For the purposes of countering systemic bias on Wikipedia, I’m undertaking a quantitative report on WikiProject Anarchism.
As this is a quantitative report, based largely on data and numbers, it is limited by the data available to me. If a possibly-related article wasn’t tagged as covered by the WikiProject in its talk page, or if the relevant entries in Wikidata are not filled in, this will unfortunately not be covered by this report. As such, my first recommendation is that people reading this make sure any missed articles are tagged for WikiProject coverage and Wikidata entries are updated with the required information.
This is also not a qualitative report. Such a report may be more relevant to specific individual articles than a broad overview of coverage by a WikiProject, as taking a qualitative review of thousands of articles collectively presents a vast challenge. For such future qualitative reports on systemic bias, I recommend that reviewers focus on article length and content, as well as the quality and distribution of its cited sources.
On 14 February 2023, I pulled the list of all 2,975 pages covered by the WikiProject Anarchism. From these, as I wanted to focus on articles in the main space, I removed all categories, templates, redirects, disambiguations, lists, etc. This brought it down to 2,242 articles that this WikiProject covers in the main space.
I then ran these 2,242 articles through PAC’s wikilinks inspector, which cross-references them with data points on Wikidata to find information about them, including gender and country of citizenship for biographies, and countries for other articles (about organisations, movements, etc.). The reliance on Wikidata provided some hurdles, as not every Wikidata entry has countries or gender listed, so there should be some accounting for a margin of error here. As a result of the data points used, this bias report will not be looking into other areas of potential systemic bias, e.g. the number of black and indigenous anarchists represented in our articles about anarchists in the United States.
From these articles, there are a total of 1,188 biographies and 1,054 non-biographical articles. With the former, there were cases of overlap in citizenship due to changing states (e.g. the Russian Empire dissolving and being replaced by the Soviet Union) or immigration (e.g. Italians moving to the United States). I also ran into a data issue with the latter, as only 426 of them are covered here. This may be due to a variety of factors, including that many articles are not limited by a specific geographic region, or that Wikidata entries are incomplete. I have noted instances of both of these.
I also took a quantitative review of our 500 most popular pages (for January 2023), as this would give us some insight not just into the systemic biases that we uphold in editing but also those that pass onto our readership; a review of the project’s 76 vital articles, which more or less represent the main targets of the WikiProject’s improvement goals, as they form some of what Wikipedia as a whole considered its most important articles; and a review of our recognised content, which broadly shows which articles have had the most active attention put into them.
Of our 1,188 biographies, there is a clear androcentric bias towards biographies about men, with approximately 82.8% of our articles being about male subjects, while only 17.1% of our biographies are about women. Furthermore, our coverage of trans, non-binary and intersex people is rather sparse, sitting at about 0.6% altogether.
The gender gap is even starker in our 48 vital biographies, of which 85.4% are about men and only 14.6% are about women, and in our 185 most popular biographies, of which 84.4% are about men and only 15.1% are about women. The gap is only marginally less pronounced in our 80 recognised biographies, of which 81.2% are about men and 18.8% are about women.
On average, men outnumber women in the Project’s coverage by more than 4-to-1. It should be noted that WikiProject Anarchism’s coverage of women is worse in every metric than the Wikipedia average of 19.5%, which should be cause for concern. Even assuming the number of biographies about men stays the same from here on (which, of course, it won’t), we would need to create at least 35 new biographies about women just to bring it up to the WP-wide average. To bring it up to parity, we would need to create at least 781 new biographies – a massive undertaking just to think about.
This under-representation may be due to a number of factors that reflect systemic bias on multiple levels. In terms of sourcing, the contributions of men are weighed more heavily than the contributions of women. Classical anarchist history often emphasises the roles of anarchism’s “founding fathers”, while at the same time neglecting, side-lining and ignoring the role of women in the subject’s development. Even when sources do cover the contribution of women to the field, there is a tendency to focus on a few more notable individuals. Feminist historian Judy Greenway described this tendency as the “Emma Goldman short-circuit”, due to the large of amount of attention paid to this anarchist “founding mother”, again to the detriment of others.
