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noopener">Twitter</a></li><li><a href="https://mastodon.flooey.org/web/@generalising" data-type="URL" data-id="https://mastodon.flooey.org/web/@generalising" target="_blank" rel="me noreferrer noopener">Mastodon</a></li></ul></aside> </div> </div> </div> <div id="content" class="site-content"> <section id="primary" class="content-area"> <main id="main" class="site-main"> <header class="page-header"> <h1 class="page-title">Tag: <span>statistics</span></h1> </header> <article id="post-1714" class="post-1714 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-data tag-statistics tag-wikidata tag-wikipedia"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2023/gender-and-blps-on-wikipedia-redux/" rel="bookmark">Gender and BLPs on Wikipedia, redux</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>Back in 2019 I <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2019/gender-and-deletion-on-wikipedia/" target="_blank">generated</a><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2019/gender-and-deletion-on-wikipedia/"> </a><a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2019/gender-and-deletion-on-wikipedia/" target="_blank">some</a><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2019/gender-and-deletion-on-wikipedia/"> data</a> on how the English Wikipedia’s biographies of living people (BLPs) broke down by gender, and how that intersected with creation and deletion rates. The headline figures were that:</p> <ul> <li>There was a significant difference between the gender split for all biographies, at 17.8% women – and for biographies of living people (BLPs), 22.7%.</li> <li>In 2009, around 20% of <em>existing</em> BLPs were on women. As time went on, the average <em>share</em> of BLPs increased slowly, by perhaps a quarter of a percentage point per year.</li> <li>In 2009, around 20% of <em>newly created</em> BLPs were on women. In about 2012, this kicked up a gear, rising above the long term average – first to about 25%, peaking around 33% before falling back a little.</li> <li>BLP articles on women were more likely to be nominated for deletion <em>until about 2017</em>, when the effect disappeared.</li> </ul> <p>One thing that was raised during the subsequent discussion was that a lot of the skew by gender was potentially linked to subject area – I was able to identify that for athletes (defined broadly, all sports players) the articles were much more likely to be men. I didn’t investigate this too much, though. Last week, I was <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Women_in_Red#Topics_that_account_for_a_disproportionate_amount_of_the_gender_gap_in_biographies" target="_blank">reminded about this</a>, and I’ve been looking at the numbers again. It brought up two interesting divergences.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Please don’t make me read all this</h3> <p>Okay – but you’ll miss the graphs. In summary:</p> <p><em>English Wikipedia has more women in recent cohorts (about ~25% of living people born since the seventies) and there are far more men among athletes. Since the athletes make up a staggeringly high amount of articles among younger subjects, the gender split among non-athletes is much more balanced – a little under a third overall, but breaking 50% female among the younger cohorts.</em></p> <p>Still with me? Let’s start. Sorry about the spoilers.</p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Time and tide</h3> <p>The first phenomenon is very straightforward: while the overall percentage across all people is around 25% women, how that is <em>distributed</em> over time varies. In general, there is a steady rise until about the 1970s; <strong>for those born from the 1970s onwards, the generation who are currently in their active working lives, the level is relatively stable at around 25% women.</strong></p> <p>The exception is those born in the 1920s (where it sits at 26%) – this is presumably affected by the fact that at this point, female life expectancy is significantly higher than male, and so the proportion of women begins to rise as a result.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-people-on-Wikipedia-female1.png"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" width="600" height="371" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-people-on-Wikipedia-female1.png" alt="" class="wp-image-1730" srcset="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-people-on-Wikipedia-female1.png 600w, https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-people-on-Wikipedia-female1-300x186.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a></figure> <p>One surprising outcome, however, is that <strong>the share of living people with no recorded age (green) is much more female than the average</strong>. This is a <em>large</em> cohort – there are in fact slightly more women in it than in any individual decade. I believe that it skews young – in other words, were this information known, it would increase the share of women in recent decades – but it is hard to find a way to confirm this. This issue is discussed in more detail below.</p> <p>(Those born in the 2010s/20s and in the 1900s/10s are omitted – the four groups have a total of 175 articles, while the cohorts shown range from 5,000 to 170,000 – but the levels are around 50%. This is likely due to life expectancy in the oldest cohorts, and the fact that the people in the youngest cohorts are mostly notable at this point as being “the child of someone famous” – which you would broadly expect to be independent of gender.)</p> <p>The percentages shown here are of the total male + female articles, but it is also possible to calculate the share of people who have a recorded gender that is not male/female. These show a very striking rise over time, though it should be cautioned that the absolute numbers are small – the largest single cohort is the 1980s with 345 people out of 170,000.</p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-people-on-Wikipedia-not-M_F.png"><img decoding="async" width="600" height="371" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-people-on-Wikipedia-not-M_F.png" alt="" class="wp-image-1723" srcset="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-people-on-Wikipedia-not-M_F.png 600w, https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-people-on-Wikipedia-not-M_F-300x186.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a></figure> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Sports by the numbers</h3> <p>The original question was to look at what the effect of athlete articles is on the overall totals. It turns out… very striking. </p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full is-resized"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Living-people-on-Wikipedia-by-sports-status.png"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Living-people-on-Wikipedia-by-sports-status.png" alt="" class="wp-image-1726" width="600" height="371" srcset="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Living-people-on-Wikipedia-by-sports-status.png 600w, https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Living-people-on-Wikipedia-by-sports-status-300x186.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a></figure> <p>A few things are immediately apparent. The first is that <strong>the share of athletes is very substantial</strong> – it reflects only around a quarter of people born in the 1950s, but 85-90% of people born in the 1990s/2000s. </p> <p>The second is that <strong>those athletes are overwhelmingly men</strong> – among the 1950s cohort, only about 10% of those athletes are female, and even by recent years it is only around 20%. This means that if we look purely at the non-athlete articles, the gender split becomes a lot more balanced. </p> <figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-non-athletes-on-Wikipedia-female.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="600" height="371" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-non-athletes-on-Wikipedia-female.png" alt="" class="wp-image-1727" srcset="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-non-athletes-on-Wikipedia-female.png 600w, https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Gender-split-for-living-non-athletes-on-Wikipedia-female-300x186.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px" /></a></figure> <p>Across all articles, it is around 32% female. But <strong>among living <strong>non-athlete</strong>s, born since 1990, the gender balance is over 50% female.</strong></p> <p>This is a really amazing figure. I don’t think I ever particularly expected to see a gender analysis on Wikipedia that would break 50%. Granted, the absolute numbers involved are low – as is apparent from the previous graph, “non-athletes born in the 1990s” is around 22,000 people, and “born in the 2000s” is as low as 2,500 – but it’s a pretty solid trend and the total numbers for the earlier decades are definitely large enough for it to be no anomaly.</p> <p>(Eagle-eyed readers will note that these do not quite align with the numbers in the original linked discussion – those were a couple of points lower in recent decades. I have not quite worked out why, but I think this was an error in the earlier queries; possibly it was counting redirects?)</p> <p>One last detail to note: the “date missing” cohort comes out over 90% <em>non</em>-athletes. Presumably this is because their exact age is often significant and linked in to eg when they start professional sports, so it’s easily publicly available. </p> <h3 class="wp-block-heading">Methodology: the thousand word footnote</h3> <p>Feel free to let your eyes glaze over now.