The gender gap gap

[Johnny Au]

There are encyclopedia entries for single songs, albums, video games and every star trek episode ever known. (NYBrad has firmly affirmed that deleting Star Trek episodes, however obscure, is bad for business). Is Wikipedia only about that content produced and promoted by the major studios / networks / gun manufacturers, etc.?

Don't forget Wikipedia's grand repository of bus rapid transit stations and light rail transit stations, despite many of them simply being concrete medians with roofs and benches. Subway stations and even underground light rail transit stations I can understand.

[Poetlister]

Don't forget Wikipedia's grand repository of bus rapid transit stations and light rail transit stations, despite many of them simply being concrete medians with roofs and benches. Subway stations and even underground light rail transit stations I can understand.

You get all sorts of oddities like the Manchester services which are underground railways in the centre of Manchester, trams a bit further out and then above ground railways in the suburbs. If you include the proper stations, it might be inconsistent to exclude the stops on the tram sections.

[Capeo]

Are you sure about this? The WP:ACDS (T-H-L) say that "Any editor may advise any other editor that discretionary sanctions are in force for an area of conflict. However, these only count as the formal notifications required by this procedure if the standard template message – currently {{Ds/alert}} – is placed unmodified on the talk page of the editor being alerted."

You are correct that the matter is not quite so clear-cut. Anyone can give a DS alert on a user's talkpage. However, placing the template on the talkpage, thereby declaring the page to be within "area of conflict", is a different matter. See the section Page restrictions which is a bit confusing. Even the Arbs aren't sure: GorillaWarfare takes one position, and Kelapstick takes another.

As you know, based on the recent ARCA in the ARBPIA area: ArbCom is very well capable of writing rules that nobody understands, not even they.

I actually just commented at that ARCA about how convoluted those templates are. I understood it as you had stated in your prior post, but that's not the case. The only template that only admins can place is the editnotice on talkpages that definitively confirm the page is subject to DS. The other two templates any editor can use. Which is a bit silly since they say, affirmatively, that the page is subject to DS whether that's the case or not. To find out if it is you either have to take it to AE or ARCA and see where the admin's whims fall.

Then you have the fact that Arbs can't even agree on when DS are applicable. Particularly curious when some of the current Arbs fashioned this particular DS. GW seemed to imply to me that the "gender-related conflict" clause applies to any editor conflict where gender comes up, regardless of the article where conflict is taking place. That seemed pretty ridiculous to me considering the anonymity WP holds oh so dear. Not to mention how easily gamed that is. Other Arbs seemed to disagree with GW's implications. Hard to tell since a hefty portion of the Arbs right now barely respond to anything even though they're actively editing in other areas.

It also doesn't seem like much is going to come out of this "clarification". It's pretty much impossible to clarify anything when the Arbs can't be bothered. Clarifying would involve engaging the ambiguity in the whole DS process and it doesn't seem like they have stomach to go down that rabbit hole. For instance, I found a bunch of the stuff SlimVirgin said to be wildly inappropriate for an admin or... really, any editor. It was a weird mix of accusations, ownership, special pleading and threatening templating that was extremely unbecoming of an admin. I'm sure nothing will come of that either. Headbomb needs to shut the fuck up at this point too though. Each subsequent post they make to that ARCA does them no favors.

[Bezdomni]

I've done some letter-crunching to make some sense out of that l-o-n-g FA list that appeared in the suddenly undefunct ( !! ) Signpost. Actually, a lot of letter-crunching. Pipes are evil. ^^

What the data show:

* The most common topic—by far—is war. (24 entries)
* Within war, the most populated subcategory is: boats. (9)
* The quarterly gender gap was 11-3 in favor of men.
* The fauna-flora gap was 12-1 in favor of fauna.
* Within F-F, the most popular subcategory was: birds. (9)
* Casliber seems to have been the most prolific nominator in this latter area and, quite possibly, overall, just edging out boats-nominator Sturmvogel 66.

Please have a quick look at the more structured result... 3 months of FA are a bright light into the belly of a beast.