It is worth noting that of all the women covered by the WikiProject, Emma Goldman is the only one whose biography is a level-4 vital article and also the only one that has been reviewed to featured article status. Of the project’s 9 featured articles: 2 are biographies about male subjects; 2 are about books written by men; and 1 is about a fictional male character. There are left 3 historical events: women are entirely absent from the articles on the Tottenham Outrage and the Siege of Sidney Street; while for the Assassination of William McKinley, the only 3 women mentioned are McKinley’s wife Ida, McKinley’s biographer Margaret Leech and… Emma Goldman, who defended McKinley’s assassin. This implies a tendency to not just overlook women, but also to reference them largely in their relation to men. However, a more qualitative review of this is required in order to establish the extent of this issue.
As for the issue of representation for trans and non-binary people, this too requires some work, as it appears that they are under-represented among our articles. This is an issue that is particularly pronounced with trans men, the sole example of which accounts for only 0.1% of our total biographies on men. (In contrast to a 1.5% proportion for trans women) Non-binary people too account for only 0.17% of our biographies.
This too may be an issue with biases in sources, which often entirely neglect to represent LGBTIQA+ individuals and their contributions. There also may be a recency bias at play here, as trans and non-binary people are generally more represented in the contemporary era than they have been in the past, due in part to changing societal attitudes, shifting foci in scholarship and the self-organisation of marginalised folk to represent themselves and improve their conditions. As such, finding historical examples of trans and non-binary people related to anarchism may be more difficult – either because they weren’t “out” or because mainstream historiography glossed over that aspect of them.
Unlike the massive gender gap for women in this project, this one requires less new articles to close, going by general statistics for trans and non-binary population numbers. Even a few new biographies about trans and non-binary people would go a long way.
The geographic gap was also quite stark in WikiProject Anarchism, which displays a clear western-centric bias towards countries of the so-called “Western World” or “Global North”. Frequently the top 20% of countries will account for 80% of our articles, while the bottom 80% of countries account for only 20% of our articles.
Together, countries from Western Europe, North America and Oceania account for 75.7% of our biographies and 71.2% of our non-biographical articles. If one stretches the definition of the “western world” to include Eastern Europe and Latin America, which together account for 18.1% of biographies and 20.4% of non-biographical articles, the remainder left over is quite small. Africa and Asia together account for only 6.2% of our biographies and 8.4% of our non-biographical articles. The lack of focus on Africa and Asia is particularly pronounced in our most popular pages, recognised content and vital articles, in which they often go entirely unrepresented.
On average, Africa and Asia are out-numbered more than 9-to-1 by other regions. Even taken together with Latin America and Eastern Europe, they are still out-numbered by Western Europe and North America by about 3-to-1. Even Western Europe alone accounts for more than half of the entire WikiProject’s coverage.
Assuming the number of biographies about people from the “western world” remains the same (which, again, it won’t), at least 900 biographies about people from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America would need to be created to bring this up to parity. In order to bring non-biographical articles up to parity, at least 180 articles would need to be created. Even if one were to set the task of getting Western Europe alone below the 50% mark, we would need to create an additional 224 biographies and 32 new non-biographical articles. It’s clear that countering Western-centrism within the WikiProject will be no easy feat.
This representational problem is again down to a number of factors. Western-centrism in anarchist historiography has gone largely unexamined until relatively recently, when certain scholars began to make an active effort to highlight anarchist histories in a more global context.
