![]() ![]() Now the second question, do the article lengths differ by gender? Indeed they do, by a small amount.įemale BLPs created at any time since 2009 are slightly longer on average than male ones of similar age, with only a couple of brief exceptions the gap may be widening over the past year but it’s maybe too soon to say for sure. This has driven the overall share steadily and continually upwards, now at 22.7% (as noted above). In late 2012, the rate of creation of female BLPs kicked up a gear, and from then on it’s been noticeably above the long-term average (almost hitting 33% in late 2017, but dropping back since then). Looking at the ratio over time (expressed here as %age of total male+female), the relative share of female BLPs was ~20% in 2009. As can be seen, and as might be expected, the gap has closed a bit over time. This graph shows all existing BLPs, broken down by gender and (approximately) when they were created. I’ll be sticking to data on living people throughout this post, but it’s interesting to compare the historic information. This is, as noted, only articles about living people across all 1,626,232 biographies in the English Wikipedia with a gender known to Wikidata, it’s about 17.83% female, 82.13% male, and 0.05% some other value. (Because of the limits of the query, I didn’t try and break down those in any more detail.) Of those with known gender, it breaks down as 77.06% male, 22.67% female, and 0.27% some other value. Of those, 697,402 were identified as male by Wikidata, 205,117 as female, 2464 had some other value for gender, 1220 didn’t have any value for gender (usually articles on groups of people, plus some not yet updated), and 517 simply didn’t have a connected Wikidata item (yet). The difference seems to have mostly disappeared for articles created in the last couple of years.) Statistics on the gender breakdown of BLPsĪs of a snapshot of yesterday morning,, the English Wikipedia had 906,720 articles identified as biographies of living people (BLPs for short). (If you want to get the tl dr summary – yes, there is some kind of difference in the way older male vs female articles have been involved with the deletion process, but exactly what that indicates is not obvious without data I can’t get at. Thanks to Sarah for prompting the research! Then I went off and thought about it for a bit more, and realised we could get most of the way there of it with some inferences. My initial assumption was, huh, I don’t think we can do that with Wikidata. And, instinctively, it seems plausible that there is a bias in the relative frequency of nomination for deletion – can we find if it’s there? This is, of course, something that’s being discussed a lot right now there is a lot of emerging push-back against the excellent work being done to try and add more notable women to Wikipedia, and one particular deletion debate got a lot of attention in the past few weeks, so it’s on everyone’s mind. I’d also like to know when they were created average length and whether they’ve been nominated for deletion. In particular, I’m looking for the gender breakdown. I’m trying to find out how many biographies of living persons exist on the English Wikipedia, and what kind of data we have on them. So, a really interesting question cropped up this weekend: ![]()
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