[Kingsindian]

Blog post in Times Higher Ed:

How we doubled the representation of female classical scholars on Wikipedia

[Poetlister]

Blog post in Times Higher Ed:

How we doubled the representation of female classical scholars on Wikipedia

"The Welsh-language Wikipedia (Cywiki) currently has more biographies of women than men." That sounds like an overcompensation. It is hard to believe that there are more women than men who are notable, even among Welsh speakers. Will it last?

[hættulegt]

Don't forget Wikipedia's grand repository of bus rapid transit stations and light rail transit stations, despite many of them simply being concrete medians with roofs and benches. Subway stations and even underground light rail transit stations I can understand.

You get all sorts of oddities like the Manchester services which are underground railways in the centre of Manchester, trams a bit further out and then above ground railways in the suburbs. If you include the proper stations, it might be inconsistent to exclude the stops on the tram sections.

Manchester (assuming you mean the UK one) doesn't have any underground railways. Just trams and trains above ground (and articles for the stations for both).

[Rogol Domedonfors]

Manchester (assuming you mean the UK one) doesn't have any underground railways. Just trams and trains above ground (and articles for the stations for both).

There's the Picc-Vic tunnel (T-H-L) article. There are no fewer than ten underground railways in Manchester, sadly none in an actual state of existence.

PS: Not quite sure what this has to do with gender ...

[Kingsindian]

There's a page on Meta which summarizes research on gender gap in Wikipedia content.

This paper seems to be a good one to start with. Here are its findings:

We present and apply a computational method for assessing gender bias on Wikipedia along multiple dimensions. We find that most Wikipedia language editions exhibit a slight over-representation of women, but the proportional differences in the coverage of men and women are not significant. That means, men and women are covered equally well in all six Wikipedia language editions. Also on the visibility level, we do not find any evidence for male-bias in the selection procedure of articles that are featured on the startpage of the English Wikipedia. These are encouraging findings suggesting that
the Wikipedia editor community is sensible to gender inequalities and covers notable women and men equally well. However, we also find that the way women are portrayed on Wikipedia starkly differs from the way men are portrayed. We find evidence for both structural and lexical gender biases. On a structural level, we observe an asymmetry: Women on Wikipedia tend to be more linked to men than vice versa. On a lexical level we find that especially romantic relationships and family-related issues are much more frequently discussed on Wikipedia articles about women than men.

[thekohser]

There's a page on Meta which summarizes research on gender gap in Wikipedia content.

This paper seems to be a good one to start with. Here are its findings:

We present and apply a computational method for assessing gender bias on Wikipedia along multiple dimensions. We find that most Wikipedia language editions exhibit a slight over-representation of women, but the proportional differences in the coverage of men and women are not significant. That means, men and women are covered equally well in all six Wikipedia language editions. Also on the visibility level, we do not find any evidence for male-bias in the selection procedure of articles that are featured on the startpage of the English Wikipedia. These are encouraging findings suggesting that
the Wikipedia editor community is sensible to gender inequalities and covers notable women and men equally well. However, we also find that the way women are portrayed on Wikipedia starkly differs from the way men are portrayed. We find evidence for both structural and lexical gender biases. On a structural level, we observe an asymmetry: Women on Wikipedia tend to be more linked to men than vice versa. On a lexical level we find that especially romantic relationships and family-related issues are much more frequently discussed on Wikipedia articles about women than men.

A head-scratcher...

To estimate the bias on Wikipedia that goes beyond the bias in the offline world, ideally one would have a complete list of notable people available that is (a) not biased and (b) independent from Wikipedia. Since it is impossible to obtain such a list...

They went ahead and chose three sources, two of which have Wikipedia as a part of their feeder system.

So, to compare Wikipedia bias to outside, independent sources, they compared Wikipedia to Wikipedia.

[Kingsindian]

Well, if something is impossible but the question is important, one has to work with what is available. It's like the joke about the drunk searching for his keys under the lamp post.

If I understand correctly, the paper uses three datasets: Freebase (T-H-L), Pantheon, and the book Human Accomplishment (T-H-L) by Charles Murray (T-H-L). The first two have Wikipedia as part of their system. I think Freebase incorporates Wikipedia content, but was compiled independently (I am not sure). As for the last one, I think it would be, um, controversial to cite Murray in a discussion about who is "notable". Looking at the Wikipedia article for the latter, most of the top names in various fields are male. I don't know how useful such a dataset would be for this question.

