon

I have just come across an article titled Aussies join push for more Wiki women published on 3 January by news.com.au. On researching the background, I also came across Balancing the history books, one Wikipedia entry a time, an article by Mary Tomsic and Deborah Thomas of the University of Melbourne. It looks to me as if it would be useful to encourage some of the participating students to join WiR (if they have not already done so). Perhaps Pru.mitchell and Canley who helped with the August editathon could keep us informed of future initiatives so that we can assist students interested in writing women's biographies.--Ipigott (talk) 11:07, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes - can do. Start of the Australian academic year is still a little way off. Pru.mitchell (talk) 01:45, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Indiana University editathon

There a report on the October editathon here.--Ipigott (talk) 11:38, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

In the News

Naomi Parker, who inspired the We Can Do It! poster, died recently. Her article could use some attention and I'm too busy myself to do much right now. You might also like to comment on the relevant submission at ITN. Andrew D. (talk) 14:15, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

• Kudos to Victuallers, who is already on it, having made a good start at Naomi Parker. Andrew D. (talk) 14:40, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks - Feel free to tidy it up or some bits. Victuallers (talk) 14:45, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

WiR membership template

I've noticed that most of our members do not display our membership template ({{User WikiProject Women in Red}}) on their user pages. The reason is probably that it is not included anywhere on our main page as we have a special approach to membership. Any ideas about how we can resolve this issue?--Ipigott (talk) 10:19, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

As there have been no suggestions, I've just added a line to our introduction on the main WiR page.--Ipigott (talk) 09:30, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

I think "Userbox" is the more common terminology and have tweaked the main WiR page accordingly. Could we add an image of it there too perhaps? ... my first attempt broke the format, so I gave up. I didn't know about the userbox until spotting this thread, but have now added it to my userpage! PamD 09:54, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

PamD: Yes, userbox is indeed the mot juste. Thanks for changing it. I think it's useful for members to post it as it not only identifies their interests, it encourages others to join the project when they see how many wonderful people are members.--Ipigott (talk) 15:48, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Anya Shrubsole

Thought this would be of interest here. Today, England cricketer Anya Shrubsole became the first woman to appear on the cover of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. BBC, Cricinfo. Lugnuts ^{Fire Walk with Me} 14:21, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Did you know...?

Did you know that based on Wikidata figures, since June 2016 27.37% of all the new biographies on the English Wikipedia have been about women? Then there were 1,347,281 in total of which 217,442 were about women. Today we have 1,516,748 of which 263,816 are about women. This also means we have created 46,376 new women's biographies or an average of 2,240 per month. That's not bad, given that in June 2016, only 16.28% of biographies were about women. In other words, we have been creating 11.09% more women's biographies each month than we did until June 2016. The difference results mainly from the efforts of those participating in Women in Red.--Ipigott (talk) 17:09, 23 January 2018 (UTC) @Rosiestep, Sphilbrick, Victuallers, and Dr. Blofeld: You may be interested in these figures.--Ipigott (talk) 10:02, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Love this, Ipigott Can you also give us numbers on how many women's biographies are deleted each month? I'm sure there are some that are deleted without being tagged with a "Project Banner" or entered into Wikidata, but a basic figure to give us an idea of the occurrence would help. SusunW (talk) 14:08, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

SusunW: Sorry, I don't know of any reliable way of listing deleted women's biographies. I expect the admins can use their tools to make a month by month inventory. You might be interested in Deletionpedia which is specially designed to "save" articles deleted from Wikipedia. You can browse through this and see how many women's biographies have been deleted over the past 30 days (but I don't know how many of them have been caught). The list looks pretty complete for the first few days of January. You can also see a list of all the articles deleted on Wikipedia on Deletion log but you can't read any of them.--Ipigott (talk) 14:49, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

That was my thought too, hard to create a list. I don't have the technical skill to create such a list, but I wish we had access to some sort of figures, which would give us an idea of how much that is being created is lost. When I get that magic wand ... SusunW (talk) 15:53, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

SusunW: If you think it's important, we could take it one month at a time from the deletion log, starting at the beginning of February. We could also cross-check with articles specifically labelled for AfD. We could see which ones deserved to be deleted and which simply needed more work or should never have been put up for deletion. As we go forward, this could contribute to our efforts to amend some of the criteria on acceptance vs deletion. We could create a page on WiR on article deletions. Compared to some of the other gnoming jobs we have to do each month, it shouldn't be too difficult or time-consuming.--Ipigott (talk) 07:03, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

