Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Countering systemic bias/Archive 22

Possible biased use of the Template:Overly detailed?
Have any other editors come across any bias in the use of the Template:Overly detailed in relation to women or female-related articles? It seems to me that sportsmen and actors can have long complicated lists of results / works but academics can only have long lists of publications if their research is not homogeneous / heterogeneous in nature. There are various theories / arguments about how many publications should be included in bios on academics but I'm not aware of any actual policies, this seems to result in the claim of "there's too many" being arbitrarily applied.
 * Additional relevant discussions
 * Afd for Stanley Aronowitz's bibliography (particulary the admin's closing comments "it should only be the most significant works)"
 * this diff discussing the admin's closing comments for Afd for Stanley Aronowitz's bibliography as having set a "precedent".
 * Further comment from closing admin User talk:RoySmith Re: AfD:Stanley Aronowitz bibliography
 * Talk:Gina Rippon
 * and - by comparison - I could just as easily add the Template:Overly detailed to this section: Ronnie O'Sullivan.

--The Vintage Feminist (talk) 02:29, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not familiar with this area. However, WP:TRIVIA highlights the risk of indiscriminate and unselective lists: "A trivia section is one that contains a disorganized and "unselective" list. However, a selectively populated list with a relatively narrow theme is not necessarily trivia, and can be the best way to present some types of information." This applies equally to academics, who might have half a dozen genuinely influential publications out of several hundred in the course of a career. There isn't much benefit to the average reader others. I'd also agree that Stanley Aronowitz does not seem sufficiently notable for his publications to merit their own article for the same reason we have only Marx/Engels Collected Works rather than "Karl Marx bibliography". —Brigade Piron (talk) 09:15, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The article has a bibliography, Karl Marx, but if I reformatted the section so
 * Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1848
 * becomes
 * and did the same to the other titles it would be "orange boxed" within the week and I run the risk of being accused of POV-pushing. --The Vintage Feminist (talk) 17:41, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Actually yes, for an article I spent many months researching because there's no biographical sources in general reference works, songwriter Blanche Merrill. It seems to be a "Wikipedia thing" that people who have no knowledge of the subject feel that it is their right to criticize articles for being overly detailed when they have not done any research on the topic by themselves.  In general I'm one of those who feel Wikipedia should err on the side of more, not less. - kosboot (talk) 10:22, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Is it possible to determine which articles have that template, and of the biographies, to determine the proportion of men and women? - kosboot (talk) 17:10, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * "What links here" gives you the articles, but nothing else. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Doug Weller (talk • contribs) 17:52, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The transclusion count tool says that the template is used 2,827 times. If you were downloading the lists of names of articles in batches of 500, that would be six batches.  If you stored in a spreadsheet like Excel, you could judge which were biographies from the article names (there are some you would have to check), and you could categorise as male and female. This would take a few days but would allow you to generate some statistics.
 * The transclusion count tool says that the template is used 2,827 times. If you were downloading the lists of names of articles in batches of 500, that would be six batches.  If you stored in a spreadsheet like Excel, you could judge which were biographies from the article names (there are some you would have to check), and you could categorise as male and female. This would take a few days but would allow you to generate some statistics.


 * I would guess that there are probably more biographies of men than of women on Wikipedia; does anyone know the relative proportions?


 * If, for example, about 25% of the biographies marked as too detailed were of women, and about 25% of biographies on Wikipedia were of women, this would indicate no bias. If one the other hand, 12.5% of of biographies on Wikipedia were of women, this would suggest a serious bias. -- Toddy1 (talk) 19:17, 12 August 2020 (UTC)