They say that their findings are "broadly consistent" with related work, which used stuff like TIME articles and Encyclopedia Britannica articles.

I haven't really looked at this stuff in detail: what is "notable" is, of course, hard to define satisfactorily.

[HRIP7]

They say that their findings are "broadly consistent" with related work, which used stuff like TIME articles and Encyclopedia Britannica articles.

Reagle and Rhue (2011), whose paper is mentioned, found that "Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than are articles on men relative to Britannica."

So in this respect at least, this study's conclusions are different. It's anyone's guess what the difference is mainly due to – whether it's changes in Wikipedia over the past six years or the different reference sets used.

[thekohser]

It's anyone's guess what the difference is mainly due to – whether it's changes in Wikipedia over the past six years or the different reference sets used.

Or the skill level of the researchers.

[Kingsindian]

They say that their findings are "broadly consistent" with related work, which used stuff like TIME articles and Encyclopedia Britannica articles.

Reagle and Rhue (2011), whose paper is mentioned, found that "Wikipedia articles on women are more likely to be missing than are articles on men relative to Britannica."

So in this respect at least, this study's conclusions are different. It's anyone's guess what the difference is mainly due to – whether it's changes in Wikipedia over the past six years or the different reference sets used.

They are using different measures. If you look at the overall coverage, Wikipedia and EB roughly have the same bias as the original dataset, with WP doing slightly better in most cases (Table 1). If one looks only at missing articles, then the statement you quoted is correct. (Table 2). From the conclusion:

With respect to the percentage of women in a reference work, Wikipedia and Britannica both roughly mirror the bias of the source list, with Wikipedia performing slightly better than does Britannica in most cases (Table 1). While Wikipedia has more biographies of women than does Britannica in absolute terms (Table 1), Wikipedia tends to be less balanced in whom it misses than is Britannica as seen in the percentages of missing articles (Table 2) and the positive and significant Male coefficient in the logistic regression

In absolute terms, Wikipedia does much better than EB, simply because missing articles in WP are much lower than in EB, because of number of articles.

[Poetlister]

To estimate the bias on Wikipedia that goes beyond the bias in the offline world, ideally one would have a complete list of notable people available that is (a) not biased and (b) independent from Wikipedia. Since it is impossible to obtain such a list...

It's easy enough for British people. You use the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and Who's Who/Who was Who. There are works for other countries, such as The Dictionary Of Canadian Biography and The Australian Dictionary of Biography, but I don't know them well enough to say if they meet the same standards.

[Rogol Domedonfors]

In passing, a splendid coinage, or malapropism, for such discussions, from Graaf Statler on another site: Gendergab.

[Poetlister]

Apologies if I've overlooked something, but I can find no discussion here of this paper: Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia. It's published by Springer so is a reliable source.

[Bezdomni]

Apologies if I've overlooked something, but I can find no discussion here of this paper: Women through the glass ceiling: gender asymmetries in Wikipedia. It's published by Springer so is a reliable source.

The Linguistic Intergroup Bias theory in Section 2.2.2 Topical and linguistic bias is pretty interesting. Verbs, they suggest, are used for punctual failures of in-group heroes, whereas more permanent abstract qualities (bad, center-wing, etc.) get used for those not in the in-group. Unfortunately, I still haven't really found/understood the results section associated with the methodology... I'll have to reread, more carefully.

Since they are using DBpedia, it's worth mentioning (though possibly not here) that they just had their annual meeting in Graaf's town: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/blog/more-140-d ... -amsterdam

[Kingsindian]

I do hope you'll have a chance to look at this article, KI, since there's so much labeling going on at WP and since you seem interested by the linguistic strategies of those seeking to mark others as (not) being part of the in-group.

I skimmed the paper. Section 3.2.2 describes the results for linguistic bias for genders. The magnitude of the effects is very small (as seen in Table 5 as well):

Effect sizes, measured by Cohen’s w, are very small, in line with the typically small effects in other studies in psycholinguistics. When measuring relative changes, we find that adjectives are almost 9% more likely to be used to describe positive aspects of men’s biographies, while 1.62% more likely to describe negative aspects in women’s biographies.

I have no idea of what these effects imply, if anything.