</p> <p>These numbers were constructed mostly using the <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://petscan.wmflabs.org/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://petscan.wmflabs.org/" target="_blank">petscan</a> tool, and leveraging data from both English Wikipedia and Wikidata. From Wikipedia, we have a robust categorisation system for year/decade of birth, and for whether someone is a living person. From Wikidata, we have fairly comprehensive gender data, which Wikipedia doesn’t know about. (It also has dates of birth, but it is more efficient to use WP categories here). So it is straightforward to produce intersection queries like “all living people marked as 1920s births and marked as female” (<a href="https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?outlinks_any=&namespace_conversion=keep&cb_labels_any_l=1&labels_no=&search_wiki=&common_wiki=auto&show_soft_redirects=both&depth=0&sitelinks_no=&show_redirects=no&min_redlink_count=1&categories=Living+people%0D%0A1920s+births%7C1&sparql=select+*+where+%7B+%3Fitem+wdt%3AP21+wd%3AQ6581072+%7D&output_compatability=catscan&templates_any=&active_tab=tab_other_sources&langs_labels_no=&maxlinks=&sitelinks_yes=&links_to_all=&cb_labels_yes_l=1&edits%5Bflagged%5D=both&interface_language=en&search_max_results=500&templates_yes=&format=html&show_disambiguation_pages=no&language=en&referrer_name=&negcats=&project=wikipedia&combination=subset&ns%5B0%5D=1&sortorder=ascending&edits%5Bbots%5D=both&min_sitelink_count=&page_image=any&max_age=&edits%5Banons%5D=both&cb_labels_no_l=1&subpage_filter=either">report</a>). Note that this is crunching a lot of data – don’t be surprised if queries take a minute or two to run or occasionally time out.</p> <p>To my surprise, the report for “living people known to be female” initially produced a reliable figure, but one for “living people known to be male” produced a figure that was an undercount. (I could validate this by checking against some small categories where I could run a report listing the gender of every item). The root cause seemed to be a timeout in the Wikidata query – I was originally looking for<em> { ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5 . wdt:P21 wd:Q6581097 }</em> – items known to be human with gender male. Tweaking this to be simply <em>{ ?item wdt:P21 wd:Q6581097 }</em> – items with gender male – produced a reliable figure. Similarly, we had the same issue when trying to get a total for all items with reported gender – simply <em>{ ?item wdt:P21 ?val }</em> works.</p> <p>Percentages are calculated as percentage of the number of articles identified as (male + female), rather than of all BLPs with a recorded gender value or simply of all BLPs. There are good arguments for either of the first two, but the former is simpler (some of my “any recorded gender value” queries timed out) and also consistent with the 2019 analysis. </p> <p>A thornier problem comes from the sports element. There are a number of potential ways we could determine “sportiness”. The easiest option would be to use Wikidata occupation and look for something that indicates their occupation is some form of athlete, or that indicates a sport being played. The problem is that this is too all-encompassing, and would give us people who <em>played</em> sports but for whom it is not their main claim to fame. An alternative is to use the Wikipedia article categorisation hierarchy, but this is very complex and deep, making the queries very difficult to work with. The category hierarchy includes a number of surprise crosslinks and loops, meaning that deep queries tend to get very confusing results, or just time out.</p> <p>The approach I eventually went with was to use Wikipedia’s infoboxes – the little standardised box on the top right of a page. There are a wide range of distinct infobox templates tailored to specific fields; each article usually only displays one, but can embed elements of others to bring in secondary data. If we look for articles using one of the 77(!) distinct sports infoboxes (<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://petscan.wmflabs.org/?labels_any=&labels_yes=&regexp_filter=&search_query=&templates_no=&manual_list=&links_to_any=&categories=Living+people&output_limit=&labels_no=&ores_type=any&edits%5Bflagged%5D=both&outlinks_any=&namespace_conversion=keep&psid=25494250&maxlinks=&cb_labels_no_l=1&templates_any=Infobox+F1+driver%0D%0AInfobox+professional+wrestler%0D%0AInfobox+tennis+biography%0D%0AInfobox+boxer%0D%0AInfobox+Canadian+Football+League+biography%0D%0AInfobox+figure+skater%0D%0AInfobox+snooker+player%0D%0AInfobox+Champ+Car+driver%0D%0AInfobox+sumo+wrestler%0D%0AInfobox+Gaelic+games+player%0D%0AInfobox+basketball+biography%0D%0AInfobox+ice+hockey+biography%0D%0AInfobox+college+coach%0D%0AInfobox+bodybuilder%0D%0AInfobox+British+Touring+Car+Championship+record%0D%0AInfobox+rugby+biography%0D%0AInfobox+rugby+league+biography%0D%0AInfobox+lacrosse+player%0D%0AInfobox+V8+Supercar+record%0D%0AInfobox+darts+player%0D%0AInfobox+NASCAR+driver%0D%0AInfobox+field+hockey+player%0D%0AInfobox+sports+announcer+details%0D%0AInfobox+volleyball+biography%0D%0AInfobox+NCAA+athlete%0D%0AInfobox+WRC+driver%0D%0AInfobox+Gaelic+games+manager%0D%0AInfobox+cyclist%0D%0AInfobox+badminton+player%0D%0AInfobox+alpine+ski+racer%0D%0AInfobox+go+player%0D%0AInfobox+baseball+biography%0D%0AInfobox+horseracing+personality%0D%0AInfobox+racing+driver%0D%0AInfobox+skier%0D%0AInfobox+Le+Mans+driver%0D%0AInfobox+chess+biography%0D%0AInfobox+speed+skater%0D%0AInfobox+speedway+rider%0D%0AInfobox+swimmer%0D%0AInfobox+NFL+biography%0D%0AInfobox+cricketer%0D%0AInfobox+martial+artist%0D%0AInfobox+amateur+wrestler%0D%0AInfobox+AFL+biography%0D%0AInfobox+college+football+player%0D%0AInfobox+table+tennis+player%0D%0AInfobox+Motocross+rider%0D%0AInfobox+motorcycle+rider%0D%0AInfobox+netball+biography%0D%0AInfobox+handball+biography%0D%0AInfobox+gymnast%0D%0AInfobox+sportsperson%0D%0AInfobox+climber%0D%0AInfobox+boxer+%28amateur%29%0D%0AInfobox+golfer%0D%0AInfobox+football+official%0D%0AInfobox+squash+player%0D%0AInfobox+surfer%0D%0AInfobox+professional+bowler%0D%0AInfobox+pelotari%0D%0AInfobox+curler%0D%0AInfobox+fencer%0D%0AInfobox+bullfighting+career%0D%0AInfobox+mountaineer%0D%0AInfobox+tennis+player+season%0D%0AInfobox+racing+driver+series+section%0D%0AInfobox+sailor%0D%0AInfobox+biathlete%0D%0AInfobox+sport+wrestler%0D%0AInfobox+football+biography%0D%0AInfobox+bandy+biography%0D%0AInfobox+checkers+biography%0D%0AInfobox+water+polo+biography%0D%0AInfobox+sportsperson%2FWikidata%0D%0AInfobox+pool+player%0D%0AInfobox+judoka&templates_yes=&sitelinks_no=&cb_labels_any_l=1&search_max_results=500&source_combination=&language=en&sortby=none&langs_labels_no=&common_wiki_other=&cb_labels_yes_l=1&langs_labels_any=&edits%5Banons%5D=both&project=wikipedia&links_to_all=&depth=0&referrer_name=&wpiu=any&negcats=&combination=subset&ns%5B0%5D=1&min_sitelink_count=&referrer_url=&active_tab=tab_templates_n_links&interface_language=en&before=&wikidata_prop_item_use=" target="_blank">report</a>), we can conclude they probably had a significant sporting career. An article that does not contain one can be inferred to not have a sporting background.</p> <p>But then we need to consider people with significant sports <em>and</em> non-sports careers. For example, the biographies of both <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Coe" data-type="URL" data-id="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Coe" target="_blank">Seb Coe</a> and <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanni_Grey-Thompson" data-type="URL" data-id="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanni_Grey-Thompson" target="_blank">Tanni Grey-Thompson</a> use the “infobox officeholder” to reflect their careers in Parliament being more recent, but it is set up to embed a sports infobox towards the end. This would entail them being counted as athletes by our infobox method. This is probably correct for <em>those</em> two, but there are no doubt people out there where we would draw the line differently. (To stay in the UK political theme: how about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_McLeish" data-type="URL" data-id="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_McLeish">Henry McLeish</a>? His athletic career on its own would probably <em>just</em> qualify for a Wikipedia biography, but it is, perhaps, a bit of a footnote compared to being First Minister…)</p> <p>So, here is another complication. How reliable is our assumption that an athlete has a sports infobox, and that non-athletes don’t? If it’s broadly true, great, our numbers hold up. If it’s not, and if it’s not in some kind of systematic way, there might be a more complex skew. I <em>believe</em> that for modern athletes, it’s reasonably safe to assume that infoboxes are nearly ubiquitous; there are groups of articles where they’re less common, but this isn’t one of them. However, I can’t say for sure; it’s not an area I’ve worked intensively in.</p> <p>Finally, we have the issue of dates. We’ve based the calculation on Wikipedia categories. Wikipedia birth/death categories are pretty reliably used where that data is known. However, about 150k (14%) of our BLP articles are marked “year of birth unknown”, and these are disproportionately female (35.4%). </p> <p>What effect do these factors have?</p> <p>Counting the stats as percentage of M+F rather than percentage of all people with recorded gender could be argued either way, but the numbers involved are quite low and do not change the overall pattern of the results.</p> <p>The infobox question is more complicated. It is possible that it is meaning we are not picking up all athletes because they do not have infoboxes. On the other hand, it is possible that it is meaning we are being more expansive in counting people as athletes because they have a “secondary” infobox along the line of Coe & Grey-Thompson above. The problem there is defining where we draw the line, and what level of “other significance” stops someone being counted. That feels like a very subjective threshold and hard to test for automatically. It is certainly a more conservative test than a Wikidata-based one, at least.