Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red/Archive 18

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Category

I know we have had conversations around this in the past, but I cannot figure it out. If you have a business or a book or a painting, or anything else created by a woman, how do you categorize it so that it can be included in our matrix. For example, while there is a category for "Works by Louisa May Alcott" if the writer is not yet notable, or there is insufficient data to write an article about an author, what category can you put it in? Neither "Works by women" nor "Organizations founded by women" are not categories. Is it feasible to create and populate them? SusunW (talk) 17:37, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Very supportive! But are there good arguments for why not? --Rosiestep (talk) 20:01, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
Rosiestep In support: for example, "Works by Frida Kahlo" is not a category, "Works by Georgia O'Keefe" is not a category; but "Works by Louisa May Alcott" is. Why would we list works by some authors/artists and not others?—Because "Works by Harper Lee" doesn't really make sense as a category, as she wrote only two books, but the books would easily belong in a category "Works by women". A Category makes far more sense to my mind than a template, as a template with the various works of all women would be far too cumbersome to either create or maintain. In like manner, say you are looking for an institution created by a woman, but don't remember the name. Paging through all organizations is cumbersome. Paging through the much shorter list of those created by women might be much more helpful. SusunW (talk) 20:17, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
This would also help in monitoring statistical trends in connection with women's works. Maybe Ser Amantio di Nicolao has some comments or suggestions.--Ipigott (talk) 09:17, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Or @Harej: and for luck @Ser Amantio di Nicolao:, perhaps. I think the situation is this: the automated Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red#Metrics are currently derived from wikidata where an item has P31:Human P21:Female, and there is a bot (and tbh, right now, me, on a rather obsessive basis) ensuring that new women biogs get added to wikidata with those two values). We're now contemplating a new category, or category tree, category:Works by women and we want to know if new articles added to this tree could be included in the metrics automatically. This would presumably require us to ensure that they are added to wikidata, with an appropriate and know-to-the-metric-wizards values. I don't know two things right now: 1. what the appropriate wikidata item properties/values might be and 2. whether the metrics bot can be configued to start appendinf these to our metrics. I'll have a think about q1, but would welcome informed input on q1 & q2. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:54, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Regular meets

WiR is getting larger and we are having communication issues. We have simultaneous projects which means that no one knows everything that's going on. Its a sign of success. I have volunteered to see if I can organise regular meetings. The suggestion is that these should be

  1. weekly via Skype (or similar)
  2. no requirement to attend (the meeting happens anyway)
  3. no secret cabale - notes if taken may be published
  4. held at a time that supports those interested. So definitely Europe and USA daylight time (and Asia???)
  5. discuss projects
  6. discuss future directions

Any comments? Any additions? Anyone want to be on the mailing list? invitee list? organise it? Victuallers (talk) 09:31, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

I am interested, but only if it can be a secret cabale (especially if we always say it in French). Time slot could be a major issue, but I think we should try to get the Swedes involved, and otherwise have a US cabal in the morning and a EUR-Brexit cabale in the evening. What say you to that? Jane (talk) 11:33, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
I am interested too: cabale, cabal or no—jeje. Time is an important factor. I'm on Mexican CST. SusunW (talk) 19:51, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Meeting-phobic, but this is such a good bunch for a secret cabale. Put me down for California time.Penny Richards (talk) 21:57, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
I'm in! Location: California. --Rosiestep (talk) 01:07, 7 December 2016 (UTC)
  • I know I'm in the minority here but one of things I appreciate most about Wikipedia is that it is generally a completely open environment. While telephone conversations may help to sort out some of the issues, I think communications will suffer unless key decisions are made public. As far as I am concerned, I think well organized written discussions are the most effective way of going forward. I hope the cabales will not upset this situation.--Ipigott (talk) 08:28, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Notification and question

Hello. Earlier, an IP editor asked about somebody creating an article about her aunt, Ms. founding editor Patricia Carbine. See WT:WikiProject Feminism#Patrica Carbine for details.