[Bezdomni]

I do hope you'll have a chance to look at this article, KI, since there's so much labeling going on at WP and since you seem interested by the linguistic strategies of those seeking to mark others as (not) being part of the in-group.

I skimmed the paper. Section 3.2.2 describes the results for linguistic bias for genders. The magnitude of the effects is very small (as seen in Table 5 as well):

Effect sizes, measured by Cohen’s w, are very small, in line with the typically small effects in other studies in psycholinguistics. When measuring relative changes, we find that adjectives are almost 9% more likely to be used to describe positive aspects of men’s biographies, while 1.62% more likely to describe negative aspects in women’s biographies.

I have no idea of what these effects imply, if anything.

This could be a base-line for comparison in a right-left-center study. But the devil is always in the coding of evaluative adjectives before getting started...

let's see... I should be able to figure out how many times "far right" pops up (22,384) as opposed to "far left" (9,399) and "far center" (12, none related to politics).

looks promising, no?

[Poetlister]

let's see... I should be able to figure out how many times "far right" pops up (22,384) as opposed to "far left" (9,399) and "far center" (12, none related to politics).

looks promising, no?

That could mean that very right-wing politicians are more likely to have articles than very left-wing ones, or that there are more of them.

[Kingsindian]

Yes. To take an analogue of the gender gap, there are many more articles on men than women.

One common way of getting around these issues is to look at other reference sources, like Britannica, and comparing them. Of course, Britannica is not perfect, but at least it gives a yardstick to compare to.

[Bezdomni]

let's see... I should be able to figure out how many times "far right" pops up (22,384) as opposed to "far left" (9,399) and "far center" (12, none related to politics).

looks promising, no?

That could mean that very right-wing politicians are more likely to have articles than very left-wing ones, or that there are more of them.

Sorry to be pedantic, but since I included User and Wikipedia namespaces in the search, we'd be looking at (very) different data for just article space:

in article "main" space: far right (7,590), far left (4.469), far center (8)

but one would need to eliminate properly spatial terms like "far left corner" and "in the far right" , even "on the far left" sometimes (the more arbitrarily the better ^^) ... and of course "far center", into which I'm going to have to look forthwith to see whatever that could possibly mean... . painstaking work, this. ^^

KI: you're kidding about measuring in "yards" I hope.

[Johnny Au]

It's also possible that a BLP can have "far left" and "far right" mentioned in the article.

[Volunteer Marek]

let's see... I should be able to figure out how many times "far right" pops up (22,384) as opposed to "far left" (9,399) and "far center" (12, none related to politics).

looks promising, no?

That could mean that very right-wing politicians are more likely to have articles than very left-wing ones, or that there are more of them.

Also, Bezdomni, are you seriously trying to compare the frequency of "far-right" to ... "far-center". What the hell is that?

[thekohser]

let's see... I should be able to figure out how many times "far right" pops up (22,384) as opposed to "far left" (9,399) and "far center" (12, none related to politics).

looks promising, no?

That could mean that very right-wing politicians are more likely to have articles than very left-wing ones, or that there are more of them.

Also, Bezdomni, are you seriously trying to compare the frequency of "far-right" to ... "far-center". What the hell is that?

I interpreted that as a bit of a cheeky joke, but hey... that's just my style. I could be wrong.

[Poetlister]

KI: you're kidding about measuring in "yards" I hope.

Don't forget, most WP editors are in the USA, where they can't even spell "metre", let alone measure things in metres.

[Bezdomni]

Including far centre does, arguably, include some difficult to class tokens. Both a politician and a director either have chairs or have been seated in the far centre, apparently... ^^

[No Ledge]

The USS Colorado is a far center ship. Bet you didn't know that even battleships have political affiliations. Although Donald Trump's speeches so far center on asserting how great and fantastic he and his presidency are, I actually consider Hillary to be the quintessential "far center" politician. That's why she couldn't even beat a loser like Trump. Yes I know, she won the popular vote but any competent politician would have beat Trump by a landslide. Hint: if you have to resort to "swiftboating" and smearing your opponent to win votes, you're a loser. It was blatantly obvious to voters what Trump was about, and totally unnecessary for Hillary to help the voters figure out Trump. Getting back to the topic, the gender gap, I want the first woman president to be one that I can feel proud about.