(One of those cases where I again didn't get the ping...) Ipigott, thank you for this analysis. It's very heartwarming. Indeed SusunW, it would be good to track the deletion statistics as well. Still other metrics which would interest me: (a) how many editors are creating those articles, and (b) how many of the new EN-wiki articles have an article on another language Wikipedia? --Rosiestep (talk) 10:07, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Rosiestep: I suspect the only way to see how many editors are creating articles would be by doing it manually -- unless Bobo.03 could adapt his approach to provide month-by-month lists of all editors who have created new WiR pages. As for the number of new articles which also have an article in another language wiki, Jane023 might be able to help via Wikidata. It might be interesting to break this down into two sets of data: EN articles which have been created when an article in another language already exists and articles in other languages which are created once an article in English exists.--Ipigott (talk) 10:26, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Hi TNegrin (WMF): Following up on our chat in Berlin... I'm wondering if these kinds of tools already exist? If not, can your tech team lend us a hand as I don't think of us are keen on the manual approach? --Rosiestep (talk) 10:33, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Barbara Spofford Morgan

Sometime you find a wonderful profile without searching it... I was actually writing the article for the son, John Spofford Morgan, a man who married his partner after 64 years they were together, and I found a notiche about the mother Barbara Spofford Morgan, and a book she wrote in 1914, "The Backward Child, a Study of the Psychology and Treatment of Backwardness"... I decided to research also the mother and I found out that, despite being from a very wealthy family (she was introduced at the England court in 1905) and married to a millionaire, Barbara was the first American woman to receive the degree of doctor of philosophy from the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, author of children's books, books on mental testing and on religion, director of the psychologic clinic of the Neurologic Institute in New York, lecturer on mental testing at the New York University, private practice in mental testing in New York City, governor of the Women's Municipal League, a field worker for the North American Civil League for Immigrants, activist for the benefit of the Randalls Island Hospital for Mental Defectives, trustee of the Public Education Association and a governor of the Cosmopolitan Club... not bad for a woman who did not have a profile on Wikipedia until today... Oh, by the way, she died in 1971 and her son was in a gay relationship since 1947, a relationship that was accepted by the family... Elisa.rolle (talk) 23:45, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, Elisa for "discovering" her and writing an informative article. I see you only came across her when writing about her son. All too often, we find women appended in one way or another to male members of their families. I'm afraid there must be hundreds of notable American women from more or less the same period who have not been covered on Wikipedia.--Ipigott (talk) 10:53, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Brava Elisa.rolle what a lovely article. Indeed, finding women in earlier periods involves knowing who the men in their lives were. As we wrote in the essay, it is often the only way to back into their stories. Internationally, women only gained citizenship in their own right in 1933, before that, they were wards of either their father, brother or husband. People tend to forget that, though it wasn't that long ago. SusunW (talk) 13:40, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Ine Gevers

Hi all, I was tipped that a woman who attended one of our Dutch workshops (I wasn't there so didn't meet her) had an article contested on Dutch Wikipedia. I hate cleaning up after newbies but this one actually looks notable so I tried to fix the English version that was also posted in Draft space and put it here: Ine Gevers. I am no expert in modern art but this one clearly exposes one of my pet peeves: no matter how many exhibitions she organized or curated and no matter how many publications, her works are in the RKD library but there is still no bio in RKDartists - grr. Anyway can someone figure out how to handle the Draft vs article thing because I have no idea: Draft:Ine Gevers (2). Thx Jane (talk) 14:25, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks Jane023. I'll clean it up and move it to mainspace.--Ipigott (talk) 15:17, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Jane023: I actually tidied it up and then discovered you had "created" it yourself. If you had moved it from draft space to main space, you would have kept the editing history, including the name of the original creator.--Ipigott (talk) 16:48, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Oh so sorry about that! The whole reason I posted was to include both links and explain that I have literally no idea anymore how to handle those draft copies and have been driven away by AfC so many times that I gave up trying. Any idea how to get the editing history back? Jane (talk) 18:15, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

I suppose you could still move the article to mainspace under another name like "Ine Gevers (curator)" and then arrange the redirects as desired. Jane (talk) 18:18, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Rosiestep and probably assist with merging the information. SusunW (talk) 19:04, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

Drmies, this is one of those tricky ones: an after-the-fact attribution merger. Can you help with this one? Thank you! --Rosiestep (talk) 03:57, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Oh dear--not right now, I'm afraid, but I'll come back and see what I can do. First I must tackle the old predicative complement--in class. I don't even know what that is in Dutch! Drmies (talk) 18:41, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

No rush - thanks for taking a look. I doubt the original poster could even navigate to the original Draft page, but in any case, I release the rights to my edits so you can just do whatever is possible to repair the editing history to reflect the original work of the poster (if that is possible). Jane (talk) 19:14, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Systemic bias in notability

I hope those working on the pair of articles above will forgive for butting in to note a wider point: how this raises yet again the systemic bias in Wikipedia's notability guidelines.

1. WP:NFOOTBALL presumes notability for "Players who have played [snip] in a competitive game between two teams from fully-professional leagues", even if that was only a brief appearance "as a substitute". So even a player who made a one-off appearance for one minute at the end of only one professional game is presumed notable, even if they never encountered the ball.
2. WP:PROF says that notability of academics "depends on the impact the work has had on the field of study". So even someone who has been a tenured prof for decades and written copiously about scholarly topics fails the notability test unless that work has had a significant impact. If their field is specialised, that impact will show only low numbers.