</p> <p>And for dates, hmm. We know that the articles that do not report an age are disproportionately female (35% vs the BLP average of 25%), but also that they are <em>even</em> more disproportionately “not athletes” (7% athletes vs the BLP average of 43%). There are also a lot of articles that don’t report an age; around 14% of all BLPs.</p> <p>This one probably introduces the biggest question mark here. Depending on how that 14% break down, it could change the totals for the year-by-year cohorts; but there’s not really much we can do at the moment to work that out.</p> <p>Anecdotally, I suspect that they are more likely to skew younger rather than being evenly distributed over time, but there is very little to go on here. However, I feel it is unlikely they would be distributed in such a way as to <em>counteract</em> the overall conclusions – this would require, for example, the female ones being predominantly shifted into older groups and the male ones into younger groups. It’s possible, but I don’t see an obvious mechanism to cause that.</p> <p><em>[Edit 4/8/23 – tweaked to confirm that these are English Wikipedia only figures, after a reminder from <a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="https://hildabastian.wordpress.com/2023/08/04/some-knowledge-gaps-are-no-coincidence/" data-type="URL" data-id="https://hildabastian.wordpress.com/2023/08/04/some-knowledge-gaps-are-no-coincidence/" target="_blank">Hilda</a>. I would be very interested in seeing similar data for other projects, but the methodology might be tricky to translate – eg French and German do not have an equivalent category for indexing living people, and different projects may have quite different approaches for applying infoboxes.]</em></p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2023/gender-and-blps-on-wikipedia-redux/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2023-08-02T23:36:52+01:00">August 2, 2023</time><time class="updated" datetime="2023-08-04T18:14:40+01:00">August 4, 2023</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/data/" rel="tag">data</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/wikidata/" rel="tag">wikidata</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/wikipedia/" rel="tag">wikipedia</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2023/gender-and-blps-on-wikipedia-redux/#comments">1 Comment<span class="screen-reader-text"> on Gender and BLPs on Wikipedia, redux</span></a></span> </footer> </article> <article id="post-1578" class="post-1578 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-data tag-statistics tag-wikidata tag-wikipedia"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2019/gender-and-deletion-on-wikipedia/" rel="bookmark">Gender and deletion on Wikipedia</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>So, a really interesting question <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Request_a_query#Question_about_BLPs">cropped up</a> this weekend:</p> <blockquote><p> I’m trying to find out how many biographies of living persons exist on the English Wikipedia, and what kind of data we have on them. In particular, I’m looking for the gender breakdown. I’d also like to know when they were created; average length; and whether they’ve been nominated for deletion.</p></blockquote> <p>This is, of course, something that’s being discussed a lot right now; there is a lot of emerging push-back against the <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05947-8">excellent work</a> being done to try and add more notable women to Wikipedia, and one particular deletion debate <a href="https://undark.org/2019/04/25/wikipedia-diversity-problem/">got a lot of attention</a> in the past few weeks, so it’s on everyone’s mind. And, instinctively, it seems plausible that there is a bias in the relative frequency of nomination for deletion – can we find if it’s there?</p> <p>My initial assumption was, huh, I don’t think we can do that with Wikidata. Then I went off and thought about it for a bit more, and realised we could get <i>most</i> of the way there of it with some inferences. Here’s the results, and how I got there. Thanks to <a href="https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:SlimVirgin">Sarah</a> for prompting the research!</p> <p>(If you want to get the tl;dr summary – yes, there is <b>some kind</b> of difference in the way older male vs female articles have been involved with the deletion process, but exactly what that indicates is not obvious without data I can’t get at. The difference seems to have <i>mostly</i> disappeared for articles created in the last couple of years.)</p> <h3>Statistics on the gender breakdown of BLPs</h3> <p>As of a snapshot of yesterday morning, 5 May 2019, the English Wikipedia had 906,720 articles identified as biographies of living people (BLPs for short). Of those, 697,402 were identified as male by Wikidata, 205,117 as female, 2464 had some other value for gender, 1220 didn’t have any value for gender (usually articles on <i>groups</i> of people, plus some not yet updated), and 517 simply didn’t have a connected Wikidata item (yet). Of those with known gender, it breaks down as 77.06% male, 22.67% female, and 0.27% some other value. (Because of the limits of the query, I didn’t try and break down those in any more detail.)</p> <p>This is, as noted, only articles about <i>living people</i>; across <a href="https://www.denelezh.org/gender-gap/?project=enwiki&sort=label">all 1,626,232 biographies in the English Wikipedia</a> with a gender known to Wikidata, it’s about 17.83% female, 82.13% male, and 0.05% some other value. I’ll be sticking to data on living people throughout this post, but it’s interesting to compare the historic information.</p> <p>So, how has that changed over time?</p> <p><a title="Andrew Gray [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BLPs_by_gender_and_date_of_creation.png"><img decoding="async" alt="BLPs by gender and date of creation" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/42/BLPs_by_gender_and_date_of_creation.png" width="512"></a></p> <p>This graph shows all existing BLPs, broken down by gender and (approximately) when they were created. As can be seen, and as might be expected, the gap has closed a bit over time.</p> <p><a title="Andrew Gray [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Percentage_of_BLPs_which_are_female_over_time.png"><img decoding="async" alt="Percentage of BLPs which are female over time" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Percentage_of_BLPs_which_are_female_over_time.png" width="512"></a></p> <p>Looking at the ratio over time (expressed here as %age of total male+female), the relative share of female BLPs was ~20% in 2009. In late 2012, the rate of creation of female BLPs kicked up a gear, and from then on it’s been noticeably above the long-term average (almost hitting 33% in late 2017, but dropping back since then). This has driven the overall share steadily and continually upwards, now at 22.7% (as noted above).</p> <p>Now the second question, do the article lengths differ by gender? Indeed they do, by a small amount.</p> <p><a title="Andrew Gray [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BLPs_by_current_article_size_and_date_of_creation.png"><img decoding="async" alt="BLPs by current article size and date of creation" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/BLPs_by_current_article_size_and_date_of_creation.png" width="512"></a></p> <p>Female BLPs created at any time since 2009 are slightly longer on average than male ones of similar age, with only a couple of brief exceptions; the gap may be widening over the past year but it’s maybe too soon to say for sure. Average difference is about 500 bytes or a little under 10% of mean article size – not dramatic but probably not trivial either. (Pre-2009 articles, not shown here, are about even on average)</p> <p>Note that this is raw bytesize – actual prose size will be smaller, particularly if an article is well-referenced; a single well-structured reference can be a few hundred characters. It’s also the <i>current</i> article size, not size at creation, hence why older articles tend to be longer – they’ve had more time to grow. It’s interesting to note that once they’re more than about five years old they seem to plateau in average length.</p> <p>Finally, the third question – have they been nominated for deletion? This was really interesting.</p> <p><a title="Andrew Gray [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Percentage_of_BLPs_which_have_previously_been_to_AFD,_by_date_of_creation_and_gender.png"><img decoding="async" alt="Percentage of BLPs which have previously been to AFD, by date of creation and gender" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Percentage_of_BLPs_which_have_previously_been_to_AFD%2C_by_date_of_creation_and_gender.png" width="512"></a></p> <p>So, first of all, some caveats. This only identifies articles which go through the structured “articles for deletion” (AFD) process – nomination, discussion, decision to keep or delete. (There are <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_process">three deletion processes</a> on Wikipedia; the other two are more lightweight and do not show up in an easily traceable form). It also cannot specifically identify if <i>that exact page</i> was nominated for deletion, only that “an article with exactly the same page name has been nominated in the past” – but the odds are good they’re the same if there’s a match. It will miss out any where the article was renamed after the deletion discussion, and, most critically, <i>it will only see articles that survived deletion</i>. If they were deleted, I won’t be able to see them in this analysis, so there’s an obvious survivorship bias limiting what conclusions we can draw.