[Bezdomni]

In Merhdad Yazdani's "Investigating the Gender Pronoun Gap in Wikipedia", there are 2 occurences of "far right", one of "bottom center" and a single "on the left". There's some hope! I'm having a bit of trouble following the article due to the question of "he" and "she" being sometimes excluded (as stop-words) while they simultaneously seem to be the subject of inquiry (but, again, I'm probably reading too quickly)...

The bit about battleships buttressing the She-heavy (featured) article ranks is amusing.

ps: like Google searches, the WP search I did doesn't seem to take punctuation into account. "far-right" = "far right" I've never understood this neutralization of hyphens... (but then the weird hyphenated words mid-line in the PDF of Wikistudies 1:1 are odd, too)

[Midsize Jake]

I could actually sort-of see "far center" as a legitimate term to describe people who are so completely committed to, and adamant about, moderate economic and social policy that they would use the tactics of political extremists (including but not limited to violence and "dirty" propaganda) to intimidate opponents of those policies.

I probably would have thought it rather absurd 20 years ago, but these days, not so much. I wouldn't be surprised if we hear this term more often in coming years, though I doubt it will ever become common usage.

[Bezdomni]

In unrelated matters, someone should pinch Greg and ask him if there's any truth to his renewed interest in dated cans of original Rogol juice.

[Midsize Jake]

In unrelated matters, someone should pinch Greg and ask him if there's any truth to his renewed interest in dated cans of original Rogol juice.

I'll ask him - it could be a "joe-job," but at the same time, it would be nicer if people would ask our permission before using screen shots of various members' posts. AFAIK we routinely accede to such requests, even in cases like Ms. Genderdesk where the person tends to be critical of us. (I'd imagine that we'd mostly object to the use of screenshots by sites that promote hate ideologies, death cults, abusive sexual and psychological perversions, things of that nature - those sites, of course, also being among the least likely to ask for permission as a matter of course.)

[thekohser]

I haven't found the author of Gender Desk to be particularly reliable as a source of factual information in the past, so why now? Anyway, she apparently modified the infringing content, so that would seem to be an implicit admission that the material had been re-used improperly, no? I don't really have the time to look into it more carefully.

[Poetlister]

I'd imagine that we'd mostly object to the use of screenshots by sites that promote hate ideologies, death cults, abusive sexual and psychological perversions, things of that nature - those sites, of course, also being among the least likely to ask for permission as a matter of course.

Wikimedia Commons is extremely careful in matters of copyright, except when it comes to photos of non-human primates and images from British galleries.

[Bezdomni]

Sigh. These wars strike me as kind of silly.

The text version of the Community Health Initiative Administrator Confidence Survey contains interesting data about age & sex of respondents, as well as their number of years of servitude? service.

[Randy from Boise]

Sigh. These wars strike me as kind of silly.

The text version of the Community Health Initiative Administrator Confidence Survey contains interesting data about age & sex of respondents, as well as their number of years of servitude? service.

More evidence that core WP volunteers are older than most people think they are... Fortunately we don't hear much nonsense about purported teenaged administrators going nutso anymore...

RfB

[Poetlister]

Fortunately we don't hear much nonsense about purported teenaged administrators going nutso anymore...

RfB

Well no, after ten years as admins they're 20-somethings.

[Barbara Page]

Do I really have to go all the way back to the beginning of this thread to figure out what all you 'guys' are talking about? Does this thread have anything to do with a gender gap or gender gap gap? What does this even mean? Do we ever try to figure what feminism has to do with art? The other WP women editors, or those who say they are, ARE pretty fiesty. I'm new so chew me up, set me straight, call me names, send me candy but be so kind to clue me in.

[Kingsindian]

The "gap" written twice is a typo.

This thread is a running thread which goes in all sorts of directions. A more focused blog post on the gender gap is this one. There are several others on various other aspects.

[Bezdomni]

It never hurts to go back and read the first posts. If you do, you'll be able to safely reject KI's weird claim that the title of the thread is a typo. The author of that original post, since banned, has been sharply critical of both WP and WPO (which he considers to be a back room of WP) in part because he1 thinks there is a "gap" in most people's understanding of what the gender gap might be. (i.e. more than just a quantitative question). I personally only became actively involved in WP because I noticed some Green politicians being smeared by a Clinton spinner (I first noticed it on Ajamu Baraka, then on Jill Stein, but the spinner had smeared them in the other order, and more recently has focused his energy on another democratic politician a bit hostile to the DNC). I've always thought that the dysfunctional ambiance of marauding "neutrality" gangs on WP is probably just a mirror of the larger (media) environment: when NBC gets the order not to publish on Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein, for example, nothing gets published...