Related to that request, I have a question. Is there someplace where people can make requests of this WikiProject for new articles? Is this page the right place?

Thank you. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 06:29, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

@Malik Shabazz: There is no need to ask for permission to create an article, even if it is about a member of one's family. All that is needed is that the article should be supported by reliable secondary sources showing that the person is/was notable.--Ipigott (talk) 08:04, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

Wikidata coding women as "male"

I have been going through a number of the articles created yesterday in connection with BBC 100 Women and am amazed to find that many of them have been entered on Wikidata as "male". As a result, they have not appeared in our metrics which, despite all the activity, were no higher than for an average day. The problem may well be that many of the new articles carried no categories and those which did often had no categories identifying them as women. Perhaps Harej and Missvain could look into this and try to fix the problem. I'm trying to correct as many as possible manually but it's quite a job!--Ipigott (talk) 11:05, 9 December 2016 (UTC)

I looked at a couple of them. Same perp; working from petscan. I've left him/her a note on their talk page. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:48, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Tagishsimon You can see how many I've been changing from male to female from my contributions on Wikidata. About half of those I've edited were originally coded male. I wonder if this problem has been around for some time. If so, there may be hundreds if not thousands of women coded male on Wikidata. But until now, for new articles there has usually been nothing on Wikidata so it looks to me like a fairly new problem.--Ipigott (talk) 12:23, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
From the couple I looked at, an individual is running Petscan reports of the sort I posted in a thread above on this page, and then using the ability of Petscan to add wikipdata items automatically ... the user is choosing to code a whole bunch as male then they're m&f. So the problem is human error, which in that sense has been around for ages. I do some more diggind and see if they're all the same person or if we have a variety. How are you winding them - which list are you working from - just going thru the 2016 100 list? --Tagishsimon (talk) 12:55, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Seems to be MechQuester creating female as males, Moscow Connection creating items without gender. Beyond that you've picked up some of mine which were coded human/female. --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:04, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Tagishsimon Sorry not to get back earlier. Bogged down in the articles. I've been going through yesterday's AlexBot on Women in Red. It would be great if you could find out who's causing the trouble and get him to stop it. There's still a huge list to go through. He couldn't have chosen a worse day, I'm nowt down to Mary C. Boys.--Ipigott (talk) 16:48, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Looks to me as if it is MechQuester. Can his work be reverted?--16:53, 9 December 2016 (UTC)Ipigott (talk)
He's agreed to revert them: see here. Then we'll probably have to start all over again!--Ipigott (talk) 17:58, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
I think no need now. I've been though his edit history and changed another 75 or so. I think there are no more left. I looked at Moscow Connection - lots of items with no properties, lots of women articles disappearing down that particular black hole. All now fixed. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:21, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
That is bizarre. Yeah, surely something to bring up in Wikidata for a faster response...not sure where people are overseeing gender (if at all) on Wikidata at this time. Sorry you had to slog through that! It is much appreciated! - Missvain (talk) 00:40, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
I think there's mainly not much QA going on on wikidata, and we're on our own for spotting occurrences like this. Even the query engine times out before giving useful results on selects like human males with name starting as "Helen". And it's very easy to make a tool make many wrong edits in a short time. On the bright side, today's stats should be healthy. --Tagishsimon (talk) 07:27, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Thanks Tagishsimon I see you spent a good hour making all those changes. We can now try to see how many new bios of women resulted from the BBC editathon. I agree with Missvain that much more care needs to be devoted to serious high-volume errors resulting from the use of bots on Wikidata. Can you take this up with those responsible?. Perhaps Rosiestep can also bring the problem up with Wikimedia?--Ipigott (talk) 08:30, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
  • Thanks all. Glad the issue was detected. I notified WMF and Lydia @ Wikidata. --Rosiestep (talk) 12:45, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
I don't think there's anyone in particular to take the QA issue up with; it is a known issue, I've come across some limited work related to it. But mainly the place seems to work on many eyeballs. Wikidata has tens of different interfaces and tools all facilitating bulk creation & amendment: that's the status quo. I think all we can do is to try to pick off individuals as we come across them. It is worth, when finding a mis-gendered wikidata item, checking who created it by the page history and dropping them a note. --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:46, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
@Ipigott and Tagishsimon: I am so thankful you take care of these technical issues so I don't have to. I really appreciate what you do, as the technical piece is beyond my abilities. Far better for me to write or work on improving articles, but it is so nice to have y'all with technical skill there to count on. SusunW (talk) 15:35, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
@Tagishsimon: I certainly appreciate the trouble you and a number of other editor take to develop bots to feed Wikidata on the basis of new articles. But I am seriously concerned on several scores. When Wikidata started, a great deal of trouble was taken to ensure that only reliable information was added. As time has gone by, I have noticed that ever more entries are generated by bots, often apparently with no human checking. I constantly come across wrong or misleading information on the introductory descriptions, nationality, professions and of course gender. There are also ever more entries where key data are missing. One of the problems seems to be that data are harvested from the very first version of an article. In most cases, errors are corrected on the Wikipedia article but changes are not made to Wikidata. As Wikidata is increasingly used as a source for a variety of other applications and sites on the internet, it is obviously important for it to be maintained to the highest quality possible. I also think WiR itself may be responsible for some of the omissions as we have concentrated on adding "female" in connection with all our new biographies without any backup on the other data. Perhaps there should be a work group of some kind looking more closely at the problem. Thanks Rosie for alerting those who may be able to take some action.--Ipigott (talk) 15:59, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
They're not really bots being developed, They're tools being used. The vast majority of edits to wikidata use these tools. Only a minority of edits are done by hand - at least, that's my evaluation of visiting recent changes. Wikidata will accrue inaccurate data on a GIGO basis, according to the competence of the user. I've said my bit on it above; known problem, our discovery not earthshaking. As to missing data, that's just a depth versus quantity trade-off. In the long term items will be populated with additional properties. There are three key drivers for prioritising the addition of items tagged only with human & female, which are a) it drives Interwiki Language Links (ILL) b) drives our statistics c) creates a wikidata item that someone else can query for lack of DoB, for instance, and remedy. Here's an example of a user doing just that (at least at the time of writing). Neither is it antithetical to the notion of striving for completeness, it's merely the first step - it certainly does not in any real way preclude anyone from expending effort on the addition of properties. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:26, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Unsourced BLP