</p> <p>Having said all that…</p> <p>Female BLPs created 2009-16 appear noticeably more likely than male BLPs of equivalent age to have been through a deletion discussion at some point in their lives (and, presumably, all have been kept). Since 2016, this has changed and the two groups are about even.</p> <p>Alongisde this, there is a corresponding drop-off in the number of articles created since 2016 which have associated deletion discussions. My tentative hypothesis is that articles created in the last few years are generally less likely to be nominated for deletion, perhaps because the growing use of things like the draft namespace (and associated reviews) means that articles are more robust when first published. Conversely, though, it’s possible that nominations continue at the same rate, but the deletion process is just more rigorous now and a higher proportion of those which are nominated get deleted (and so disappear from our data). We can’t tell.</p> <p>(One possible explanation that we can tentatively dismiss is age – an article can be nominated at any point in its lifespan so you would tend to expect a slowly increasing share over time, but I would expect the majority of deletion nominations come in the first weeks and then it’s pretty much evenly distributed after that. As such, the drop-off seems far too rapid to be explained by <i>just</i> article age.)</p> <p>What we don’t know is what the overall <i>nomination for deletion</i> rate, including deleted articles, looks like. From our data, it could be that pre-2016 male and female articles are nominated at equal rates but more male articles are deleted; or it could be that pre-2016 male and female articles are equally likely to get deleted, but the female articles are nominated more frequently than they should be. Either of these would cause the imbalance. I think this is very much the missing piece of data and I’d love to see any suggestions for how we can work it out – perhaps something like trying to estimate gender from the names of deleted articles?</p> <p><b>Update:</b> Magnus has <a href="http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/?p=613">run some numbers on deleted pages</a>, doing exactly this – inferring gender from pagenames. Of those which were probably a person, ~2/3 had an inferred gender, and 23% of those were female. This is a remarkably similar figure to the analysis here (~23% of current BLPs female; ~26% of all BLPs which have survived a deletion debate female)</p> <p><b>So in conclusion</b>…</p> <ul> <li>We know the gender breakdown: skewed male, but growing slowly more balanced over time, and better for living people than historical ones.</li> <li>We know the article lengths; slightly longer for women than men for recent articles, about equal for those created a long time ago.</li> <li>We know that there is <i>something</i> different about the way male and female biographies created before ~2017 experience the deletion process, but we don’t have clear data to indicate exactly what is going on, and there are multiple potential explanations.</li> <li>We also know that deletion activity seems to be more balanced for articles in both groups created from ~2017 onwards, and that these also have a lower frequency of involvement with the deletion process than might have been expected. It is not clear what the mechanism is here, or if the two factors are directly linked.</li> </ul> <h3>How can you extract this data? (Yes, this is very dull)</h3> <p>The first problem was generating the lists of articles and their metadata. The English Wikipedia category system lets us identify “living people”, but not gender; Wikidata lets us identify gender (property P21), but not reliably “living people”. However, we can creatively use the <a href="http://petscan.wmflabs.org/">petscan</a> tool to get the intersection of a SPARQL gender query + the category. Instructing it to explicitly use Wikipedia (“enwiki” in other sources > manual list) and give output as a TSV – then waiting for about fifteen minutes – leaves you with a nice clean data dump. Thanks, <a href="http://magnusmanske.de/wordpress/">Magnus</a>!</p> <p>(It’s worth noting that you can get this data with any characteristic indexed by Wikidata, or any characteristic identifiable through the Wikipedia category schema, but you will need to run a new query for each aspect you want to analyse – the exported data just has article metadata, none of the Wikidata/category information)</p> <p>The exported files contain three things that are very useful to us: article title, pageid, and length. I normalised the files like so:</p> <div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap5"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap4"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap3"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap2"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight"><div class="bash"><pre class="de1"><span class="kw2">grep</span> <span class="br0">[</span><span class="nu0">0</span>-<span class="nu0">9</span><span class="br0">]</span> enwiki_blp_women_from_list.tsv <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">cut</span> <span class="re5">-f</span> <span class="nu0">2</span>,<span class="nu0">3</span>,<span class="nu0">5</span> <span class="sy0">&</span>gt; women-noheader.tsv</pre></div></div></div></div></div></div></div> <p>This drops the header line (it’s the only one with no numeric characters) and extracts only the three values we care about (and conveniently saves about 20MB).</p> <p>This gives us two of the things we want (age and size) but not deletion data. For that, we fall back on inference. Any article that is put through the AFD process gets a new subpage created at “Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/PAGENAME”. It is reasonable to infer that if an article has a corresponding AFD subpage, it’s <i>probably</i> about that specific article. This is not always true, of course – names get recycled, pages get moved – but it’s a reasonable working hypothesis and hopefully the errors are evenly distributed over time. I’ve racked my brains to see if I could anticipate a noticeable difference here by gender, as this could really complicate the results, but provisionally I think we’re okay to go with it.</p> <p>To find out if those subpages exist, we turn to <a href="https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/">the enwiki dumps</a>. Specifically, we want “enwiki-latest-all-titles.gz” – which, as it suggests, is a simple file listing all page titles on the wiki. Extracted, it comes to about 1GB. From this, we can extract all the AFD subpages, as so:</p> <div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap5"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap4"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap3"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap2"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight"><div class="bash"><pre class="de1"><span class="kw2">grep</span> <span class="st0">"Articles_for_deletion/"</span> enwiki-latest-all-titles <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">cut</span> <span class="re5">-f</span> <span class="nu0">2</span> <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">sort</span> <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">uniq</span> <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">cut</span> <span class="re5">-f</span> <span class="nu0">2</span> <span class="re5">-d</span> <span class="sy0">/</span> <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">sort</span> <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">uniq</span> <span class="sy0">&</span>gt; afds</pre></div></div></div></div></div></div></div> <p>This extracts all the AFD subpages, removes any duplicates (since eg talkpages are listed here as well), and sorts the list alphabetically. There are about 424,000 of them.</p> <p>Going back to our original list of articles, we want to bin them by age. To a first approximation, <tt>pageid</tt> is sequential with age – it’s assigned when the page is first created. There are some big caveats here; for example, a page being created as a redirect and later expanded will have the ID of its initial creation. Pages being deleted and recreated may get a new ID, pages which are merged may end up with either of the original IDs, and some complicated page moves may end up with the original IDs being lost. But, for the majority of pages, it’ll work out okay.</p> <p>To correlate pageID to age, I did a bit of speculative guessing to find an item created on 1 January and 1 July every year back to 2009 (eg <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43190000&action=info#Edit_history">pageid 43190000</a> was created at 11am on 1 July 2014). I could then use these to extract the articles corresponding to each period as so:</p> <div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap5"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap4"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap3"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap2"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight"><div class="bash"><pre class="de1">... <span class="kw2">awk</span> <span class="re5">-F</span> <span class="st_h">'\t'</span> <span class="st_h">'$2 &gt;= 41516000 &amp;&amp; $2 &lt; 43190000'</span> <span class="sy0">&</span>lt; men-noheader.tsv <span class="sy0">&</span>gt; bins<span class="sy0">/</span><span class="nu0">2014</span>-<span class="nu0">1</span>-M <span class="kw2">awk</span> <span class="re5">-F</span> <span class="st_h">'\t'</span> <span class="st_h">'$2 &gt;= 43190000 &amp;&amp; $2 &lt; 44909000'</span> <span class="sy0">&</span>lt; men-noheader.tsv <span class="sy0">&</span>gt; bins<span class="sy0">/</span><span class="nu0">2014</span>-<span class="nu0">2</span>-M ...