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- "Even the clichéd white male pop culture enthusiast who prefers to edit the Wikipedia article on, say, Tom Cruise rather than on Juana Inés de la Cruz will presumably have no negative impact on these lists." Quite a presumption. Innisfree987 (talk) 08:39, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- I am curious what the gender gap would be if you exclude single sentence stub articles (such as those on some olympians or state legislators). Eddie891 Talk Work 11:37, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- Thanks for this write-up! While significantly more complicated to execute, I would love an analysis of how the percentage of female entries has shifted among Level 3 Vital Articles over time (chosen because it is significantly older than the other tiers). While the Level 3 list started from the slightly older m:list of articles every Wikipedia should have, the latter is less tailored to enwiki. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 15:12, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- Using Vital Articles as a whole is fine for a "rough cut" guess, but its power dramatically fades if sliced up into subsections, e.g. the suggested inquiry into matters like "how important is 15th century Italy". That'll tell you how many 15th century Italy fans were among the editors who filled out VA5 were, and that's about it - zoomed in to that level of detail, there's going to be way more randomness from the small group of editors maintaining an area.
- That's true - 15th century Italy might not have been a great example to pick, given how low its p-value is, as they say. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:20, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- The other elephant in the room for any gender gap studies is the old WP:NSPORTS before the 2022 reform + the activities of certain editors who basically dumped entire player statistic tables in to Wikipedia, which means a surprisingly large proportion of Wikipedia biographies are that of random 4th division football players. A dump of 10000 random articles I did in April 2025 had the 3 most common Wikiprojects being 3231 in Biography, 713 in United States, and 556 (!) in Football. While I'm sure there were a few non-biography articles in there on games / seasons / teams in those WP Football articles, I'm sure most were players. I should go finish writing up my fuller findings, but I suspect it might be interesting to do a gender gap analysis that excludes either very short articles (as likely being just stats-only "This guy played at the 2010 Winter Olympics") or just flat excludes all sports biographies, given how sports bios are hugely male-dominated on Wikipedia (but not "interestingly" so as many of these articles get like 2 views a day, and some wouldn't survive the stricter notability scrutiny applied after the 2022 change to sports notability guidelines). SnowFire (talk) 16:15, 18 July 2025 (UTC)
- I am surprised the editor did not talk to participants at WP:Women in Red or even link to the project. Or, for that matter, talk to women who edit Wikipedia. We've been at this for, literally, 20 years now. The efforts to increase visibility of women are ongoing and this is just rehashing the same old stuff. It's a problem, it needs more input and participation, and the "notability" standard has long been criticized for systemic bias and a failure to assess actual notability as opposed to publicity or meaningless numerical metrics. Montanabw(talk) 20:54, 19 July 2025 (UTC)
- There is certainly a problem here with using the VA project to assess representation, considering it has its own set of US-centric and androcentric biases. The central premise of this article then uses this flawed metric to imply that gender parity is an inherently problematic target (citing an arbitrary shortlist of "great men" of history), and adjusts the target to a level where men's articles would still outnumber women's by 3-to-1. When (not if) we surpass the 25% ratio, which judging by Women in Red's progress will take us about another decade, does the author think more articles about women will result in them being overrepresented? Personally, I've always seen gender parity as a direction more than a hard goal, and think trying to figure out a solid "correct" figure is inevitably going to run into issues. --Grnrchst (talk) 11:11, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- To answer your question: if this analysis is roughly correct, then a ratio of over 25-30% or so would indicate over-representation of women, yes, unless the overall number of articles jumps as well. I wouldn't see that as a problem in itself, though, just like I don't see the current under-representation as a problem per se, since I think missing data is equally bad regardless of what demographics it applies to; but that's a whole separate discussion. Yaron Koren (talk) 15:30, 20 July 2025 (UTC)
- I mean, Wikipedia notability requirements are pretty flexible. A lot of it comes down to individual interpretations of vague rules. Technically, there'd be no problem at all with giving weight to gender. Say you've got two marginally-notable professors, writers, racecar drivers, chefs, or whatever -- one a woman and one a man. If deciding whether to have or keep an article for each, use a lower notability standard for the woman. You'd have to write this down in a rule or guideline. I personally am not in favor of this, because reasons. But it wouldn't bother me either, and maybe I'm wrong. It's not gonna happen anyway -- the editor corps, mostly male, would not go for it -- but it would address and alleviate the problem. Herostratus (talk) 07:12, 21 July 2025 (UTC)
- I have actually seen the reverse of this: two marginally notable professors, husband and wife, had their notability called into question. The wife ended up getting merged into the husband's article as they had overlapping achievements. ✶Quxyz✶ 22:50, 24 July 2025 (UTC)
- Did anyone bring up the idea of moving the article name's to include the husband and wife? I would argue there's a precedent, given Category:Couples. – The Grid (talk) 00:10, 29 July 2025 (UTC)
- I have actually seen the reverse of this: two marginally notable professors, husband and wife, had their notability called into question. The wife ended up getting merged into the husband's article as they had overlapping achievements. ✶Quxyz✶ 22:50, 24 July 2025 (UTC)
- As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about notability, this is a very interesting answer to a very interesting question. Thank you for writing this article. Toadspike [Talk] 15:20, 29 July 2025 (UTC)
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