1 The OP has never explicitly identified himself as a guy as far as I know, but I think it's a safe bet based on traditional gender roles / language use... (I'd laugh a lot if I turned out to be wrong about that. ^^)

[Randy from Boise]

It never hurts to go back and read the first posts. If you do, you'll be able to safely reject KI's weird claim that the title of the thread is a typo. The author of that original post, since banned, has been sharply critical of both WP and WPO (which he considers to be a back room of WP) in part because he1 thinks there is a "gap" in most people's understanding of what the gender gap might be. (i.e. more than just a quantitative question). I personally only became actively involved in WP because I noticed some Green politicians being smeared by a Clinton spinner (I first noticed it on Ajamu Baraka, then on Jill Stein, but the spinner had smeared them in the other order, and more recently has focused his energy on another democratic politician a bit hostile to the DNC). I've always thought that the dysfunctional ambiance of marauding "neutrality" gangs on WP is probably just a mirror of the larger (media) environment: when NBC gets the order not to publish on Democratic donor Harvey Weinstein, for example, nothing gets published...

1 The OP has never explicitly identified himself as a guy as far as I know, but I think it's a safe bet based on traditional gender roles / language use... (I'd laugh a lot if I turned out to be wrong about that. ^^)

Ya know, I forgot all about that original poster until you mentioned him. Now that you moved me to read from the top, I think we've IDed that "Darkened Knight" twerp that adores writing barely sane 1,000 word screeds at WikiInAction on Reddit...

RfB

[Bezdomni]

I'll take screeds over snark any day.

[Midsize Jake]

I'll take screeds over snark any day.

Yeah, that one's only 715 words!

I have to admit though, aside from the length and the rather off-putting tone, it's a fairly accurate summary of why their current approach to the "gender gap" isn't likely to work the way they want it to.

[Randy from Boise]

I'll take screeds over snark any day.

These people are not progressive intellectuals, as they're so desperate to be seen as, they're reactionary idiots. They're not polite and friendly, they're hostile and aggressive.

Let us just say that this fellow has a sense of self-awareness and irony on a par with Donald John Trump.

RfB

[Kingsindian]

For people who are mystified as to what is this all about, here is the TLDR:

Megalibrarygirl (T-C-L) is currently running for admin. For a long time, there was a single "oppose" vote, by user XXanthippe (T-C-L). A lot of people found their questions (Q8) and vote rationale to be inappropriate. Drmies (T-C-L) even struck out Q8 briefly, but Megalibrarygirl answered the question anyway, and the question was restored. The lone oppose voter was also badgered by various people, as happens in RfAs all the time.

There is now another "oppose" vote, by the way.

[Anthonyhcole]

For people who are mystified as to what is this all about, here is the TLDR:

Thank you.

[Kingsindian]

There's an ANI case about philoSOPHIA (T-H-L), which is a newish feminist journal. The article was recently at AfD.

The dispute occurred when SlimVirgin, among others, tried to add the editorial board of the journal to the article. Headbomb (T-C-L) argued against it, saying that editorial boards are mostly for promotion and it is a long-standing practice on Wikipedia to not include them in articles. There was edit-warring, in the course of which SlimVirgin added a DS notice to the article saying that discretionary sanctions applied because it a "gender-related" article under the Gamergate provision. This miffed Mr. Headbomb, who considered this bulllying; and they brought it to admin noticeboard.

These are some of the comments on the admin noticeboard:

@Headbomb: You're reverting two women who are trying to write an article about a feminist journal, and you keep removing the names of the women who run it. It doesn't get more gender-related than that.

I don't want to keep discussing this here, except to say that the aggression—"I don't quite fucking know" and "utterly fucking horseshit"—is a huge part of the problem. I don't know you. You're an anonymous man on the internet who has been inexplicably aggressive for several days at an article in which you have no interest. It's actually frightening. I'm not exaggerating when I say that. It frightens me.

