Wikipedia talk:Categorizing articles about people/Ethnicity, gender, religion and sexuality/Archive 4

Input requested at a CfD; and req. for guideline clarity improvement
I have taken a highly unusual Thoreauvian (i.e. essayist, what some would call longwinded) approach in a CfD, that in this case seems highly relevant to the entire purpose and validity of the CATGRS guideline. I don't think it's even controversial in any way; it's just about whether there should or should not be a Category:Female pool players. I've chosen the wordy tactic because I believe that most XfD processes on WP are, in operation, far too summary and flippant, and even sometimes willy-nilly, and I wanted this to be as cogent and fully-explicated as possible, even at the cost of being accused of tendentiousness. Clarity is worth it, and I care more about WP working fluidly than I do about my personal esteem or pride here. Further input at the CfD in question, from people who think about the gendered category issue a lot, would be much appreciated. (For the record, I would like it noted that this request is entirely neutral; if the CfD is shot down, that is just fine by me - I have no axe to grind, I just want the whole "gendered categories" theme to have some semblance of precedential reason behind it that can be relied upon, and I will adhere to that whichever way it goes.)

PS: This is also an implicit request for CATGRS regulars to tighten this guideline up, so that these endless CfD debates can be avoided in the future. They pop up constantly, and it is a huge waste of WP human resources to continue with them any longer. What is and is not a valid gendered category split very much needs to be clearer than it presently is. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93; ‹(-¿-)› 09:57, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

LGBT categories
I'm looking for anyone interested in helping review and possibly revamp the LGBT people and culture categories. See that talk page if you're interested. -- SatyrTN (talk / contribs) 15:39, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Recording the gender of a person
Is there anywhere on a Wikipedia article to record the gender of a person? I was wondering, of the 500,000 or so articles we have on people, how many are on men and how many are on women. If each article had a "gender" parameter that was filled in as male or female, it would be possible to get an answer. I looked at Persondata, but that doesn't seem to have such a parameter. Category:Men and Category:Women doesn't help either. I noted at Biographical metadata that gender is one possibility, but hadn't realised that we don't seem to record this in any way. I would say that while gender is not always a defining characteristic in relation to a person's notability, it is still a basic characteristic that we should have been, and should in future record in some fashion. What do others think? Carcharoth (talk) 01:58, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm not crazy about the use of metadata on Wikipedia. (Metadata has a double use: it can be used for auto-generating technical terms – and male/female isn't too technical – but it can also be used for "screen scraping" as used by personal information gatherers, identity thieves, and spammers.  It is also a "what you see is not what you get" form of coding, or maybe I should say "what you don't see is what you get".  I think that some day we'll have to consider whether metadata should be officially banned on Wikipedia, if only because it is [or could be] made redundant by existing Wiki features, and I'd be in favour of that.)  We already use categories, a built-in feature of Wiki software, and the information you're seeking could be found if we used the category feature in biographies. --A Knight Who Says Ni (talk) 12:29, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I think the obvious place to code gender would be in an infobox template such as Infobox person. Stepheng3 (talk) 18:07, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
 * There would have to be an "other" option to cover transgender and other (don't ask) issues. The problem I see is that some people will see it as too obvious to state outright (ironically, this is the sort of thing that categories are good for, but I don't think the idea of putting "men" or "women" as a category will ever fly). I have, though, considered suggesting using "biography" or "human" as a hidden category to distinguish all people articles from those on animals and objects. But again, that kind of basic characteristic seems to be poorly served at category level, or any level. My point is that the categorisation system, mainly due to a sometimes obsessive urge to subcategorise, has lost sight of the need to be able to categorise at these broad levels. Simple questions such as: "Can I have a list of all your articles on people" or "Can I have a list of all your articles on animals", seem to be difficult to answer at the moment. Maybe because no-one asks? I suppose the questions are:
 * Should such questions be answerable?
 * Can we easily answer such questions?
 * What do people think? Carcharoth (talk) 19:57, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I think these questions should, of course, be answerable. And in most cases they are. for some nice early attempts at using wikipedia metadata to make question answering databases, one should check out http://wiki.dbpedia.org/About . As for the gender aspect, I think that will have to come later and for now Persondata should remain the same. Besides, I think a quick script could classify 99.999% of all biographies on Wikipedia just by looking at the number of times "he" or "she" appeared in the relevant biography. Please check out the dbpedia.org link to see examples of question answering like “Give me all cities in New Jersey with more than 10 000 inhabitants” or “Give me all Italian musicians from the 18th century.” etc. --Rajah (talk) 18:37, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
 * 99.999% might be a little optimistic: I would guess more like 95%-99%. Wanting this data to be somewhere, I once used categories to add the gender of 30,000 women on wikipedia to Freebase: I don't know what proportion of the people they have imported from wikipedia have since had gender added. True Knowledge is a similar database (though in beta only): I think it's used the method you suggested, Rajah, to record the gender of most people in wikipedia. Dsp13 (talk) 23:41, 20 October 2008 (UTC)