User:Edwardx/sandbox8

If not "gender balance", then what?
On 16 December 2016, The Welsh Gender Equilibrium: Welsh becomes the biggest language Wikipedia to achieve gender balance!

"Wikimedia UK is helping to build an inclusive online community and ensure that the Wikimedia projects reflect our diverse society and are free from bias."

This is well-intended, and on first glance, may all sound admirable. But in removing one perceived bias, are we not perhaps introducing another?

A future world where equal numbers of men and women meet our notability criteria sounds like a great aspiration. But even for people born in the 1990s in the most progressive countries, there is not a "gender balance" amongst those we might consider to be notable.

Wikipedia aims to be a summary of human knowledge. In past centuries, far more men than women meet our notability criteria. Perhaps this is an inconvenient truth, but attempting to rewrite history by seeking a "gender balance" is misguided, and could be used by Wikipedia's critics to try to discredit the project.

Such an ahistorical approach also seems to run contrary to our first two pillars - being an encyclopedia and being written from a neutral point of view.

If the answer is not "gender balance", what should we be aiming for?

The slides created by Jane,, discussed in Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women_in_Red provide an excellent starting point.

These slides show that for the English, Dutch and Japanese Wikipedias, the %age of women actors and singers are all over 40%. For both occupations, this figure does not seem a cause for serious concern.

Objective data will always be a challenge, but it is sometimes easy enough. For the 2016 Olympics, about 45% of competitors are women, and thanks to WP:NOLYMPICS, all competitors are notable. So, what is the ratio of their biographies on the different Wikipedias?

I think the answer lies in using Wikidata to extract ever more robust data, both in terms of analysing existing Wikipedia biographies, and in thinking about more deeply about the sort of female/male ratios we should be aiming for, by country, by timeframe, by occupation, etc. Looking at the changing ratios by birth year/decade could be very instructive.