When looking at Sub-Saharan Africa, the only countries that have received any substantial focus in anarchist historiography (and thus in our own articles) are Nigeria and South Africa, where scholars such as Sam Mbah and Lucien van der Walt have respectively highlighted their own country’s anarchist history. Other countries in the region either haven’t developed a notable anarchist movement until relatively recently (e.g. Ethiopia and Uganda), or their anarchist histories were tied inextricably with colonialism (e.g. Angola and Mozambique). Additionally, the global decay of anarchism in the mid-20th century meant that anarchism was not in the position to become part of the de-colonial and post-colonial histories of these countries. That our “ Anarchism in Africa” article largely exists to collect pieces of information that wouldn’t be enough to fill out articles on specific countries is indicative of the scale of the problem.
Anarchist historiography of Southwestern Asia and North Africa (SWANA) is generally more developed than those south of the Sahara, but also suffer from the same problems of Western-centrism. Generally anarchist histories of North Africa are very closely tied with those of southern Europe, focusing almost exclusively on the actions of French and Italian anarchists in the region. As before, the remission of anarchism that prevented its connection with de-/post-colonial movements affected this region too. The explosion of a coherent native anarchist movement in this region has largely been tied to the Arab Spring, when these ideas caught traction with young revolutionaries (e.g. Egypt, Syria, Tunisia). To my knowledge, I could only name a single historical North African anarchist covered by the project, that being Sail Mohamed. On the other hand, I know of several notable modern anarchists from SWANA, but as far as I know, none of them have biographies on Wikipedia.
Anarchist historiography of South Asia is also a troubled subject, as while there has been cases of anarchists and anarchisms popping up throughout the region, a coherent anarchist movement as such is still in its infancy. For example, the term “anarchist” was often thrown around by the British Empire to refer to basically anyone in modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran that had a tendency to rebel (e.g. Babists, NCM, Samiti). Additionally, there were some notable figures that incorporated anarchism into their own theory and practice (e.g. Gandhi, Ghose, Singh and Tagore) but aren’t usually explicitly identified as “anarchists” in most sources.
Research into anarchist history of Southeast Asia is also rather sparse, both as the scholarly interest in this area is relatively new and as the modern anarchist movements in the region are quite young. The historical anarchist movements in the region were very closely tied to developments in China or the countries’ former colonisers, so it’s difficult to find sources that are specifically about anarchism in the region.
In contrast, the relative under-representation of Eastern Europe, Latin America and East Asia are less easy to explain away, as there are copious amounts of sources on anarchist individuals and movements in these regions of the world. While the other regions mentioned above require some more keen and dedicated research, we have many of the resources we need already available to us here. Expanding our coverage of these areas will thus be more easily manageable, even if it is less urgently needed than other regions of Asia and those in Africa.
I’ll conclude with my recommendations to counter the systemic bias present in the project.
First off, we need to expand our lists of sources and our bibliographies to collect texts that focus on anarchist women and anarchists from post-colonial regions of the world. Inquiries into Google Scholar, Google Books, JSTOR and WorldCat may aid us in this.
We then need to go about creating and improving our articles, whether biographies or otherwise, that can help us close the gender and geographic gaps in our WikiProject. On an individual level, see how long you can go without creating or expanding an article about the life or work of male anarchists from Western Europe or North America, in order to force a shift in your focus for some amount of time. It may also be prudent for us to hold an edit-a-thon or some kind of collective drive that focuses specifically on coverage of these areas.
We also need to think about how we can more equitably cover these areas in our recognised content and our vital articles. The former should be less of an issue, as it just means improving and submitting more articles from this area for GA, FA and DYK reviews. The latter is trickier, as most vital article sections are already filled up. (To be honest, the Vital articles WikiProject itself might need a quantitative systemic bias review) Additionally we should consider how we can ensure these parts of the project are more easily findable and better sign-posted, in order to provide these articles more regular reader traction and hopefully get more of them into our most popular pages.
Forging closer links with other relevant WikiProjects would also be vital in closing the gender and geographic gaps that exist in our own project. Working together with the Women in Red and Women in Green projects, as well as the gender gap task force, would help us towards closing the gender gap. We could also reach out to the Africa and Asia projects to see if they have any recommendations or advice in expanding our coverage for these regions.