If Jacqueline Maria Dias and Bernadette Louise Dean were male footballers, both AfDs would have triggered a flurry of vexed !votes to keep, noting that it is quite sufficient that both are professional academics. The discussions would be closed early per WP:SNOW, and the nominators would be reproached.

If we were to try to equate the 2 tests, we could do so either by 1) raising the bar for sportspeople, or 2) by lowering it for academics:

1. require that footballers be demonstrated to have made significant impact in their sport
2. presume notability for academics if they have held, however briefly, a full professorship, or published a single scholarly work (regardless of its impact)

The demographic imbalance of editors makes it hard to challenge these inbuilt biases purely through en.wp discussions. However, external analysis can have a big impact in persuading the wider community of editors to show up and outvote the special interest groups (in this case, sports fans). WiR members have been v successful in generating media coverage of their great work in correcting the under-representation of women. Maybe those who have the ear of journalists or academic researchers could also make a point of noting how en.wp policy is stacked against them? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 13:26, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

I think this is really important, and I actually like your suggestion quite a lot - actually having an equivalent standard would so vastly simplify dealing with articles on academics and fairly drastically improve our coverage. I think we get a similar situation with academics at present to that which I'm currently frustrated with in business where the arbitrary bar for those fields is set so high that practically anything is at risk of being nominated for deletion regardless of its actual notability, which drastically cuts down on the regular editors willing to drive new articles in those areas, and in turn sends the quality of our content to hell. I know I'm usually put off spending my time on academics in my areas for this reason. The Drover's Wife (talk) 13:42, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

The problem actually exists at the level of sourcing. It is trivially easy to find mainstream news articles about all sorts of professional athletes, pop singers, movie and tv stars. Academics, on the other hand are only rarely written about. Within the literature of their speciality it is rare to find more than the barest of resumés, even in articles reporting major awards. It is the present culture that is systemically biased in what it publishes - whole articles devoted to the hairstyles of Holywood stars, but virtually nothing about doctors, engineers, scientists whose work actually affect the daily lives of millions of people. So please don't blame the WP community for the systemic biases of entire cultures. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:02, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

I don't think that actually does explain it: I've seen way too many academics get deleted for a level of sourcing that would not be a problem if it were a football player who played one game once. The Drover's Wife (talk) 14:21, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

As someone who has started lots of articles about businesspeople (and led the deletion of plenty of paid/COI business articles) I share the concerns of all those above. Alas, looking at our userviews, our readers seemingly want to read about pop stars, actors and sportspeople. Bread and circuses. Edwardx (talk) 14:24, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

(ec) @Roger (Dodger67): sorry, but I disagree. I think this is not simply an issue of sourcing.

Sure, there is a media bias towards pop culture which makes it much easier to find sources about footballers and pop singers than about philosophers or social scientists. Even in heavyweight broadsheet newspapers, there are usually several pages dedicated to sport. However, the only newspaper I have ever seen with ever seen with a dedicated academia section is The Times of London, which had The Times Higher Educational Supplement ... but even before it was rebranded as a magazine, it was a separately-purchased publication rather than an insert in the newspaper.

But my point here is that en.wp notability guidelines and AFD practice combine to reinforce the media bias.

WP:NFOOTBALL allows us in practice to have an article on a footballer even if the only evidence of their entire existence is a passing mention in an old local newspaper, or on a sports database. Yes, WP:NFOOTBALL is supposed to be only a guide to assist decision-making, but in practice it is near-impossible to get consensus at AFD to delete footballers who clearly fail WP:GNG. The reality is that if there is evidence that a professional footballer actually existed, an article on them will be kept ... which is not the case for scholars.

In the mid-2000s, XfDs were closed only by admins. WP:RFA was then a much much milder process than the hazing ritual it became by 2010, but at least it meant that consensus was weighed by editors who had to some degree won the trust of the community and shown some ability to weigh !votes against policy and guideline. Nowadays, XfDs can be closed by any editor, without any assessment of their ability to make judgements outside of their own interests. It is rare for them to do more than count heads let alone uphold the subtleties in the guidelines ... so the passing-mention footballer is kept and the scholar is deleted.

We do have some decent policy on these broad principles, e.g.

• Wikipedia is not a directory ... yet we have what are effectively directories of factoid sportspeople
• Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information ... but the discernment is applied as a systematic bias which basically reflects the priorities of the young men who predominate among en.wp's editors. So en.wp documents every quirk of video games, sports, porn, popular music etc, frequently in copious detail sourced to what are essentially commercial fanzines.

We even signpost readers away from broad topics to these pop culture items: in the case of the dictionary term "rare" it took nearly 22,000 words of heated discussion to revert the hijacking of the word for a video-game subsidiary of Microsoft, but the hundreds-of-years-old concept of "the advantage" (as in "the upper hand") remains assigned to a barely notable rock band. I don't think anyone has even bothered to challenge the selection of the fictional characterJohn Connor as primary topic over alternatives which include a member of the Cabinet of the United States.

