Monday, December 07, 2015

#Wigi - are these gender indicators about #Wikidata or #Wikipedia?

http://wigi.wmflabs.org/
Wigi is a wonderful project. As you can see, it stands for "Wikipedia Gender Indicators" and when you think it is Wikipedia as you know it, it is not. The data is from Wikidata and the data included represents all the Wikipedias and all the other projects that include people.

Its purpose is to inform about the gender gap and, it relies on the quality of Wikidata to do so. This is not a bad thing because a lot of effort goes into the information about people, their gender, their "ethnicity" and the dates of birth and death. This information is mostly based on information from Wikipedia and by giving it this name, WIGI gets the attention it deserves.

The aim of this project is to show what progress is made regarding the gender gap. It shows the change between periods. In this way we get a feeling how much effort goes into writing articles and how it affects significant numbers regarding the gender gap. When some articles are missed, it does not make much of a statistical difference because as the quality goes up, it is unlikely to change the variance much.

It is however important to understand that in this data other biases are hidden. The number of people dying in Syria or Iraq is suspiciously low. It demonstrates a lack of awareness of the culture and the people who live there. With the approach of WIGI it is fairly easy to produce these biases as well and it is obvious that implicitly the NPOV of all Wikipedias is in doubt.
Thanks,
       GerardM

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