</pre></div></div></div></div></div></div></div> <p>This finds all items with a pageid (in column #2 of the file) between the specified values, and copies them into the relevant bin. Run once for men and once for women.</p> <p>Then we can run a short report, along these lines (the original had loops in it):</p> <div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap5"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap4"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap3"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap2"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight-wrap"><div class="wp-geshi-highlight"><div class="bash"><pre class="de1"> <span class="kw2">cut</span> <span class="re5">-f</span> <span class="nu0">1</span> bins<span class="sy0">/</span><span class="nu0">2014</span>-<span class="nu0">1</span>-M <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">sort</span> <span class="sy0">&</span>gt; temp-M <span class="kw3">echo</span> <span class="re5">-e</span> <span class="nu0">2014</span>-<span class="nu0">1</span>-M<span class="st0">"<span class="es1">\t</span>M<span class="es1">\t</span>"</span><span class="sy0">`</span><span class="kw2">cat</span> bins<span class="sy0">/</span><span class="nu0">2014</span>-<span class="nu0">1</span>-M <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">wc</span> -l<span class="sy0">`</span><span class="st0">"<span class="es1">\t</span>"</span><span class="sy0">`</span><span class="kw2">awk</span> <span class="st_h">'{ total += $3; count++ } END { print total/count }'</span> bins<span class="sy0">/</span><span class="nu0">2014</span>-<span class="nu0">1</span>-M<span class="sy0">`</span><span class="st0">"<span class="es1">\t</span>"</span><span class="sy0">`</span><span class="kw2">comm</span> <span class="re5">-1</span> <span class="re5">-2</span> temp-M afds <span class="sy0">|</span> <span class="kw2">wc</span> -l<span class="sy0">`</span> <span class="sy0">&</span>gt;<span class="sy0">&</span>gt; report.tsv</pre></div></div></div></div></div></div></div> <p>This adds a line to the file <tt>report.tsv</tt> with (in order) the name of the bin, the number of entries in it, the mean value of the <tt>length</tt> column, and a count of the number which also match names in the <tt>afds</tt> file. (The use of the <tt>temp-M</tt> file is to deal with the fact that the comm tool needs properly sorted input).</p> <p>After that, generating the data is lovely and straightforward – drop the report into a spreadsheet and play around with it.</p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2019/gender-and-deletion-on-wikipedia/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2019-05-06T21:36:49+01:00">May 6, 2019</time><time class="updated" datetime="2022-08-14T22:07:02+01:00">August 14, 2022</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/data/" rel="tag">data</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/wikidata/" rel="tag">wikidata</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/wikipedia/" rel="tag">wikipedia</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2019/gender-and-deletion-on-wikipedia/#comments">3 Comments<span class="screen-reader-text"> on Gender and deletion on Wikipedia</span></a></span> </footer> </article> <article id="post-1274" class="post-1274 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-shakespeare tag-statistics"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/graphing-shakespeare/" rel="bookmark">Graphing Shakespeare</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>Today I came across <a href="https://labs.jstor.org/shakespeare/">a lovely project</a> from JSTOR & the Folger Library – a set of Shakespeare’s plays, each line annotated by the number of times it is cited/discussed by articles within JSTOR.</p> <p>“This is awesome”, I thought, “I wonder what happens if you graph it?”</p> <p>So, without further ado, here’s the “JSTOR citation intensity” for three arbitrarily selected plays:</p> <p><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/msd.png"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/msd.png" width="600"/></a></p> <p><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/macbeth.png"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/macbeth.png" width="600"/></a></p> <p><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/othello.png"><img decoding="async" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/othello.png" width="600"/></a></p> <p>Blue is numbers of citations per line; red is no citations. In no particular order, a few things that immediately jumped out at me –</p> <ul> <li>basically no-one seems to care about the late middle – the end of Act 2 and the start of Act 3 – of <em>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</em>; <li>“… a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / signifying nothing” (<em>Macbeth</em>, 5.5) is apparently more popular than anything else in these three plays; <li><em>Othello</em> has far fewer “very popular” lines than the other two. </ul> <p><em>Macbeth</em> has the most popular bits, and is also the most densely cited – only 25.1% of its lines were never cited, against 30.3% in <em>Othello</em> and 36.9% in <em>A Midsummer Night’s Dream</em>.</p> <p>I have no idea if these are actually interesting thoughts – my academic engagement with Shakespeare more or less reached its high-water mark sixteen years ago! – but I liked them…</p> <hr> <p>How to generate these numbers? Copy-paste the page into a blank text file (<code>text</code>), then use the following bash command to clean it all up –</p> <p><code>grep "FTLN " text | sed 's/^.*FTLN/FTLN/g' | cut -b 10- | sed 's/[A-Z]/ /g' | cut -f 1 -d " " | sed 's/text//g' > numberedextracts</code></p> <p>Paste into a spreadsheet against a column numbered 1-4000 or so, and graph away…</p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/graphing-shakespeare/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2015-08-17T21:42:14+01:00">August 17, 2015</time><time class="updated" datetime="2015-08-17T22:17:23+01:00">August 17, 2015</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/shakespeare/" rel="tag">shakespeare</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/graphing-shakespeare/#respond">Leave a comment<span class="screen-reader-text"> on Graphing Shakespeare</span></a></span> </footer> </article> <article id="post-1232" class="post-1232 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-canada tag-data tag-history tag-statistics tag-ww1"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/canadian-self-reported-birthday-data/" rel="bookmark">Canadian self-reported birthday data</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>In the <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/when-do-you-think-you-were-born/">last post</a>, we saw strong evidence for a “memorable date” bias in self-reported birthday information among British men born in the late 19th century. In short, they were disproportionately likely to <i>think</i> they were born on an “important day” such as Christmas.</p> <p>It would be great to compare it to other sources. However, finding a suitable dataset is challenging. We need a sample covering a large number of men, over several years, and which is unlikely to be cross-checked or drawn from official documentation such as birth certificates or parish registers. It has to explicitly list full birthdates (not just month or year)</p> <p>WWI enlistment datasets are quite promising in this regard – lots of men, born about the same time, turning up and stating their details without particularly much of a reason to bias individual dates. The main British records have (famously) long since burned, but the Australian and Canadian records survive. Unfortunately, the <a href="https://www.aif.adfa.edu.au/search">Australian index</a> does not include dates of birth, but the <a href="http://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/military-heritage/first-world-war/first-world-war-1914-1918-cef/Pages/search.aspx">Canadian index</a> does (at least, when known). So, does it tell us anything?</p> <p>The index is available as <a href="http://data.gc.ca/data/en/dataset/6a6e6a79-9e2a-48cc-99ec-163da26d15e9">a 770mb+ XML blob</a> (oh, dear). Running this through <tt>xmllint</tt> produces a nicely formatted file with approximately 575,000 birthdays for 622,000 entries. It’s formatted in such a way as to imply there may be multiple birthdates listed for a single individual (presumably if there’s contradictory data?), but I couldn’t spot any cases. There’s also about ten thousand who don’t have nicely formatted dd/mm/yyyy entries; let’s omit those for now. Quick and dirt but probably representative.</p> <p>And so…</p> <p><img decoding="async" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/canadiandata.png" width=500px></p> <p>There’s clearly a bit more seasonality here than in the British data (up in spring, down in winter), but also the same sort of unexpected one-day spikes and troughs. As this is quite rough, I haven’t corrected for seasonality, but we still see something interesting.</p> <p>The highest ten days are: 25 December (1.96), 1 January (1.77), 17 March (1.56), 24 May (1.52), 1 May (1.38), 15 August (1.38), 12 July (1.36), 15 September (1.34), 15 March (1.3).</p> <p>The lowest ten days are: 30 December (0.64), 30 January (0.74), 30 October (0.74), 30 July (0.75), 30 May (0.78), 13 November (0.78), 30 August (0.79), 26 November (0.80), 30 March (0.81), 12 December (0.81).</p> <p>The same strong pattern for “memorable days” that we saw with the UK is visible in the top ten – Christmas, New Year, St. Patrick’s, Victoria Day, May Day, [nothing], 12 July, [nothing], [nothing].