Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Newsletter/20160703/Feature

Follow-up: Gender Declaration in WikiProject Video Games
 Submitted by Thibbs 

After receiving comments from readers of The Newsletter's 4th Quarter 2015 feature related to the demographic breakdown of unaffiliated WP:VG editors (i.e. those who edit WP:VG topics but have not declared themselves to be members on the membership rolls), we return to the topic this quarter for a brief follow-up. To analyze statistics on unaffiliated WP:VG editors, we turn to Wikipedia's relatively new WikiProject Directory which began collecting data on WP:VG edits during May 2015. This quarter marks the one-year anniversary of this data collection and provides us with an excellent excuse to dig into the numbers. Before we begin, however, a quick explanation of the WikiProject Directory's WP:VG subdivisions is in order.


 * 1) Active WikiProject Editors - Editors included in this list are those who have made at least two edits to WP:VG's WikiProject-area pages and discussions within a 90-day period. This includes all Wikipedians (not just WP:VG members) editing pages that start with " " and " ", with bots excluded. These editors are responsible for drafting and maintaining the WikiProject's guidelines and other community-oriented pages, as well as assisting in the achievement of consensus regarding the implementation of these guidelines. In plain English, these are the rule-writers, discussers, and organizers.
 * 2) Active Subject-Area Editors - Editors included in this list are those who have made at least five edits to an article in the WP:VG subject area within a 30-day period. This includes all Wikipedians (again, not just WP:VG members) editing mainspace articles with the WP:VG template on their talk pages, with bots excluded. In a word, these editors are the project's "content generators".

Naturally there is considerable overlap between these two subdivisions, with content creators frequently commenting on the WikiProject-area pages whenever trouble or confusion arises. At the same time, membership in both lists also experiences considerable variation from month to month with non-core members (new fly-by-night editors, editors active in different areas who drop in to contribute on a particular topic and then leave, WikiGnomes making minor corrections throughout the project, etc.) making up more than twice the population of core members. In this follow-up examination, monthly gender statistics for male, female, and editors of undeclared gender were generated for both the WikiProject Editors and the Subject-Area Editors, and membership lists were compared from month to month to generate gender statistics for a list of "core members" of the WikiProject and Subject-Area lists.

WikiProject-space breakdown
In the leftmost graph above, we see monthly totals for male, female, and undeclared editors divided by gender. Month 1 on this graph is May 2015 - the first month for which active WP:VG WikiProject-space edits were recorded. Month 2 is June 2015, month 3 is July 2015, and month 13 is May 2016, etc. Historical gender statistics were obtained by using the gender "magic word" (discussed in the Q4-2015 feature) with usernames drawn from historic diffs of WikiProject Directory's WP:VG page. Because IP editors were found to fall almost exclusively within the "gender undeclared" category, they were excluded from this examination under the assumption that they mainly represent editors whose account preferences have simply never been set up. Vanished users, on the other hand, were found to often have intact account preferences and were included in the examination.

In the graph at right above, we see monthly percentages for male, female, and undeclared editors divided by gender. This graph uses exactly the same dataset as the graph at left, but its figures have been converted into percentages.

From these two graphs it appears that when editorship increases (such as between Month 7 and Month 10 - November 2015 and February 2016) the total number as well as the percentage of female membership increases. This suggests that new project-space editors are likely to consist of a higher percentage of female editors than WP:VG's current demographics reflect. This may be is encouraging for those concerned about WP:VG's gender gap.

Subject-Area (mainspace) breakdown
The two graphs concerning "content-creator" Subject-Area editors follow from the same basic methodology as used in the two WikiProject-space graphs (above subsection). Month 1 is May 2015 and Month 13 is May 2016, etc. The graph at left shows the monthly totals for content creators editing WP:VG-related topics, and the graph at right uses the same dataset but converts the raw totals into percentages of the combined total. These graphs fail to reflect any significant change in female editor percentages corresponding to increased WP:VG mainspace activity (such as during months 7 to 9 - November 2015 to January 2016). This may suggest that while increased editor activity can produce increased female Project-space activity, the subject area as a whole still demonstrates a significant gender gap, and more work still needs to be done at the encyclopedia level and at the gamer culture level to address this.

"Core" members
To generate a list of WP:VG's "core members", WikiProject Directory lists in both WikiProject-space and Subject-Area (mainspace) subsections were compared month by month. Editors appearing on all 14 available months (from May 2015 to June 2016) were considered to be "core" members and were analyzed separately. The list of "core" members should not be understood to be a list of the project's most important or most prolific editors, and many significant members of the community missed the "core" designation by only a single month's absence from the lists. While this rigid approach to determining WP:VG's insider core has obvious limitations it is hoped that the resulting pie-charts produce a significantly more accurate picture of the gender breakdown of long-term and recurring WP:VG editors. In these charts we can see that within Project-space WP:VG is significantly more male than either female or undeclared. Among content-creators, however, nearly half are of undeclared gender. This finding is noteworthy in light of the Q4-2015 feature's finding that WP:VG has a higher percentage of declared males than many other Wikiprojects. From this examination of WP:VG core members, it would appear that it is primarily among declared members (i.e. those on the project rolls) and Project-space editors that this high declared-male fraction is to be found and that among the content-creators, WP:VG's figures much more closely comport to those found in other female-minority WikiProjects throughout the encyclopedia. Again this is slightly encouraging, but for those of us who would love to see a significant reduction in gender disparity there is still much work to be done.