The number of articles is a bit overwhelming. Just found Carole Souter, a completely unsourced BLP. Does anyone have time to deal with that urgently? Carcharoth (talk) 19:07, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Sorry on my side of the pond I find articles where she talked about other things, but none that talk about her. Two press-releases contain most of the information in the article, but those don't meet the threshhold of RS. [1], [2] as they are not independent of the subject, since they are both organizations for which she was employed. SusunW (talk) 20:01, 10 December 2016 (UTC)
OK, I'll try in a bit. Shouldn't be that difficult to verify the information in the article. A source can be reliable even if not independent of the subject. It is just not an independent source. Carcharoth (talk) 20:42, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Are the stubs I made appriciated?

Hi WiR friends, recently I created several women's footballers with an outdated reference or a wrong linked reference. I see I was wrong with this, and won't do it again. As Fram started following my edits he listed all of the mistakes and errors I made. Good that someone noticed them, but in my opion he overdid everything, just wanting to annoy and not to help. However things, escalated and now they want me to stop me for creating stubs. Many admins are replying only to the negative part Fram stated. As I know some people her know me longer as I'm a main contributor for WiR and some have probably/hopefully also seen a lot of positive stubs and work of me. I want to ask you if you think it's the best way to abandon me from making stubs. I would appriciate what your real opinion is at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#Proposal. Thanks, Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 12:42, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Fram has a very long history of targetting editors who create a lot of stubs, or seem to sacrifice quality in favour of quantity. Often his concerns are genuine, and it is good for wikipedia to have people looking for errors. The problem is that Fram has a way of going about things which excessively grill editors and their articles and make them feel shitty, it comes across a lot of the time as bullying. I do think Sander that you could focus more on quality than quantity, Fram has some valid points, but generally most of us here really support your work.

