Tilman Bayer

“ I sought to compare if the overall percentage of biographies about women nominated for deletion each month was proportionate to the available biographies about women. If the nomination process was not being biased by gender, the proportions between these datasets should be roughly the same. [...] From January 2017 to February 2020, the number of biographies about women on English-language Wikipedia rose from 16.83% to 18.25%, yet the percentage of biographies about women nominated for deletion each month was consistently over 25%. ”

“ For example, the ratio of female article subject among biographies of living people, or those born within, say, the last 50-70 years, is much larger than the ratio among English Wikipedia's biographies as a whole (as would be expected from historical considerations) – and at the same time, it is very plausible that issues of notability are less likely to be settled for living subjects. ”

“ But this indicates that the female ratio of newly created articles was much higher during that time than in the existing article corpus that forms the reference point of Tripodi's headline comparison. It is also noteworthy that several previous research publications who started from similar concerns as Tripodi (e.g. that the gender gap among editors – which is very well documented across many languages and Wikimedia projects, see e.g. this reviewer's overview from some years ago – would cause a gender bias in content too) but applied more diligent methods, e.g. ”