Additionally, our sister projects on other language Wikipedias could be of some assistance. In particular, our sister projects on the Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedias could be helpful in expanding our coverage of Latin America, ditto with the Polish and Russian projects for Eastern Europe. The French project may even have some recommendations for where to look for sources on Africa and Southwestern Asia, although this seems less likely.
We also ought to be inviting more women, LGBTIQA+ folk and people from Africa and Asia to participate in the WikiProject, as they could help contribute not just to closing our content gaps but our contributor gaps as well. (Although gender and geographic gaps for contributors is harder to gauge, as we largely contribute on an anonymous basis and I wouldn’t want to pressure anyone into disclosing information about themselves) We could put out a call-to-action for more contributors in this area, or we could reach out to people we know on a more personal level. To anyone interested, we should offer to assist them in getting started with editing, as getting to grips with Wikipedia can be tricky for almost everyone.
Finally, I think it would be a good idea for us to get into contact with experts in these fields that may be able to provide us with sources, targets and advice for creating and expanding more articles. I can speak from experience that working with scholars on subject matter they’re familiar with can be an enlightening experience and is endlessly helpful in improving our content. In terms of who to reach out to, there are plenty of examples in bibliographies throughout our project. I hesitate to name any names here, as there would be too many to count and I worry about them receiving spam. But if there’s any areas of interest you have that you would like to look further into, I can provide you some more personalised recommendations.
To cap this off, there is clearly a lot of work ahead of us in order to counter the systemic biases of the project. It will be difficult to narrow the gender and geographic gaps, and it’ll be even more difficult to close them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I hope the criticisms and suggestions that I’ve provided here can help us work further towards the goal of greater equity in our coverage.
-- Grnrchst ( talk) 19:31, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
94% of all editors are malehang on, where is this stat from? I'm sure men predominate on Wikipedia but I'd really be quite shocked to find this was the actual statistic. -- asilvering ( talk) 21:32, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
For the purposes of countering systemic bias on Wikipedia, I’m undertaking a quantitative report on WikiProject Anarchism.
As this is a quantitative report, based largely on data and numbers, it is limited by the data available to me. If a possibly-related article wasn’t tagged as covered by the WikiProject in its talk page, or if the relevant entries in Wikidata are not filled in, this will unfortunately not be covered by this report. As such, my first recommendation is that people reading this make sure any missed articles are tagged for WikiProject coverage and Wikidata entries are updated with the required information.
This is also not a qualitative report. Such a report may be more relevant to specific individual articles than a broad overview of coverage by a WikiProject, as taking a qualitative review of thousands of articles collectively presents a vast challenge. For such future qualitative reports on systemic bias, I recommend that reviewers focus on article length and content, as well as the quality and distribution of its cited sources.
On 14 February 2023, I pulled the list of all 2,975 pages covered by the WikiProject Anarchism. From these, as I wanted to focus on articles in the main space, I removed all categories, templates, redirects, disambiguations, lists, etc. This brought it down to 2,242 articles that this WikiProject covers in the main space.
I then ran these 2,242 articles through PAC’s wikilinks inspector, which cross-references them with data points on Wikidata to find information about them, including gender and country of citizenship for biographies, and countries for other articles (about organisations, movements, etc.). The reliance on Wikidata provided some hurdles, as not every Wikidata entry has countries or gender listed, so there should be some accounting for a margin of error here. As a result of the data points used, this bias report will not be looking into other areas of potential systemic bias, e.g. the number of black and indigenous anarchists represented in our articles about anarchists in the United States.
From these articles, there are a total of 1,188 biographies and 1,054 non-biographical articles. With the former, there were cases of overlap in citizenship due to changing states (e.g. the Russian Empire dissolving and being replaced by the Soviet Union) or immigration (e.g. Italians moving to the United States). I also ran into a data issue with the latter, as only 426 of them are covered here. This may be due to a variety of factors, including that many articles are not limited by a specific geographic region, or that Wikidata entries are incomplete. I have noted instances of both of these.