</p> <p>Two of these are distinctively “Canadian” – both 24 May (the Queen’s birthday/Victoria Day) and 12 July (the Orange Order marches) are above average in the British data, but not as dramatically as they are here. Both appear to have been relatively more prominent in late-19th/early-20th century Canada than in the UK. Canada Day/Dominion Day (1 July) is above average but does not show up as sharply, possibly because it does not appear to have been widely celebrated until after WWI.</p> <p>One new pattern is the appearance of the 15th of the month in the top 10. This was suggested as likely in the <a href="http://www.panix.com/~murphy/bday.html">US life insurance analysis</a> and I’m interested to see it showing up here. Another oddity is leap years – in the British data, 29 February was dramatically undercounted. In the Canadian data, it’s strongly overcounted – just not quite enough to get into the top ten. 28 February (1.28), 29 February (1.27) and 1 March (1.29) are all “memorable”. I don’t have an explanation for this but it does suggest an interesting story.</p> <p>Looking at the lowest days, we see the same pattern of 30/xx dates being very badly represented – seven of the ten lowest dates are 30th of the month…. and all from days where there were 31 days in the month. This is exactly the same pattern we observed in UK data, and I just don’t have any convincing reason to guess why. The other three dates all fall in low-birthrate months, </p> <p>So, in conclusion:</p> <ul> <li>Both UK and Canadian data from WWI show a strong bias for people to self-report their birthday as a “memorable day”; <li>“Memorable” days are commonly a known and fixed festival, such as Christmas; <li>Overreporting of arbitrary numbers like the 15th of the month are more common in Canada (& possibly the US?) than the UK; <li>The UK and Canadian samples seem to treat 29 February very differently – Canadians overreport, British people underreport; <li>There is a strong bias against reporting the 30th of the month <i>particularly in months with 31 days</i> </ul> <p>Thoughts (or additional data sources) welcome.</p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/canadian-self-reported-birthday-data/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2015-02-22T16:17:28+00:00">February 22, 2015</time><time class="updated" datetime="2015-02-22T16:21:02+00:00">February 22, 2015</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/canada/" rel="tag">canada</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/data/" rel="tag">data</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/history/" rel="tag">history</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/ww1/" rel="tag">ww1</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/canadian-self-reported-birthday-data/#comments">1 Comment<span class="screen-reader-text"> on Canadian self-reported birthday data</span></a></span> </footer> </article> <article id="post-1220" class="post-1220 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-data tag-history tag-statistics tag-ww1"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/when-do-you-think-you-were-born/" rel="bookmark">When do you think you were born?</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>Back in <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/back-to-the-army-again/">the last post</a>, we were looking at a sample of dates-of-birth in post-WWI Army records.</p> <p>(To recap – this is a dataset covering every man who served in the British Army after 1921 and who had a date of birth in or before 1900. 371,716 records in total, from 1864 to 1900, strongly skewed towards the recent end.)</p> <p>I’d suggested that there was an “echo” of 1914/15 false enlistment in there, but after a bit of work I’ve not been able to see it. However, it did throw up some other very interesting things. Here’s the graph of birthdays.</p> <p><img decoding="async" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/armybirths-raw.png" width=500px></p> <p>Two things immediately jump out. The first is that the graph, very gently, slopes upwards. The second is that there are some wild outliers.</p> <p>The first one is quite simple to explain; this data is not a sample of men born in a given year, but rather those in the army a few decades later. The graph in the previous post shows a very strong skew towards younger ages, so for <i>any given year</i> we’d expect to find marginally more December births than January ones. I’ve normalised the data to reflect this – calculated what the expected value for any given day would be assuming a linear increase, then calculated the ratio of reported to expected births. [For 29 February, I quartered its expected value]</p> <p><img decoding="async" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/armybirths-normalised.png" width=500px></p> <p>There are hints at a seasonal pattern here, but not a very obvious one. January, February, October and November are below average, March and September above average, and the rest of the spring-summer is hard to pin down. (For quite an interesting discussion on “European” and “American” birth seasonality, see <a href="http://www.canpopsoc.ca/CanPopSoc/assets/File/publications/journal/CSPv20n1p1.pdf">this Canadian paper</a>)</p> <p>The interesting bit is the outliers, which are apparent in both graphs. </p> <p>The most overrepresented days are, in order of frequency, 1 January (1.8), 25 December (1.43), 17 March (1.33), 28 February (1.27), 14 February (1.22), 1 May (1.22), 11 November (1.19), 12 August (1.17), 2 February (1.15), and 10 October (1.15). Conversely, the most underrepresented days are 29 February (0.67 after adjustment), 30 July (0.75), 30 August (0.78), 30 January (0.81), 30 March (0.82), and 30 May (0.84).</p> <p>Of the ten most common days, seven are significant festivals. In order: New Year’s Day, Christmas Day, St. Patrick’s Day, [nothing], Valentine’s Day, May Day, Martinmas, [nothing], Candlemas, [nothing].</p> <p>Remember, the underlying bias of most data is that it tells you what people put into the system, not what really happened. So, what we have is a dataset of what a large sample of men born in late nineteenth century Britain <i>thought</i> their birthdays were, or of the way they pinned them down when asked by an official. “Born about Christmastime” easily becomes “born 25 December” when it has to go down on a form. (Another frequent artefact is <a href="http://www.panix.com/~murphy/bday.html">overrepresentation of 1-xx or 15-xx dates</a>, but I haven’t yet looked for this.) People were substantially more likely to remember a birthday as associated with a particular festival or event than they were to remember a random date.</p> <p>It’s not all down to being memorable, of course; 1 January is probably in part a data recording artefact. I strongly suspect that at some point in the life of these records, someone’s said “record an unknown date as 1/1/xx”. </p> <p>The lowest days are strange, though. 29 February is easily explained – even correcting for it being one quarter as common as other days, many people would probably put 28 February or 1 March on forms for simplicity. (This also explains some of the 28 February popularity above). But all of the other five are 30th of the month – and all are 30th of a 31-day month. I have no idea what might explain this. I would really, really love to hear suggestions. </p> <p>One last, and possibly related, point – each month appears to have its own pattern. The first days of the month are overrepresented; the last days underrepresented. (The exception is December and possibly September). This is visible in both normalised and raw data, and I’m completely lost as to what might cause it…</p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/when-do-you-think-you-were-born/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2015-02-16T23:12:55+00:00">February 16, 2015</time><time class="updated" datetime="2015-02-17T09:17:38+00:00">February 17, 2015</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/data/" rel="tag">data</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/history/" rel="tag">history</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/ww1/" rel="tag">ww1</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/when-do-you-think-you-were-born/#comments">3 Comments<span class="screen-reader-text"> on When do you think you were born?</span></a></span> </footer> </article> <article id="post-1204" class="post-1204 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-data tag-history tag-statistics tag-ww1"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/back-to-the-army-again/" rel="bookmark">Back to the Army again</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>In the winter of 1918-19, the British government found itself in something of a quandary. On the one hand, hurrah, the war was over! Everyone who had signed up to serve for “three years or the duration” could go home. And, goodness, did they want to go home.</p> <p>On the other hand, the war… well it wasn’t really over. There were British troops fighting deep inside Russia; there were large garrisons sitting in western Germany (and other, less probable, places) in case the peace talks collapsed; there was unrest around the Empire and fears about Bolsheviks at home.</p> <p>So they <a href="http://www.1914-1918.net/reenlistment.html">raised another army</a>. Anyone in the army who volunteered to re-enlist got a cash payment of £20 to £50 (no small sum in 1919); two month’s leave with full pay; plus comparable pay to that in wartime and a separation allowance if he was married. Demobilisation continued for everyone else (albeit slowly), and by 1921, this meant that everyone in the Army was either a very long-serving veteran, a new volunteer who’d not been conscripted during wartime (so born 1901 onwards) or – I suspect the majority – re-enlisted men working through their few years service.