 * By the way, if you have data in Excel, it is not difficult to turn it into Wikipedia tables (and vice versa), facilitating sharing of information. -- Toddy1 (talk) 19:19, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The WGHI says that 18.54% of Wikipedia's biographies are about women as of 8/4/2020. Mcampany (talk) 19:35, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks. -- Toddy1 (talk) 19:47, 12 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Other questions you might want to ask of the data, are (1) whether the template is applied to the whole article, or to a section, and (2) whether there are comments on the talk page that explain what needs to be fixed to make it acceptable. I looked at two examples of biographies of people I had never heard of:
 * Cheryl Studer, an opera singer. There is discussion on the talk page about uncited information, that gives a bit of a clue as to the objection. The biography also has a long list of works. If you look at an example female pop singer, nobody seems to object to a much greater level of detail, albeit spun off into sub-articles.
 * Jessica Barson, a scientist. There are no clues on the talk page or in edit summaries.  I can see that someone who is not interested in her work would find being told what she does boring - but what do you expect from an article about a scientist.  I think it is a mistaken tagging.
 * -- Toddy1 (talk) 19:47, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * It's not just a matter of male / female bios it is also subject matter, for example WP:Articles for deletion/The NeuroGenderings Network and when that failed a whole debates section - where I had been very careful to show X's research shows one thing whilst Y's research shows something else - was removed so I had to start this Talk:The NeuroGenderings Network and the section was removed on a completely different basis to the one being argued by the original deleting editor. --The Vintage Feminist (talk) 20:56, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Of 3575 items listed by
 * 145 were category pages
 * 216 were list pages
 * 94 were pages described as "Wikipedia..."
 * 131 were talk pages (this does not include user talk pages)
 * 176 were user pages
 * 11 were draft pages
 * 102 were template pages
 * 2700 were probably article pages.
 * -- Toddy1 (talk) 21:22, 12 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Another way to examine this problem would be to use Category:Wikipedia articles that are excessively detailed from June 2020, etc. This gives far more manageable length lists. -- Toddy1 (talk) 21:27, 12 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Past discussion (Feb 2020) of cleanup maintenance categories: WP:Village pump (policy)/Archive 156. It includes some transclusion statistics for Template:Overly detailed, it is considerably higher than for other cleanup categories. --The Vintage Feminist (talk) 23:37, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Data
I am going through the cases - but it is going to take me some time -- Toddy1 (talk) 15:59, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I am at row 0779 (of 2700), which is about 30% of the way through a simple classification. The table is generated by Excel.  If you spot errors, or room for improvement, please say so. -- Toddy1 (talk) 16:03, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I am at row 1213. -- Toddy1 (talk) 21:02, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Is the order of this list determined in a way that might be systematically related to the conditional probability that an observation has the template given that it's a page for a particular category of person? I ask because classifying a ~50% random sample must be sufficient to get a good enough answer, and would save you a ton of time. The only problem is if the list is not randomly ordered, so if the ones you've coded so far are systematically different from the ones you haven't coded. - Astrophobe  (talk) 21:15, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I think it is best to code the lot. The order is the order it was produced by the link that Doug Weller gave us, so it is non-random.  The larger the sample, the more robust the results of significance tests.


 * We currently have 207 non-fiction biographical articles coded (in 5 of these the bio coding is hedged). Of the 207, 150 are male (72%) and 57 are female (28%). Mcampany told us that  18.54% of Wikipedia's biographies.  The number of female biographies with the template is nearly 50% more than the expected value. -- Toddy1 (talk) 21:52, 13 August 2020 (UTC)

Conclusion. If we only look at biographies of non-fictional individuals, whose gender is either male or female (ignoring spin off articles, etc), we have 609 articles - of these 380 (62%) are of male subjects and 229 (38%) are of female subjects. This is astonishing, considering that 18.54% of biographies are of females. If the same proportion of biographical articles of females were tagged as of males, then we would have expected 86 biographies of females to be tagged. -- Toddy1 (talk) 22:20, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

I only went through the first 500 articles and I did not include fictional characters or groups. I discovered there were 61 biographies 10 women (16.4% of 61) and 51 men (83.6% of 61), but I note that a number of the men could be considered to be socially / cultural liberal or diverse. --The Vintage Feminist (talk) 01:29, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Women (10, 16.4%)
 * Sections (5)


 * Twyla Tharp - American dancer, choreographer, and author
 * Donna Summer - American singer, songwriter and actress
 * Eve (rapper) - American rapper, singer, songwriter, actress, and talk show hostess from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
 * Amy Gutmann - US academic who is the 8th president of the University of Pennsylvania
 * Dorothy Hill - Australian geologist and palaeontologist