The problem I think is differences in how we view wikipedia. Do we really want it to be a database and list every name with very basic info, or do we want to build a proper encyclopedia with detailed coverage? Having run a Destubathon recently, most editors typically do not go about the site expanding stubs, so if you're going create those short sportspeople stubs, chance are they'll remain like that for many years. The best thing for those I think would be careful bot preperation and use it to produce fleshier articles upon creation. Banning you from creation isn't the way to go. I would support a bot to create new articles on women sportspeople if you programmed it to use a range of sources and produce something with minimum 1 kb of readable prose which is accurate. ♦ Dr. Blofeld 14:44, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

I would just add that if you were to be banned from creating stubs, the number of new articles on women each month would be drastically reduced. But so no doubt would the number of new articles on men. Perhaps the relative percentages would remain more or less the same. While I agree with Dr. Blofeld that quality is important, I think it helps to have basic information about sports people around the world. A one-line entry with a box, stating the essentials is better than nothing at all. So maybe you could divide you time between creating start class articles and stubs.--Ipigott (talk) 07:43, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Yes, I agree. But if there's a way to generate the stubs as x 10 the rate and x 3 the prose/quality of information then we should try to do that and make the entries as good as possible first time as a lot of short stubs, particularly on lesser notable athletes who might have competed at one Olympics often remain that way for a long time.♦ Dr. Blofeld 14:49, 11 December 2016 (UTC)
Sander.v.Ginkel, stubs are valuable. Every one of those women comes from "somewhere" and there are people living in those towns who might look to her as a role model, and in their time, want to improve her article after you've started it. Of course, the referencing has to be right, so make sure that it is. --Rosiestep (talk) 07:27, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Nov-Dec stats

Some stats about %Female in the projects

Hi all, here are my slides I presented last week at the WMNL conference on the Gendergap. I gave the talk in Dutch but most of the slides are in English. I updated some statistics that I collected a few years ago about women in authority control indexes on Wikidata, and now that so many person-related items are better filled, I could also show some data about %Female per occupation and time period. Soon I hope to compile some statistics about %Female per continent. See here. Jane (talk) 07:36, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing these with us, Jane. They are extremely interesting and well presented. The last three are particularly revealing. Perhaps we could use some of them for illustrating our own presentations and WiR write-ups? As far as I can see, at the moment they are all part of a pdf file.--Ipigott (talk) 12:35, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
Ah yes I will upload the .png files separately, forgot about that. Jane (talk) 14:07, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
Done (I linked them in the File template so if you click on the file and then scroll down you can click on the slides from there). Jane (talk) 15:36, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
Jane023 - thanks for sharing these useful slides. I'd be very interested in seeing them by occupation and for other languages, though I don't know how much effort it takes to create one. --Rosiestep (talk) 22:56, 29 November 2016 (UTC)
Yes I think the occupations are fascinating too. For the occupation slide, I built this by running individual queries per language per occupation. An example of such a query is in the slide itself, set up to run for female aviators, so if you haven't started playing around with Sparql queries that would be a good place to start (switch out the occupation with another Q number, like the one for writers). I first looked up the most common occupations in English for these three languages, and then selected a few to build the slide -- I should probably write this up somewhere. Here are the most common occupations for the Japanese Wikipedia : actor: 12174 items, singer: 5132 items, seiyū: 3965 items, model: 3142 items, AV idol: 2999 items, tarento: 2986 items, television actor: 2135 items, announcer: 2108 items, fashion model: 1743 items, writer: 1529 items, film actor: 1481 items, figure skater: 1479 items, novelist: 1137 items, mangaka: 1130 items, politician: 994 items, composer: 975 items, singer-songwriter: 965 items, volleyball player: 928 items. Jane (talk) 08:26, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