I also took a quantitative review of our 500 most popular pages (for January 2023), as this would give us some insight not just into the systemic biases that we uphold in editing but also those that pass onto our readership; a review of the project’s 76 vital articles, which more or less represent the main targets of the WikiProject’s improvement goals, as they form some of what Wikipedia as a whole considered its most important articles; and a review of our recognised content, which broadly shows which articles have had the most active attention put into them.
Of our 1,188 biographies, there is a clear androcentric bias towards biographies about men, with approximately 82.8% of our articles being about male subjects, while only 17.1% of our biographies are about women. Furthermore, our coverage of trans, non-binary and intersex people is rather sparse, sitting at about 0.6% altogether.
The gender gap is even starker in our 48 vital biographies, of which 85.4% are about men and only 14.6% are about women, and in our 185 most popular biographies, of which 84.4% are about men and only 15.1% are about women. The gap is only marginally less pronounced in our 80 recognised biographies, of which 81.2% are about men and 18.8% are about women.
On average, men outnumber women in the Project’s coverage by more than 4-to-1. It should be noted that WikiProject Anarchism’s coverage of women is worse in every metric than the Wikipedia average of 19.5%, which should be cause for concern. Even assuming the number of biographies about men stays the same from here on (which, of course, it won’t), we would need to create at least 35 new biographies about women just to bring it up to the WP-wide average. To bring it up to parity, we would need to create at least 781 new biographies – a massive undertaking just to think about.
This under-representation may be due to a number of factors that reflect systemic bias on multiple levels. In terms of sourcing, the contributions of men are weighed more heavily than the contributions of women. Classical anarchist history often emphasises the roles of anarchism’s “founding fathers”, while at the same time neglecting, side-lining and ignoring the role of women in the subject’s development. Even when sources do cover the contribution of women to the field, there is a tendency to focus on a few more notable individuals. Feminist historian Judy Greenway described this tendency as the “Emma Goldman short-circuit”, due to the large of amount of attention paid to this anarchist “founding mother”, again to the detriment of others.
It is worth noting that of all the women covered by the WikiProject, Emma Goldman is the only one whose biography is a level-4 vital article and also the only one that has been reviewed to featured article status. Of the project’s 9 featured articles: 2 are biographies about male subjects; 2 are about books written by men; and 1 is about a fictional male character. There are left 3 historical events: women are entirely absent from the articles on the Tottenham Outrage and the Siege of Sidney Street; while for the Assassination of William McKinley, the only 3 women mentioned are McKinley’s wife Ida, McKinley’s biographer Margaret Leech and… Emma Goldman, who defended McKinley’s assassin. This implies a tendency to not just overlook women, but also to reference them largely in their relation to men. However, a more qualitative review of this is required in order to establish the extent of this issue.
As for the issue of representation for trans and non-binary people, this too requires some work, as it appears that they are under-represented among our articles. This is an issue that is particularly pronounced with trans men, the sole example of which accounts for only 0.1% of our total biographies on men. (In contrast to a 1.5% proportion for trans women) Non-binary people too account for only 0.17% of our biographies.
This too may be an issue with biases in sources, which often entirely neglect to represent LGBTIQA+ individuals and their contributions. There also may be a recency bias at play here, as trans and non-binary people are generally more represented in the contemporary era than they have been in the past, due in part to changing societal attitudes, shifting foci in scholarship and the self-organisation of marginalised folk to represent themselves and improve their conditions. As such, finding historical examples of trans and non-binary people related to anarchism may be more difficult – either because they weren’t “out” or because mainstream historiography glossed over that aspect of them.
Unlike the massive gender gap for women in this project, this one requires less new articles to close, going by general statistics for trans and non-binary population numbers. Even a few new biographies about trans and non-binary people would go a long way.