So, no, I don't agree that the problem is solely the systemic biases of entire cultures. It's also en.wp systemic exacerbations of those biases, and a foundation-level failure to uphold the principle in WP:About that en.wp is an encyclopedia and counter the tendency to make it a pop culture fanzine which systematically squeezes out topics on how and by who the non-fictional world is shape and analysed. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 15:46, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

I completely share the sentiments of the original poster. Most academics (in the humanities anyway) who have published more than one book with scholarly publishers or a good number of articles in high-impact journals, and held a high-level academic post (I would say Professor rank in the UK or above, for instance) should be worthy of an article. And there would be plenty more below this rank. Part of the problem is the specialised knowledge required to even know about most academics, the dearth of independent RS's about their lives (not just their works) and the fact that so much is offline or paywalled. Increasingly, I am struck by the need for us to be systematic in the way that we create articles – otherwise we simply end up generating content patchily and introducing our own biases. I spent a lot of time creating lists of Fellows of the British Academy (the UK's premier humanities and social sciences learned society, membership easily passing PROF); there is no online list of fellows, so I went through paper copies of their annual reports (from 1902 to the present day) to generate our lists, revealing surprisingly patchy coverage. This took a long time and is something most editors could not do for practical reasons. But it is the sort of thing we need to do if we are going to correct the tremendous bias we have against academic articles; we need accurate and comprehensive lists of professors, named chairs, fellowships of learned societies, academic and state awards, newspaper obituaries and research impact metrics. And all this only for those who currently meet PROF as it stands. No wonder we are still having this discussion! (BTW our coverage of non-anglophone politicians is another matter, but I noticed during the WiR November contest that most European countries have scholarly, historical databases listing every single MP elected since their parliament was founded; in the 16 years WP's existed, we've done nothing with those resources – presumably because no-one's thought to look.) Cheers, —Noswall59 (talk) 15:55, 21 January 2018 (UTC).

I agree with Noswall59's advocacy of a systematic approach, and of building lists.

My own editing is mostly about history of politicians, esp in Ireland and its neighbouring island. A few of us used sources such as the Oireachtas members database and reference books to build a complete set of lists members of of every Dáil and Seanad, and of members by constituency. That made it relatively easy for a wider set of editors to create at least a crude stub article on every parliamentarian in independent Ireland. No redlinks.

Lists also seem to be popular with readers. At a steady average of ~20 daily pageviews, List of women in Dáil Éireann is by far the most-read article I ever created.

I use similar list-making approaches for my more intermittent work of building coverage of the 100%-male topic of 1801–1918 Irish members of the UK Parliament. The cost of the ref books and the shortage of free online sources means that few others pick up on that framework, but I have seen the same principle apply: the better the lists and better their interlinking (via navboxes, categories etc), the more likely that the articles will be created.

Politicians are an easier set to defend against deletion than many others (thanks to WP:NPOL), but even so I find that list-making is hugely-helpful because a by-product of a good list is that it concentrates a decent catalogue of sources. That can be v useful for others trying to establish GNG.

A few small, informal collaborations could make a lot of progress in building lists of politicians. Noswall59, during that WiR November contest did anyone collect links to the online databases of parliamentarians? I am thinking I might try using them to expand the sparse set which I have just grouped at Category:Lists of women legislators. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs)

I will reply properly tomorrow or later this evening, but in short, I am not away of an effort to collect these databases. I have been meaning to do something about since November but didn't really know where to air it. I have several links. This is for the Spanish senate (you can click between different periods going from 1834 to the present day using the navbox on the left). See the top of my sandbox for several other countries. I'm aware of similar databases for Poland, Flanders and Italy (the Italian one goes back to unification in 1848). I have no idea about other countries. We have nothing like this in the UK, so I think most UK editors at least wouldn't think to look for any of this, but the potential is clear, not just for women (though there will be many women MPs without articles) but for creating hundreds of articles about non-anglophone people: I produced this Legislature of 1834–35 (Spain) as a test case. I'd be very interested in working on this further! Cheers, —Noswall59 (talk) 19:52, 21 January 2018 (UTC).

BrownHairedGirl, I've created a table of European countries in my userspace and started populating them with databases. Feel free to take a look and, if you want, looking other countries up. If you are at all interested, I find that it's best to (a) check the legislature's website; (b) if that is not helpful, try the native wikipedia(s): they almost always have better coverage that we do, often pointing to sources we could use. Cheers, —Noswall59 (talk) 13:42, 22 January 2018 (UTC).