Possible stats snafu

I get the impression that there may be a hiatus with stats, arising out of what I think might be a database synchronisation issue. All of my petscan reports are returning duff data suggestive of the database against which the query is made being having not been fed new data for a day or so. If so, we can anticipate few or fewer articles making it to wikidata and so lower stats counts. I'm yet to find anyone in the large echoey place who might be able to throw light on the supposed issue. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:26, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Results for week ended 11 December

I must say I was surprised by the lack any real impact from BBC 100 Women in the stats for last week. The Gender by Language results show that there were only 460 new biographies on women out of a total of 1,541, i.e. 29.85%, while our Metrics for today (12 December) show 755 new articles for the month so far (approximately the same as for December 2015). One would have thought with all the publicity, the results would have been far better. (Our own list on our editathon page show that there were about 170 new articles related to the BBC event (several of which need further attention). By contrast, over 95% of the new biographies in Welsh (67 out of 70) were on women while for the Norwegian, Italian and Danish wikis, the results were around 50%. Norway with 256 new biographies on women did particularly well.

Two factors appear to have played a role in the EN stats: many new biographies were inadvertently entered into Wikidata as male (although they were female) and Sander.v.Ginkel who is our most prolific contributor was strongly discouraged from adding more stubs on women in sports. While several of us have been trying to correct the Wikidata entries, I still keep coming across new biographies which are either not on Wikidata at all or, if they are, have no gender coding. By comparison with other language versions, the English Wikipedia seems to be less proficient in ensuring new articles are backed by Wikidata entries. For women's biographies, most of the new entries are a result of bots which add "human" and "female" (on the basis of categories in the articles relating to women's occupations) but nothing else. Are there any suggestions on how to overcome these problems? Given all the recent attention to the gender gap, it would be a pity if we could not achieve better results in the coming weeks and months.--Ipigott (talk) 08:53, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