My options are to abandon the article so that I can stay out of your way, or try to use dispute resolution to resolve it. I've initiated the latter, even though what I really want to do at this point is retire. SarahSV (talk) 01:06, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

Great, now any dispute involving women editors is considered a gender-related dispute unless it's only women that are involved in the dispute? And I'm supposed to check an editors' gender before reverting them? I'm pretty sure ARBCOM would have said "Discretionary sanctions apply whenever editors who happen to be women and men disagree about something on Wikipedia" if that's what they meant. Get off your high horse, and stop claiming you know my mind and I have no interest in the article. I have plenty of interest in academic journals, as you'd see in User:Headbomb/My work#Academic serials or Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Feminism/Archive 4#WP:JCW needs help. If that somehow scares you... I have no words. You started this agression by abusing your admins powers by putting me, Randykitty, and the article under discretionary sanctions when you are yourself involved in the dispute. And somehow I'm the bad guy here? If there ever was toxic feminism, this is it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:17, 6 June 2017 (UTC)

I do not know about you, but the idea of SlimVirgin being frightened by anyone on Wikipedia sounds like grade A horseshit to me. This is Fae level stuff.

Eventually, an ARCA request (permalink) has been created by Salvidrim, and the dispute somewhat defused, at least for now. An RfC is also going on on the talkpage about the advisory board.

My own feeling is that a lot of "special pleading" is going on in various aspects of this article. However, nothing is lost by erring on the side of "inclusionism" here.

Editor Headbomb is currently running for admin (his fourth try; last one was 9 years ago). From reading his responses to the questions addressed to him, it's not surprising that he has less than 50% support. The incident mentioned above features prominently (Q4), but many other responses are also bad, or perhaps tone deaf.

[Kingsindian]

Article: Inside the Fight to Change Wikipedia's Gender Problem.

Not much new. Includes this weird quote:

As the women at Gramercy Tech found, women’s pages were also more likely to link to men and relevant gender-neutral projects than vice versa. One of the most egregious examples that they found was the entry for Brexit, which linked to male politicians like Tony Blair, a former prime minister best known for his support of the Iraq War, but not to Theresa May, the Home Secretary that unexpectedly stepped into the role of Prime Minister after her predecessor, David Cameron, resigned after it was approved. Blair’s only connection to Brexit is that he spoke out publicly against it, while May is leading it. Even when they are at the center of the story, women’s roles are forgotten.

It's not clear what version of the article on Brexit (T-H-L) they're talking about. The referendum happened on 23 June 2016. After Remain lost, David Cameron announced his resignation as PM; Theresa May announced her candidacy for leader on 30 June 2016. By the next day, 1 July 2016, Theresa May is mentioned in the article, but I can't find Tony Blair anywhere, except in a footnote. From that point onward, May remains in the article.

[Kingsindian]

The piece has been updated: apparently instead of Tony Blair, the person in question was meant to be David Cameron. And the complaint is that Theresa May is not linked in the article, not that she isn't mentioned at all. This was the diff in question (in June 2017) [e-mail communication with the author].

As the women at Gramercy Tech found, women’s pages were also more likely to link to men and relevant gender-neutral projects than vice versa. One of the most egregious examples that they found was the entry for Brexit, which linked to the Wikipedia entries of male politicians like David Cameron, the prime minister that called for the referendum of Brexit, but not to the Wikipedia page of Theresa May, the Home Secretary that unexpectedly stepped into the role of Prime Minister after Cameron, her predecessor, resigned after it was approved.

This small omission is important: URLs on Wikipedia, as on the rest of the internet, allow for content to be discovered, and the availability of a link (or not) means “the difference between someone being a name and idea and someone being a full person,” as Krauss put it. Even when they are at the center of the story, women’s roles are forgotten.

The revised article is still wrong in two ways, which vitiates the point:

• Theresa May is indeed linked in the version prior to the diff supplied; she's just linked further down instead of the lead. In any case, I don't know the details of Google's algorithm, but I doubt that Theresa May is in need of Google juice.
• David Cameron is not linked in the lead either, the government led by him is.

The example supplied doesn't really show what it purports to show. But it's a small enough point right now that it doesn't matter.