</p> <p>For administrative convenience, all records of men who left up to 1921 were set aside and stored by a specific department; the “live” records, including more or less everyone who reenlisted, continued with the War Office. They were never transferred – and, unlike the pre-1921 records, they were not lost in a bombing raid in 1940.</p> <p>The MoD has just released an interesting dataset <a href="http://1914-1918.invisionzone.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=221706&hl=">following an FOI request</a> – it’s <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/foi-responses-released-by-mod-week-commencing-1-december-2014">an index of these “live” service records</a>. The records cover all men in the post-1921 records with a DoB prior to 1901, and thus <i>almost</i> everyone in it would have either remained in service or re-enlisted – there would be a small proportion of men born in 1900 who escaped conscription (roughly 13% of them would have turned 18 just after 11/11/18), and a small handful of men will have re-enlisted or transferred in much later, but otherwise – they all would have served in WWI and chosen to remain or to return very soon after being released. </p> <p>So, what does this tell us? Well, for one thing, there’s almost 317,000 of them. 4,864 were called Smith, 3,328 Jones, 2,104 Brown, 1,172 Black, etc. 12,085 were some form of Mac or Mc. And there are eight Singhs, which looks like an interesting story to trace about early immigrants.</p> <p>But, you know, data cries out to be graphed. So here’s the dates of birth.</p> <p><img decoding="async" src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/1919-servicemen.png" width=500px></p> <p>Since the 1900 births are probably an overcount for reenlistments, I’ve left these off.</p> <p>It’s more or less what you’d expect, but on close examination a little story emerges. Look at 1889/90; there’s a real discontinuity here. Why would this be?</p> <p>Pre-war army enlistments were not for ‘the duration’ (there was nothing to have a duration of!) but for seven years service and five in the reserves. There was a rider on this – if war broke out, you wouldn’t be discharged until the crisis was over. The men born 1900 would have enlisted in 1908 and been due for release to the reserves in 1915. Of course, that never happened… and so, in 1919, many of these men would have been 29, knowing no other career than soldiering. Many would have been thrilled to get out – and quite a few more would have considered it, and realised they had no trade, and no great chance of good employment. As Kipling <a href="http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_back.htm">had it in 1894</a>:</p> <blockquote><p><i>A man o’ four-an’-twenty what ‘asn’t learned of a trade—<br /> Except “Reserve” agin’ him—’e’d better be never made.</i></p></blockquote> <p>It probably wasn’t much better for him in 1919.</p> <p>Moving right a bit, 1896-97 also looks odd – this is the only point in the data where it goes <i>backwards</i>, with marginally more men born in 1896 than 1897. What happened here?</p> <p>Anyone born before August 1896 was able to rush off and enlist at the start of the war; anyone born after that date would either have to wait, or lie. Does this reflect a distant echo of people giving false ages in 1914/15 and still having them on the paperwork at reenlistment? More research no doubt needed, but it’s an interesting thought.</p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/back-to-the-army-again/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2015-01-24T14:35:05+00:00">January 24, 2015</time><time class="updated" datetime="2015-02-16T22:09:19+00:00">February 16, 2015</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/data/" rel="tag">data</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/history/" rel="tag">history</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/ww1/" rel="tag">ww1</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2015/back-to-the-army-again/#comments">1 Comment<span class="screen-reader-text"> on Back to the Army again</span></a></span> </footer> </article> <article id="post-442" class="post-442 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-statistics tag-wikipedia"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/quality-versus-age-of-wikipedias-featured-articles/" rel="bookmark">Quality versus age of Wikipedia’s Featured Articles</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>There’s been a brief flurry of interest on Wikipedia in this article, published last week:</p> <p><a href="http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2721/2482"><i>Evaluating quality control of Wikipedia’s feature articles</i></a> – David Lindsey.</p> <blockquote><p>…Out of the Wikipedia articles assessed, only 12 of 22 were found to pass Wikipedia’s own featured article criteria, indicating that Wikipedia’s process is ineffective. This finding suggests both that Wikipedia must take steps to improve its featured article process and that scholars interested in studying Wikipedia should be careful not to naively believe its assertions of quality.</p></blockquote> <p>A <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Featured_article_candidates#Journal_article_labels_FAC_a_failure">recurrent objection</a> to this has been that Lindsey didn’t take account of the age of articles – partly because article quality can degrade over time, since the average contribution is likely to be below the quality of the remainder of the article if it began at a high level, and partly because the relative stringency of what constitutes “featured” has changed over time.</p> <p>The interesting thing is, this partly holds and partly doesn’t. The article helpfully “scored” the 22 articles reviewed on a reasonably arbitrary ten-point scale; the average was seven, which I’ve taken as the cut-off point for acceptability. If we graph quality against time – time being defined as the last time an article passed through the “featuring” process, either for the first time or as a review – then we get an interesting graph:</p> <p><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Age_of_FAs_by_quality_in_Lindsey.svg"><img decoding="async" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Age_of_FAs_by_quality_in_Lindsey.svg/500px-Age_of_FAs_by_quality_in_Lindsey.svg.png"></a></p> <p>Here, I’ve divided them into two groups; blue dots are those with a rating greater than 7, and thus acceptable; red dots are those with a rating lower than 7, and so insufficient. It’s very apparent that these two cluster separately; if an article is good enough, then <i>there is no relation</i> between the current status and the time since it was featured. If, however, it is not good enough, then there is a very clear linear relationship between quality and time. The trendlines aren’t really needed to point this out, but I’ve included them anyway; note that they share a fairly similar origin point.</p> <p>Two hypotheses could explain this. Firstly, the quality when first featured varies sharply over time, but most older articles have been brought up to “modern standards”. Secondly, the quality when first featured is broadly consistent over time, and most articles remain that level, but some decay, and that decay is time-linked.</p> <p>I am inclined towards the second. If it was the first, we would expect to see some older articles which were “partially saved” – say, one passed when the average scoring was three, and then “caught up” when the average scoring was five. This would skew the linearity of the red group, and make it more erratic – but, no, no sign of that. We also see that the low-quality group has no members older than about three years (1100 days); this is consistent with a sweeper review process which steadily goes through old articles looking for bad ones, and weeding out or improving the worst.</p> <p><small>(The moral of the story? Always graph things. It is <i>amazing</i> what you spot by putting things on a graph.)</small></p> <p>So what would this hypothesis tell us? Assuming our 22 are a reasonable sample – which can be disputed, but let’s grant it – the data is entirely consistent with all of them being of approximately the same quality when they first become featured; so we can forget about it being a flaw in the review process, it’s likely to be a flaw in the maintenance process.</p> <p>Taking our dataset, the population of featured articles falls into two classes.</p> <ul> <li><b>Type A</b> – quality is consistent over time, even up to four years (!), and they comply with the standards we aim for when they’re first passed. <li><b>Type B</b> – quality decays steadily with time, leaving the article well below FA status before even a year has passed.</ul> <p>For some reason, we are doing a bad job of maintaining the quality of about a third of our featured articles; why, and what distinguishes Type B from Type A? My first guess was user activity, but no – of those seven, in only one case has the user who nominated it effectively retired from the project.</p> <p>Could it be contentiousness? Perhaps. I can see why <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belarus">Belarus</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer's_Disease">Alzheimer’s Disease</a> may be contentious and fought-over articles – but why <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toru_Takemitsu">Tōru Takemitsu</a>, a well-regarded Japanese composer? We have a decent-quality article on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Warming">global warming</a>, and you don’t get more contentious than that.