A clearer notability guideline for academics would make such articles less likely to be challenged for lack of sources. Given academics aren't covered in the same way many other subjects would be (news coverage, etc), this would be a good idea. It's not just an issue of sourcing as Dodger67 said, as even without coverage in sports articles, many sportspeople would still pass WP:NSPORT. Kb.au (talk) 16:03, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

I have a lot of thoughts about this issue, but think it is more critical to point out that more participation (ie !voting) at AfD would increase the number of participants in this project who have experience and relationships with people who frequently edit the project who could increase the change that the standards change (by standards I am including both the written guidelines and the practice of people active at AfD). As an extension, carrying out improvements of articles nominated for discussion (see WP:HEY) can be very fulfilling and successful; You can and should !vote once, but you can make numerous improvements to a nominated article and add multiple references. One other point is that the best way to have an article kept is to avoid its nomination for deletion. Many articles for deletion are nominated after they have sat in maintenance categories for some period. So if you want to make sure a class of articles avoids deletion, make sure articles from that class do not have significant maintenance tags on them, especially keep an eye on Category:Articles with topics of unclear notability and Category:Articles lacking sources. Smmurphy^(Talk) 20:22, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

• I'd also like to see WP:PROF simplified and the bar lowered. I think something like "any academic who verifiably holds a tenured (or equivalent) position at a notable university, or who has been cited multiple times in peer-reviewed, scholarly papers, is presumed notable" would be on a par with the standard we currently hold sportspeople, entertainers, etc. to. The concern about sources is unfounded, I think. Academics are always writing about each other's work—that's their job—and those sources are much better than gossip rags or sports almanacs. I firmly believe that if you have a faculty page, a list of publications and a citation report, it's possible to write a decent biography of any academic. – Joe (talk) 20:42, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

I appreciate that you would like there to be more articles about women on Wikipedia. But most professors are just doing their job. Just as most athletes are just doing their job. To have an article an athlete is not just someone who makes a career in sports, but has to be outstanding enough to make a major league team or equivalent. As a part of popular culture sports receive extensive coverage in the media so sources are easy to find. But we have plenty of non-popular culture topics in Wikipedia, and each of them has ways of assessing notability. WP:PROF is a clear notability guideline for identifying those who have made it into the academic "major leagues.". For example, an academic's work makes an impact by being "noticed" and used by others in the field. We take into account that different fields and sub-fields have different citation rates showing impact.

It is not bias that makes one section of Wikipedia larger than another section; it is the interests of our editors. Wikipedia is many different encyclopedias - think of it an the entire reference section in a library. We have a large collection of military history and equipment, a deep scientific collection, a large collection in classical music and fine art, a large collection of literature and independently a large collection of articles on popular literature. Popular culture, including current sports, attracts the most editors. There is no reason to turn Wikipedia into a directory of all professors just because it is so much easier to write about that very small percentage of athletes who make it into the public eye.StarryGrandma (talk) 21:26, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

NPROF does this in theory, but utterly fails at it in practice. The end result of what we have with NPROF now means that an academic needs to be vastly more notable than an equivalent footballer to have their own article - which is why we're here discussing this. They're also vastly more vague and arbitrary than any of the sporting guidelines: anyone can tell you if a footballer passes WP:NFOOTY, but it's extremely difficult to definitively establish passing NPROF with any certainty in most cases of notable academics. The Drover's Wife (talk) 22:07, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

@StarryGrandma: I think you're misrepresenting both WP:NPROF and WP:NSPORT. Our guidelines for sportspeople (and most other professions with SNGs for that matter) essentially boil down to including anyone who is verifiably a professional player. PROF, on the other hand, explicitly directs to include academics who are significantly above average in terms of their impact on scholarship. A good illustration of the disparity is the age at which they tend to be included. I regularly see stubs on sportspeople created the moment they turn 18 – because that's when they start playing in a major league. But the PROF criteria are such that only people nearing the end of their career stand a good chance of passing: people don't rack up 1000s of citations, or get distinguished professorships, etc. until they're in their 50s or 60s.

To be clear, I have no problem with the sports criteria. I personally would quite like to see Wikipedia encompass a directory of both academics and sportspeople, because they are notable and encyclopaedic professions. I also understand the sentiment behind restricting our coverage to only those people who we can write long, sourced biographies of. What I don't get is why at the moment we take one approach with some sets of people and the other approach with others. – Joe (talk) 23:06, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

@Joe Roe: I think the bias you rightly note exists because it matches the interests of en.wp's core demographic of editors: young American men. So their core interests (popular music, ball games, porn, video games, scifi/fantasy, etc) all get a free pass via topic-specific notability guidelines ... while the rest of the planet has to pass a high bar.

That's why in my opening post I suggested encouraging outside coverage of the problem, partly to motivate and support editors to demand change, but also to encourage the WMF to accept some responsibility. This approach had some success a few years ago, when then WMF CEO Sue Gardner took up the issue of en.wp often being a difficult environment for women.

The deep structural biases in notability would not sit well with many of WMF's donors and funders, so publicity may encourage action. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 00:22, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

@BrownHairedGirl: I fear that bringing outside pressure is more likely to harden the community against a change than encourage them to do it. Whenever I've seen the subject of systematic bias come up in general discussions, there's always a significant number of editors who appear to have a strong revulsion to the idea that our policies should be affected by wider social concerns.