The geographic gap was also quite stark in WikiProject Anarchism, which displays a clear western-centric bias towards countries of the so-called “Western World” or “Global North”. Frequently the top 20% of countries will account for 80% of our articles, while the bottom 80% of countries account for only 20% of our articles.
Together, countries from Western Europe, North America and Oceania account for 75.7% of our biographies and 71.2% of our non-biographical articles. If one stretches the definition of the “western world” to include Eastern Europe and Latin America, which together account for 18.1% of biographies and 20.4% of non-biographical articles, the remainder left over is quite small. Africa and Asia together account for only 6.2% of our biographies and 8.4% of our non-biographical articles. The lack of focus on Africa and Asia is particularly pronounced in our most popular pages, recognised content and vital articles, in which they often go entirely unrepresented.
On average, Africa and Asia are out-numbered more than 9-to-1 by other regions. Even taken together with Latin America and Eastern Europe, they are still out-numbered by Western Europe and North America by about 3-to-1. Even Western Europe alone accounts for more than half of the entire WikiProject’s coverage.
Assuming the number of biographies about people from the “western world” remains the same (which, again, it won’t), at least 900 biographies about people from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America would need to be created to bring this up to parity. In order to bring non-biographical articles up to parity, at least 180 articles would need to be created. Even if one were to set the task of getting Western Europe alone below the 50% mark, we would need to create an additional 224 biographies and 32 new non-biographical articles. It’s clear that countering Western-centrism within the WikiProject will be no easy feat.
This representational problem is again down to a number of factors. Western-centrism in anarchist historiography has gone largely unexamined until relatively recently, when certain scholars began to make an active effort to highlight anarchist histories in a more global context.
When looking at Sub-Saharan Africa, the only countries that have received any substantial focus in anarchist historiography (and thus in our own articles) are Nigeria and South Africa, where scholars such as Sam Mbah and Lucien van der Walt have respectively highlighted their own country’s anarchist history. Other countries in the region either haven’t developed a notable anarchist movement until relatively recently (e.g. Ethiopia and Uganda), or their anarchist histories were tied inextricably with colonialism (e.g. Angola and Mozambique). Additionally, the global decay of anarchism in the mid-20th century meant that anarchism was not in the position to become part of the de-colonial and post-colonial histories of these countries. That our “ Anarchism in Africa” article largely exists to collect pieces of information that wouldn’t be enough to fill out articles on specific countries is indicative of the scale of the problem.
Anarchist historiography of Southwestern Asia and North Africa (SWANA) is generally more developed than those south of the Sahara, but also suffer from the same problems of Western-centrism. Generally anarchist histories of North Africa are very closely tied with those of southern Europe, focusing almost exclusively on the actions of French and Italian anarchists in the region. As before, the remission of anarchism that prevented its connection with de-/post-colonial movements affected this region too. The explosion of a coherent native anarchist movement in this region has largely been tied to the Arab Spring, when these ideas caught traction with young revolutionaries (e.g. Egypt, Syria, Tunisia). To my knowledge, I could only name a single historical North African anarchist covered by the project, that being Sail Mohamed. On the other hand, I know of several notable modern anarchists from SWANA, but as far as I know, none of them have biographies on Wikipedia.
Anarchist historiography of South Asia is also a troubled subject, as while there has been cases of anarchists and anarchisms popping up throughout the region, a coherent anarchist movement as such is still in its infancy. For example, the term “anarchist” was often thrown around by the British Empire to refer to basically anyone in modern-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Iran that had a tendency to rebel (e.g. Babists, NCM, Samiti). Additionally, there were some notable figures that incorporated anarchism into their own theory and practice (e.g. Gandhi, Ghose, Singh and Tagore) but aren’t usually explicitly identified as “anarchists” in most sources.
Research into anarchist history of Southeast Asia is also rather sparse, both as the scholarly interest in this area is relatively new and as the modern anarchist movements in the region are quite young. The historical anarchist movements in the region were very closely tied to developments in China or the countries’ former colonisers, so it’s difficult to find sources that are specifically about anarchism in the region.