I think, in the fields where possible, there should come a bot screening the data in the infobox of the article. As I see in for instance in the sportspeople articles there is many data in the infoboxes, sturctured almost the same in all related articles that could be easily copied to Wikidata. For instance nationality, place of birth, height, weight, fullname, clubs played for etc. As this is also the most basic data of the person wanted on Wikidata, this should become a standard practice. Sander.v.Ginkel (Talk) 09:09, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
There are such bots. The best three things we can do are a) encourage article writers to use templates & infoboxes, since these structure data so that it can be machine-read; eventually they will be utilised by a wikidatian b) encourage article-writers to complete a wikidata item for any article that work on c) encourage users to become familiar with the various tools surrounding wikidata and to make use of them. To offset Ipigott's concern, I've seen hundreds of the women biog items I've created in wikidata being updated with additional properies - particularly DoB & DoD - in the past two or three days. --Tagishsimon (talk) 09:15, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
Worth noting, too, that I don't add articles bearing notability or deletion tags to wikidata, since like as not they'll be deleted, rendering the wikidata item redundant. If the tag is removed then they are added. Other sensible tool users will do the same. --Tagishsimon (talk) 09:41, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
@Tagishsimon: Thanks for your suggestions and for everything you've been doing to help us along. But I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you on the Wikidata entries. I just looked back at a "random" date for AlexBot Women in Red. It happens to be 7 November. The first three women I see are Harriet Clisby (only human, female), Judith Rose (no entry), Manisha Panna, one of Sander's, (only human, female). If we forget all the subsequent women from Sander, the next entry is Anna K (singer), for which the article's author provided a full entry on Wikidata. I have not yet updated them on Wikidata so that people can see what I mean. I think the Wikidata entries for 8 December have received special attention because of the problems we have been experiencing. If anyone can devise a means of picking up women's bios which have no Wikidata entry, we might at least be able to improve the situation slightly.
As for encouraging article writers to create boxes and/or enter details manually on Wikidata, I think there are problems. For many biographies to do with art, music and even writing, a box often detracts from the article (although I agree with Sander that it should be possible to transfer data from the boxes we nearly always find for sports people). Recently, I have become far more familiar with Wikidata as a result of our problems and edit it quite a bit. But it is set up quite differently from all our other wikis and it is not obvious how to create or edit an entry. I only started to use it frequently once I installed the gadget. I have a feeling most of our contributors, for example Rosiestep would not feel comfortable about having to contribute to Wikidata every time an article is completed. @Joe Roe, Carcharoth, Harej, Edgars2007, Jane023, Missvain, and RexxS: You might be interested in this discussion.--Ipigott (talk) 11:36, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
I'm not sure I follow:
  • Manisha Panna - created human, female, since updated by 3 other users
  • Harriet Clisby - created human, female, since updated by 3 other users
  • Judith Rose - created human (thus not in our metrics). Since updated by 2 other users (will now be in our metrics).
  • Anna K - created with no properties, subsequently edited over a period of 4 years by about 20 editors.
This seems to be wikidata working as it should. And, note, the metrics system picks up a, say, October article, registering it with the October stats, even if it takes until December for it to be added. There may be an unknown number of items on wikidata without a gender property - that really is the extent of our problem. There are not very many biog articles on wikipedia, that have even half-way reasonable categories, that are not on wikidata. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:48, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
And here, here, here, here, here are the means by which you can check for yourself for men & women biogs not on wikidata. Petscan is not a dark art. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:51, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
  • @Tagishsimon: Thanks for taking the time and trouble to try to explain the workings of Petscan. (You "here"s took ages to download and three of them failed.) I can see that the tool can be very useful in certain circumstances. But the point I was wanting to make with the examples cited above was that if a bot makes a Wikidata entry with just "human" and "female" it can stand around for months without improvement whereas articles which are entered from box data or by human editors are usually much richer. As the examples I gave are only a month old, I decided to go further back. I picked up Jenna Dolan from last May. Despite several Wikidata updates (mainly by Petscan), the entry still does not contain the year of birth (which was in the box from the start) and does not contain her occupation (aviator/fighter pilot) either in the description or under profession (both empty). These are important items when drawing up Wikidata lists of redlinks for extension of coverage to other languages. As for compiling lists of missing women's bios from Wikidata, with your experience I think you would be able to do a far better job than me. I imagine also that you were able to add many new articles by using the tool for our list on the 8 December BBC editathon. What is needed is more enthusiasts like you who can improve all the interfaces we need both for Wikipedia and for Wikidata.--Ipigott (talk) 12:30, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