I'm also not sure how much this issue reflects a bias in our editorship. It may have been true in the early days of the project, but there are now a significant number of editors who are interested in academic biographies. My own take is that the disparity between WP:PROF and other guidelines exists mostly because of inertia. Looking through the talk, I can't find any serious proposals to radically revise (i.e. loosen) the talk page in the last decade. The basic logic―the "average professor test"―seemingly hasn't ever changed. In the meantime, other SNGs have been formulated with a much more inclusive spirit. On the other hand, the individual PROF criteria have tended to become more inclusive over time (with, for example, the standard for what constitutes a "major university" slipping from Ivy League/Oxbridge level to "not a clown college"), and individual editors active in this area frequently express frustration with PROF's unusually high standards, which makes me think there is actually a fair degree of support for loosening it up. We all just tend to be timid about changing established guidelines.

In other words I think it's worth at least trying to improve the guidelines using the normal, wiki-internal channels first. – Joe (talk) 16:10, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

• BrownHairedGirl - when you say "WP:NFOOTBALL allows us in practice to have an article on a footballer even if the only evidence of their entire existence is a passing mention in an old local newspaper, or on a sports database. Yes, WP:NFOOTBALL is supposed to be only a guide to assist decision-making, but in practice it is near-impossible to get consensus at AFD to delete footballers who clearly fail WP:GNG. The reality is that if there is evidence that a professional footballer actually existed, an article on them will be kept ... which is not the case for scholars." - What you've written is simply not true for articles about women's footballers + AFDs related to women's footballers -- at least in my experience over several years in this area. Yes, what you've written largely applies for articles written about male footballers covered by WP:FPL, but there is only 1 top women's league included in that notability essay, which is rooted in an ill-defined "fully professional criteria", not whether the player has received news coverage. See WP:HOCKEY for another example of how women athletes are excluded from sports-specific notability criteria on Wikipedia. Yes, agree with Smmurphy we need more eyes reviewing AFD's related to Women in general. Hmlarson (talk) 21:21, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

@Hmlarson: I agree about the difficulty of keeping articles on women in sports. (I did try to frame my comments narrowly, but maybe not narrow enough).

Part of the problem is the emphasis on professional sportspeople. It is a focus which works reasonably well for male soccer players globally and for most male players of ball games in the USA, but it is a disaster for many other counties, other sports and for women.

In Ireland, Gaelic games are the main sports nationwide, but it is a wholly amateur code. So for years there was a steady stream of "he's not professional" AfDs of top-level Gaelic footballers, until WP:NGAELIC was finally agreed in 2010.

I would like to believe that the structural bias against womens sports is an unintentional product of myopia, but too much of the bias is too overt to make that AGF easy to sustain. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 23:54, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

• How about we solve the whole issue, and say "Someone or something is notable if reliable sources tell us they are, by writing a lot of high-quality material about them?" In everything else, we follow our sources, we don't "correct" them. We should do so on the subject of notability too. Our sources will tell us when something is notable, by noting it. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:38, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
  • For academics, this gets us into a different long-debated issue: when people write in-depth about an academic's research contributions, does that count as "a lot of high-quality material about them" (in which case almost every academic should be included), or do we only count in-depth writings about their personal life, as if they were a celebrity (in which case very few of the now-considered-notable ones would pass)? Your simple solution sets the bar either too high or too low. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:56, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
    • David hits the nail on the head with that problem. The Drover's Wife (talk) 22:07, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
      • I think it depends. If a lot is written about the academic's professional career, and focuses a lot on their personal contributions to their field, I think it's quite justifiable to write an article that focuses primarily on that. We don't need a lengthy "personal life" section. Again, follow the sources' lead. But if the articles are primarily about the work, and only name-drop the people who worked on it, the work is notable but the individuals are not. We can always make their names into appropriate redirects. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 22:31, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
        • So you're on the "set the bar ridiculously high" side of that debate. I hope that means that you also intend to make into redirects all articles about footballers for whom we only have coverage of their athletic accomplishments. Maybe, to prevent the bias under discussion here from becoming even worst, you should go get consensus for changing NSPORTS to say that, and then come back to this debate once you've accomplished that. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:43, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
          • I think you're quite misrepresenting what I said. I said it would be just fine to have an article entirely about an academic's professional contributions, provided those are covered in an individual capacity and we can write a full article about their contributions to their field, and it's equally fine to have a sports player's article be about their notable sporting accomplishments. I don't care if we know where they went to elementary school or what their dog's name is. The cases I'm talking about are cases of articles like "Professor Doe wrote the paper about quantum squiggledygobbledy", and because that paper has some "index", we have an "article" even though that's all we can really say on the professor. That's like the practice of putting in permastubs about sports players who were on the field for five seconds and that's all we can say about them, and I absolutely do support making those into redirects to appropriate lists. We have far too many marginal at best BLPs as it stands right now. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 23:03, 21 January 2018 (UTC)
            • Can you point to even one example of a "full-length" article that is purely about an academic's research contributions (not just a single contribution, but all the significant contributions of a single academic) without also being about other aspects of the academic as a person, such as their education or appointment history? Or even one example of a "full-length" article about a sportsperson that is purely about their accomplishments in specific sporting events, and doesn't mention other non-sporting-event information such as their nationality? Because to me it is sounding like you are talking about square circles, or duck-billed lion-turtles, as an excuse to get rid of the articles we have on actual shapes or actual animals. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:48, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
            • PS my ability to take your arguments seriously is lessened by my discovery that the article you created most recently (seven years ago) is a biography of a pop musician whose only reliable sources are about her musical performances, and whose biographical details are sourced to her own myspace page. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:46, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
              • @David Eppstein: I'm...rather disappointed. I don't know you as well as some, but I'd have thought you to be better than cheap shots. And of course sources about a musician are primarily about her musical performances, what would you expect them to be about? We've always been allowed to use self-published sources for uncontroversial details, that's nothing new. You also left out the fact that it was not my more recent DYK, which, while I didn't technically make the first edit, I was involved in the creation of with other editors from Wikimedia Colorado. So, at this point, I don't think there's any purpose, since you're being both intellectually dishonest and well...just flat dishonest. I wouldn't have expected that from you. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 06:58, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
                • To be clear, I don't think there is any problem with Scarr's article. But your arguments about not having an article about an academic, but only articles about their research topics, when there is no independent sourcing about the academic's life sufficient for a "full article" would apply equally well to Scarr, I think. So if you are still supportive of articles like Scarr's (as I am), you should rethink your position on similar articles for academics. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:08, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
• Comment. So some people think that the notability standards of WP:Prof should be much higher and some people think that they should be much lower. It was ever thus, and suggests that those standards are probably about right in their present state. Xxanthippe (talk) 05:43, 22 January 2018 (UTC).