 * Entire article (1)


 * Maybelle Carter - American country musician


 * Entire article plus other orange box issues (4)


 * Jody Lynn Nye - American science fiction writer
 * Yvonne Trevino - US women's kickboxing and boxing champion
 * Yelena Davydova - Russian-Canadian gymnastics coach
 * Barbara Heinemann Landmann - (1795-1883) German, a Werkzeug, or Instrument, for the Community of True Inspiration (religious preacher)

Men (51, 83.6%)
 * Sections (17)


 * Woody Guthrie - American singer-songwriter
 * Ben Chifley - Australian politician
 * John Searle - American philosopher
 * Albert Szent-Györgyi - Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1937
 * Kane (wrestler)
 * Stone Cold Steve Austin - American actor, producer, television and podcast host, and retired professional wrestler
 * Liam Fox - British politician
 * Chuck Hagel - nomation process for becoming 24th US Secretary of Defense from 2013 to 2015 in the Obama administration
 * Mike Honda - American politician and former educator
 * Nawaz Sharif - Pakistani businessman and politician who served as the prime minister of Pakistan for three non-consecutive terms
 * Stephen II, Ban of Bosnia - the Bosnian Ban from 1314
 * Pappy Boyington - American combat pilot
 * Jeffrey R. Holland - American educator and religious leader
 * Ramesses V - 4th pharaoh of the 20th dynasty of Egypt
 * Aaron Rodgers - American football quarterback for the Green Bay Packers
 * Diarmuid Martin - RC Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland
 * Anu Malik - Indian music director and singer


 * Entire article (7)


 * Victor Cousin - French philosopher
 * Jack Osbourne - English media personality, son of heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne
 * Clint Malarchuk - Canadian retired professional ice hockey goaltender
 * Keith Windschuttle - Australian writer, historian
 * Dwyane Wade - American former professional basketball player
 * Alex James (musician) - English musician and songwriter, best known as the bassist of the band Blur
 * Corey Hart (singer) - Canadian singer-songwriter


 * Entire article plus other orange box issues (27)


 * Richard Lloyd (guitarist)
 * Harry Hay - American gay rights activist, communist, and labor advocate
 * Baji Rao I - (1700 – 1740) a general and a statesman of the Maratha Empire in India
 * N. Chandrababu Naidu - Indian politician and former Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh
 * Spyder-D - old-school rapper and producer from New York City
 * Leon Henkin - was a logician at the University of California, Berkeley
 * Emir Kusturica - Serbian filmmaker, actor and musician
 * Arthur Bremer - American who attempted to assassinate U.S. Democratic presidential candidate George Wallace on May 15, 1972, in Laurel, Maryland
 * Manna Dey - Indian playback singer, music director, musician
 * Michael Wilding (writer) - British writer and academic
 * Luis de Alba - Mexican comedian
 * Segundo Cernadas - Argentine actor
 * Ronald Ryan - last person to be legally hanged in Australia
 * Samy Molcho - Israeli mime and an expert in body language communication
 * Faudel - French-Algerian raï singer and actor
 * Jacques-Alain Miller - French psychoanalyst and writer
 * Graham Kerr - Scottish cooking personality
 * Vandolph - Filipino actor and comedian
 * Stuart Semple - multidisciplinary British artist working across painting, sculpture, happenings, technology and activism
 * In R Voice - Russian musician
 * Ogyen Trinley Dorje - Tibetan Buddhist, head of the Karma Kagyu school
 * Francis Boyle - American human rights lawyer and professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law
 * E. Stanley Jones - American 20th-century Methodist Christian missionary and theologian
 * David Campese - a former Australian rugby union player
 * Steve Sohmer - US television writer and producer, and former network television and motion picture studio executive
 * Mark McGowan (performance artist) - British street artist, performance artist and prominent public protester
 * Mario Biondi (writer) - Italian writer, poet, literary critic, journalist and translator