460 new biographies is good I think, that's by no means poor. If you combine all of the articles done for all of the wikipedias for this it's a considerable achievement and worthwhile. Rather than worrying about output, I think for this you've got to look at the positive aspects in terms of participation more, it demonstrated that something can be coordinated on a more global level to one cause. We need to focus on that now and find a way we can get even more countries involved and working on the women cause permanently in every language. Certainly on English wikipedia though there is a way we can speed up the creation process with a challenge and an initial contest for women, which if combined with editathons we could produce more. It's true that if you consider the potential millions who could edit wikipedia, yes we're under-achieving, there is enormous potential, but we've got to try to get people editing more longer term, and not just one off in an editathon, so I think this BBC editathon has been an important stepping stone on this. I'm going to start to draw the bones up of a contest/challenge today with some ideas. The contest I'm thinking of has the potential to be global, global in scope, but potentially if aligned with enough wikis could involve dozens of languages contributing to one contest from many areas of the world too. Going to need wide support and some help with judging in various languages, but possible.♦ Dr. Blofeld 13:28, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Dr. Blofeld I thought you would be coming up with a word of encouragement and some constructive ideas. But if little Norway and even smaller Wales can be taken as examples, just think what could be done for the English-speaking world. (Some 335 million people speak English as a first language. There are 5 million Norwegian speakers and half a million Welsh speakers. So if we had done as proportionately well as the Norwegians, we would have had at least 5,000 new women's biographies last week, and I hardly dare to say how many on the basis of the stats for Welsh.) The 460 are for one week. For the BBC editathon, we only had around 170 - but apparently contributions were also made to over 200 existing articles too.--Ipigott (talk) 15:46, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
I suggest you check my recent contributions Ipigott!♦ Dr. Blofeld 15:49, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
@Dr. Blofeld: Yes indeed. I see you started working on this at 13.45. Amazing what you've managed to do over past couple of hours! I can see we are going to catch up with the Welsh sooner than they might think!--Ipigott (talk) 16:08, 12 December 2016 (UTC)
Very interesting discussion. Thanks Victuallers (talk) 22:36, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Recursive Smile?

Earlier in the year I was editting articles about Nigerian women. One interesting addition was Olajumoke Orisaguna. She was a rags to riches story of a poor girl who was "discovered". The details were sketchy and I thought the article might be up for deletion. Today I went to add a bit more .... and searched to find out if there was any recent coverage. There was. There were at least twenty-five news stories about the fact that "Wikipedia" (whoever she is) had written an article about her..... should I add the new coverage to the article??? Can we make anyone notable with this technique? :-) Victuallers (talk) 22:36, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing. Indeed an interesting story, yet i doubt this would work universally ;/ Fred (talk) 05:00, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
Please don't pad out Wikipedia articles with media coverage about Wikipedia editors writing the articles. It would be OK to add that sort of coverage to a Wikipedia-related article. And also to gather the news coverage on the various pages in the Wikipedia namespace that gather media mentions of Wikipedia. Carcharoth (talk) 06:28, 13 December 2016 (UTC) Obviously. otherwise it could be recursive, hence the title Victuallers (talk) 12:27, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
It's a bit like some of those covered by BBC 100 Women in past years. When they were first covered, there was little to justify them for notability but thanks to the BBC, some of them have really gained fame. Here's one who thanks to Victuallers has become widely known, at least in her own country. But isn't that exactly what we are trying to achieve through Women in Red and more widely through Wikipedia as a whole? Here we have proof that Wikipedia can indeed enhance interest in individuals, even if we are discouraged from admitting it openly. I for one am always encouraged by press coverage drawing on biographies I started, especially when the articles are linked.--Ipigott (talk) 09:13, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
Policy, fwiw, is WP:REFLOOP, which advises in essence that this is an instance of WP:PRIMARY. --Tagishsimon (talk) 09:23, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
  • What you can do in such cases is document the coverage by using the {{press}} template on the article's talk page. Andrew D. (talk) 09:24, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
My own thought that this is a sign of the misunderstanding of what we do. I think the journalist (I'm sure thee is only one) thinks that its an honour to be included in Wikipedia whereas we are just mirroring the coverage. In this case it appears crazy that we have someone writing an article about a wiki stub being written..... and there is a "me too" machine that clones that stuff amongst other mirrorish new sites. Other possibility is that this news story was created by her new PR manager. No wonder Fake News works. Victuallers (talk) 12:35, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
I've learnt that people have some strange ideas about the 'prestige' of Wikipedia. Joe Roe (talk) 13:08, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
I must say I'm a bit confused about what we are permitted to use in connection with Wikipedia. I had thought of adding a reference to a video of a short interview with Jimmy Wales at the BBC's editathon. (The original is here.) But from what is being discussed here, that would not be permissible. Perhaps it would be allowed under "External links"?--Ipigott (talk) 14:11, 13 December 2016 (UTC)
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