• I am impressed by the enormous amount of comment on this topic over a period of only 12 hours. I have been wondering whether we could begin by trying to put together a basic list of criteria on notability in connection with women's biographies rather than trying to adjust the general rules for specific occupations or professions. I think this would be useful for a number of reasons. Until relatively recently, the contributions of women to many fields of interest were documented far more scantily than for their male counterparts. Furthermore, they did not receive nearly as many awards or distinctions as men and they were far less frequently mentioned in the press, if at all. As a result, the number of men (especially in the historical context but also in the modern world) who live up to Wikipedia's "established criteria" for the acceptance of biographies continues to be substantially higher than the number of women, however competent those women may have been. There may therefore indeed be a case for "lowering the bar" for women's biographies, not because they achieved less than men but because the "sources" did not cover them to the same extent. In my opinion, two or three secondary sources clearly documenting a woman's achievements should be a sound basis for acceptability, whether in academia, politics, science, culture or leadership. Would it be feasible to develop something along these lines or at least come up with some ideas?-Ipigott (talk) 11:32, 22 January 2018 (UTC)
  • Although I personally agree with the argument, I think it's just a non-starter on Wikipedia: the project simply isn't that evolved on gender issues, and I can see the inevitable drama right now. I think it's easier and possibly more productive to try to argue for amendments to some of these lousier notability criteria to make them clearer and more workable. The Drover's Wife (talk) 17:59, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

• 80% of success is showing up That's what Woody Allen said and, while he's in the doghouse now, that's still the way it works here too. A good benchmark for the notability of just showing up is Chitty (cricketer) who was "recorded in one first-class match in 1796, totalling 0 runs..." He gets a page on Wikipedia because he showed up for one game and because cricket fans will show up in large numbers to defend such pages at AfD. If you instead suppose that Wikipedia is logical and reasonable then you will lose out. When defending your corner, it helps to understand that

1. Notability is not a policy (it's just a guideline)
2. Notability was not dreamed up until 2006 after Wikipedia had been running for 5 years. Its introduction marks the point at which Wikipedia's spectacular growth started to level off.
3. Notability is still not a coherent concept and so there is little consensus about it. For example, I recall discussing the matter with sometime WMF director, Sue Gardner, when she visited London. She found the standards being applied were quite unreasonable and that it was quite outrageous that a female Canadian novelist had been deleted. Jimmy Wales was likewise bemused when a page he wrote about Mzoli's was deleted. Notability is not an edict from on high – the top brass don't like or support it.
4. Notability is not popular or accepted by our general readership. My favourite illustration of this is Nicholson Baker's account How I fell in love with Wikipedia. He showed up for a while and made a difference.

So, this is essentially a political issue in which you will mainly get your way by showing up. It may also help to remember that women used not to be able to vote at all. They didn't achieve suffrage by being sweetly reasonable. They did it by showing up and making a fuss, right? Andrew D. (talk) 18:20, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

I decline to defer to the views of the Wikipedia top brass alleged here. Their aim is empire building and they measure their success by the count of the articles that Wikipedia is host to. Editors who are intent on building an encyclopaedia for the world know that the quality of those articles is more important than their number. The bad drives out the good: quality before quantity please. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:20, 22 January 2018 (UTC).

