The Welsh Gender Equilibrium: Welsh becomes the biggest language Wikipedia to achieve gender balance!

  • December 16, 2016

 

Editors at work at Swansea University - image by Llywelyn2000
Editors at work at Swansea University – image by Llywelyn2000

In the last few years many editathons have been held in Wales encouraging people to write articles on women. Many new Women editors have been trained at the History Department at Swansea University since their first editathon in May 2014 and others at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth and at Machynlleth and Ruthin.

The efforts to improve and increase articles on women on Welsh Wikipedia has been steered by Wikimedia UK Wales Manager Robin Owain and a strong and committed Welsh Wikipedia community. The Welsh Wikipedia currently has nearly 90,000 articles and is ranked 60th largest out of a total of 284 language Wikipedias all over the world, punching well above its weight.

In June 2016 the proportion of biographical articles about women on Wiki Cymru was 32%. Yesterday saw that balance turned on its head for the first time on any Wikipedia with more than 10,000 articles. There are now 9,312 biographies on women and 8,123 of men on Welsh Wikipedia, and we hope that the success of achieving a more gender balanced site encourages more women to become editors.

Wikimedia UK is helping to build an inclusive online community and ensure that the Wikimedia projects reflect our diverse society and are free from bias. Wales Manager Robin Owain says that, “The number of biographies is now balanced, which is a big achievement for a small Wikipedia, but we now need to look at other factors such as increasing the content of articles from being male orientated, to being more balanced and gender neutral.”

Source:

The calculation of the gender of all biographies is made through a Wikidata Query on this page.

5 thoughts on “The Welsh Gender Equilibrium: Welsh becomes the biggest language Wikipedia to achieve gender balance!”

  1. That’s interesting (for comments), considering Women’s right in Korea is far far from ideal (or to say… worse than uk) but anyway good for you 🙂 (We’re working on this too but meh.)

    Back to the article’s topic, congratulations on this!

  2. I would be interested in a calculation of the pageviews those articles get (or maybe the number of edits to only measure “internal” effort?). Mere existence doesn’t tell the real impact articles have.

    From a manual pagepile with http://tinyurl.com/j6or8d6 http://tinyurl.com/zyq52jx and a quick count https://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/treeviews/?q=%7B%22lang%22%3A%22cy%22%2C%22pagepile%22%3A%226982%22%2C%22rows%22%3A%5B%5D%7D https://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/treeviews/?q=%7B%22lang%22%3A%22cy%22%2C%22pagepile%22%3A%226983%22%2C%22rows%22%3A%5B%5D%7D , men seem to get twice the attention.

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