In contrast, the relative under-representation of Eastern Europe, Latin America and East Asia are less easy to explain away, as there are copious amounts of sources on anarchist individuals and movements in these regions of the world. While the other regions mentioned above require some more keen and dedicated research, we have many of the resources we need already available to us here. Expanding our coverage of these areas will thus be more easily manageable, even if it is less urgently needed than other regions of Asia and those in Africa.
I’ll conclude with my recommendations to counter the systemic bias present in the project.
First off, we need to expand our lists of sources and our bibliographies to collect texts that focus on anarchist women and anarchists from post-colonial regions of the world. Inquiries into Google Scholar, Google Books, JSTOR and WorldCat may aid us in this.
We then need to go about creating and improving our articles, whether biographies or otherwise, that can help us close the gender and geographic gaps in our WikiProject. On an individual level, see how long you can go without creating or expanding an article about the life or work of male anarchists from Western Europe or North America, in order to force a shift in your focus for some amount of time. It may also be prudent for us to hold an edit-a-thon or some kind of collective drive that focuses specifically on coverage of these areas.
We also need to think about how we can more equitably cover these areas in our recognised content and our vital articles. The former should be less of an issue, as it just means improving and submitting more articles from this area for GA, FA and DYK reviews. The latter is trickier, as most vital article sections are already filled up. (To be honest, the Vital articles WikiProject itself might need a quantitative systemic bias review) Additionally we should consider how we can ensure these parts of the project are more easily findable and better sign-posted, in order to provide these articles more regular reader traction and hopefully get more of them into our most popular pages.
Forging closer links with other relevant WikiProjects would also be vital in closing the gender and geographic gaps that exist in our own project. Working together with the Women in Red and Women in Green projects, as well as the gender gap task force, would help us towards closing the gender gap. We could also reach out to the Africa and Asia projects to see if they have any recommendations or advice in expanding our coverage for these regions.
Additionally, our sister projects on other language Wikipedias could be of some assistance. In particular, our sister projects on the Spanish and Portuguese Wikipedias could be helpful in expanding our coverage of Latin America, ditto with the Polish and Russian projects for Eastern Europe. The French project may even have some recommendations for where to look for sources on Africa and Southwestern Asia, although this seems less likely.
We also ought to be inviting more women, LGBTIQA+ folk and people from Africa and Asia to participate in the WikiProject, as they could help contribute not just to closing our content gaps but our contributor gaps as well. (Although gender and geographic gaps for contributors is harder to gauge, as we largely contribute on an anonymous basis and I wouldn’t want to pressure anyone into disclosing information about themselves) We could put out a call-to-action for more contributors in this area, or we could reach out to people we know on a more personal level. To anyone interested, we should offer to assist them in getting started with editing, as getting to grips with Wikipedia can be tricky for almost everyone.
Finally, I think it would be a good idea for us to get into contact with experts in these fields that may be able to provide us with sources, targets and advice for creating and expanding more articles. I can speak from experience that working with scholars on subject matter they’re familiar with can be an enlightening experience and is endlessly helpful in improving our content. In terms of who to reach out to, there are plenty of examples in bibliographies throughout our project. I hesitate to name any names here, as there would be too many to count and I worry about them receiving spam. But if there’s any areas of interest you have that you would like to look further into, I can provide you some more personalised recommendations.
To cap this off, there is clearly a lot of work ahead of us in order to counter the systemic biases of the project. It will be difficult to narrow the gender and geographic gaps, and it’ll be even more difficult to close them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. I hope the criticisms and suggestions that I’ve provided here can help us work further towards the goal of greater equity in our coverage.
-- Grnrchst ( talk) 19:31, 16 February 2023 (UTC)
94% of all editors are malehang on, where is this stat from? I'm sure men predominate on Wikipedia but I'd really be quite shocked to find this was the actual statistic. -- asilvering ( talk) 21:32, 5 May 2023 (UTC)