I am not interested in throwing out notability standards either. Quality should always take precedence over quantity when writing articles (one of the reasons I don't write stubs). But, I also do not think that the bar should be set to create an exclusive grouping. It is after-all a "world" encyclopedia and should be representative of noted persons throughout the globe. It is not a grouping of the privileged few containing only presidents, Nobel laureates, or nobility, etc. It is rather, a collection of articles on people who are unique and worthy of note, should there be adequate, independent sourcing to confirm their contributions. The guidelines of PROF should be revisited, as I have stated numerous times, as they reinforce biases, but I am not in favor of willy-nilly adding every person on the planet to our coverage. Mere existence doesn't cut the bar, IMO. SusunW (talk) 00:36, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

• Xxanthippe doesn't seem to have created an article about anything since 2006, when they created a handful of pages such as Know Ye Not Agincourt? – a stub which still doesn't have any references. That's neither quality nor quantity. They are welcome to their negative views and position but those don't seem well-aligned with the goals of this project. Project members should show up at pages like WP:Notability (academics), as Xxanthippe does, to represent the project's view. Andrew D. (talk) 07:03, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

• I agree with @Andrew Davidson's reminder en.wp is not logical and reasonable, and of the importance of showing up. The list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Women shows where more voices may be needed. Lots of v minor celebs on that list (which don't interest me), but also a steady flow of more substantial figures.
  Like @SusunW, I also don't want to throw out notability standards. Without them, en.wp would just become a hybrid of myspace, fanzine and PR outlet. WP:GNG exists for a sound reason: as a tertiary publication, en.wp's job is to summarise secondary sources, so if those secondary sources don't exist we should not have an article. That does mean that our coverage of any topic will be limited by the coverage in reliable sources, and this inevitably means that en.wp will to some extent reflect the wider world's poor coverage of women.
  However, we do need to remove the barriers to keeping articles on topics for which reliable secondary sources can be found. Part of the problem is systemic misuse of the topic-specific notability guidelines. They were intended to be handy guides to the likelihood of WP:GNG being met: e.g. a govt minister or a member of a national parliament is almost certain to have been written about non-trivially, and the fact that AfD participants may lack access to news archives for that place and era should not justify deletion. Same for top-flight sportspeople in the most popular sports. Unfortunately they are being abused to impose the biases of drive-by AfD !voters. So when there is high certainty that no sources exist for a one-game footballer, WP:NFOOTBALL is abused to trump GNG and justify a keep ... while a well-sourced bio on an academic gets deleted because WP:PROF is abused as a tool of exclusion. @Andrew Davidson is right that just showing up at AfD is an effective counter, but I still think we need to tackle the biases in the topic-specific notability guidelines such as WP:PROF, whose presumption is to exclude academics. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 16:43, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Another AfD for a woman academic: Pam Eddinger. (Some news coverage: [7][8][9][10][11].) I'd say that president of a college where Robin Williams taught in the movie counts as notable, but that's just me. XOR'easter (talk) 23:07, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Thinking again about the disparity between WP:NFOOTBALL and WP:PROF. Maybe all the football fanboys started writing pages for the top teams' players, and worked their way down to the bottom of the barrel. I understand that our coverage of professional footballers is now quite comprehensive. Perhaps those of us who are interested in academics should start filling in the missing names at the top, rather than just trying to focus on our own narrow fields. Then we might have a better case for expanding the SNG? Edwardx (talk) 09:19, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

I agree with your first point and think that is sort of the point of this wikiproject, see: Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Worklists. I think there are people working to expand coverage at the top and at the bottom. For instance, there are female academics redlinked at pages like MacArthur Fellows Program, but these are being created relatively quickly. Smmurphy^(Talk) 17:30, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Inviting you to participate in the women editing contest "The women you have never met"

Dear WikiProject Women in Red!

Hope this message finds you all well :) On behalf of Iberocoop network I want to invite you to be part of the women editing contest we are organizing along with many other chapters and user groups in the movement. You are doing an excellent work on your local context and we will be so pleased to have you on board. In this very early stage, we are asking the organizations to add their interest in the following meta page Hope to see you there soon! Hugs----Anna Torres (WMAR) --Anna Torres (WMAR) (talk) 15:31, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks, Anna, for bringing this to our attention in good time. Rosie, would you like to sign up on behalf of WiR? I suggest we include the event as part of our Art+Feminism editathon in March. We could also announce it on our main WiR page.--Ipigott (talk) 07:50, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks to you!! Would love to have you on board!--Anna Torres (WMAR) (talk) 13:32, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Ipigott, I am still traveling. Adding @Megalibrarygirl, SusunW, and Victuallers: re: decisions. Of course, hi to my amiga, Anna Torres (WMAR). --Rosiestep (talk) 16:19, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm in. SusunW (talk) 16:34, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Me too, Ipigott! Megalibrarygirl (talk) 17:07, 26 January 2018 (UTC)