</p> <p>It could be timeliness – an article on a changing topic can be up-to-date in 2006 and horribly dated in 2009 – which would explain the problem with Alzheimer’s, but it doesn’t explain why some low-quality articles are on relatively timeless topics – Takemitsu or the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Gold_Rush">California Gold Rush</a> – and some high-quality ones are on up-to-date material such as climate change or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_India">the Indian economy</a>.</p> <p>There must be something linking this set, but I have to admit I don’t know what it is.</p> <p>We would be well-served, I think, to take this article as having pointed up a serious problem of decay, and start looking at how we can address that, and how we can help maintain the quality of <i>all</i> these articles. Whilst the process for actually identifying a featured article at a specific point in time seems vindicated – I am actually surprised we’re not seeing more evidence of lower standards in the past – we’re definitely doing our readers a disservice if the articles rapidly drop below the standards we advertise them as holding.</p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/quality-versus-age-of-wikipedias-featured-articles/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2010-04-16T14:25:33+01:00">April 16, 2010</time><time class="updated" datetime="2010-04-16T14:25:57+01:00">April 16, 2010</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/wikipedia/" rel="tag">wikipedia</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/quality-versus-age-of-wikipedias-featured-articles/#comments">3 Comments<span class="screen-reader-text"> on Quality versus age of Wikipedia’s Featured Articles</span></a></span> </footer> </article> <article id="post-215" class="post-215 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-politics tag-statistics"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/crime-statistics/" rel="bookmark">Crime statistics</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>A couple of interesting blog posts on the BBC – <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/01/conservative_estimates_on_viol.html">part 1</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/markeaston/2010/02/conservative_estimates_on_viol_1.html">part 2</a> – about a recent set of crime statistics publicised by the Conservatives.</p> <p>The basic gist of the Conservative claim is that violent crime is vastly increased over the past decade; the basic problem is that the method of recording violent crime changed in the middle of the period, to a much more “permissive” approach, where police were obliged to record a complaint rather than dismissing it. Which, unsurprisingly, tends to lead to a lot more reported crime, without actually saying anything about the underlying crime rates.</p> <p>I suppose in an ideal world Labour would be running a campaign of “Do you really want to be governed by people who can’t read printed warnings on graphs?”, but sadly all we’ll get is a bit of he-said-she-said over the next two weeks and a few more people will be left beliving that the country is a far scarier place now than it ever was.</p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/crime-statistics/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published updated" datetime="2010-02-03T12:48:53+00:00">February 3, 2010</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/politics/" rel="tag">politics</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/crime-statistics/#respond">Leave a comment<span class="screen-reader-text"> on Crime statistics</span></a></span> </footer> </article> <article id="post-191" class="post-191 post type-post status-publish format-standard hentry category-andrew tag-statistics tag-wikipedia"> <header class="entry-header"> <h2 class="entry-title"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/demographics-in-wikipedia/" rel="bookmark">Demographics in Wikipedia</a></h2> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p>There’s a lengthy internal debate going on in Wikipedia at the moment (see <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-01-25/BLP_madness">here</a>, if you really want to look inside the sausage factory) about how best to deal with the perennial article of biographies of living people, of which there are about 400,000.</p> <p>As an incidental detail to this, people have been examining the issue from all sorts of angles. One particularly striking graph that’s been floating around shows the number of articles marked as being born or died in any given year from the past century:</p> <p><img decoding="async" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/Births_and_deaths_in_Wikipedia_biographies%2C_1899-2010.png/500px-Births_and_deaths_in_Wikipedia_biographies%2C_1899-2010.png"><br /><small><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Births_and_deaths_in_Wikipedia_biographies,_1899-2010.png">User:Carcharoth</a></small></p> <p>As <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2010-01-25/Births_and_deaths">the notes</a> point out, we can see some interesting effects here. Firstly – and most obviously – is the “recentism”; people who are alive and active in the present era tend to be more likely to have articles written about them, so you get more very recent deaths than (say) people who died forty years ago. Likewise, you have a spike around the late 1970s / early 1980s of births of people who’re just coming to public attention – in other words, people in their early thirties or late twenties are more likely to have articles written about them. </p> <p>If we look back with a longer-term perspective, we can see that the effects of what Wikipedia editors have chosen to write about diminish, and the effects of demographics become more obvious. There are, for example, suggestions of prominent blips in the deathrate during the First and Second World Wars, and what may be the post-war baby boom showing up in the late 1940s.</p> <p>So, we can distinguish two effects; underlying demographics, and what people choose to write about.</p> <p>(In case anyone is wondering: people younger than 25 drop off dramatically. The very youngest are less than a year old, and are invariably articles about a) heirs to a throne; b) notorious child-murder cases; c) particularly well-reported conjoined twins or other multiple births. By about the age of five you start getting a fair leavening of child actors and the odd prodigy.)</p> <p>Someone then came up with this graph, which is the same dataset drawn from the French Wikipedia:</p> <p><img decoding="async" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fb/Naissances_et_d%C3%A9c%C3%A8s_dans_les_biographies_de_frWP%2C_1899-2009.png/500px-Naissances_et_d%C3%A9c%C3%A8s_dans_les_biographies_de_frWP%2C_1899-2009.png"><br /><small><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Naissances_et_d%C3%A9c%C3%A8s_dans_les_biographies_de_frWP,_1899-2009.png">User:Pymouss</a></small></p> <p>At a glance, they look quite similar, which tells us that the overall dynamic guiding article-writing is broadly the same in both cases. This doesn’t sound that drastic a change, but different language editions can vary quite dramatically in things like standards for what constitutes a reasonable topic, so it is useful to note. French has a more pronounced set of spikes in WWI, WWII, and the post-war baby boom, though, as well as a very distinctive <i>lowering</i> of the birthrate during WWI. These are really quite interesting, especially the latter one, because it suggests we’re seeing a different underlying dynamic. And the most likely underlying dynamic is, of course, that Francophones tend to prefer writing about Francophones, and Anglophones tend to prefer writing about Anglophones…</p> <p>So, how does this compare in other languages? I took these two datasets, and then added Czech (which someone <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graf_biografi%C3%AD_podle_let_narozen%C3%AD_a_%C3%BAmrt%C3%AD_cswp.png">helpfully collected</a>), German and Spanish. (The latter two mean we have four of the five biggest languages represented. I’d have liked to include Polish, but the data was not so easily accessible.) I then normalised it, so each year was a percentage of the average for that language for that century, and graphed them against each other:</p> <p><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_biographies_by_birth_year_1899-2009.svg"><img decoding="async" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7c/Wikipedia_biographies_by_birth_year_1899-2009.svg/500px-Wikipedia_biographies_by_birth_year_1899-2009.svg.png"></a></p> <p><a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_biographies_by_death_year_1899-2009.svg"><img decoding="async" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3f/Wikipedia_biographies_by_death_year_1899-2009.svg/500px-Wikipedia_biographies_by_death_year_1899-2009.svg.png"></a></p> <p>What can we see from these? Overall, every project has basically the same approach to inclusion; ramping up steadily over time, a noticeable spike in people who died during WWII or in the past two decades, and a particular interest in people who are about thirty and in the public eye. There is one important exception to this last case – German, which has a flat birthrate from about 1940 onwards, and apparently no significant recentism in this regard. The same is true of Czech to a limited degree. (Anecdotally I believe the same may be true of Japanese, but I haven’t managed to gather the data yet)</p> <p>The WWII death spike is <i>remarkably</i> prominent in German and Czech, moderately prominent in French, and apparent but less obvious in English and Spanish. This could be differential interest in military history, where biographies tend to have deaths clustered in wartime, but it also seems rational to assume this reflects something of the underlying language-biased data. More Central Europeans died in WWII than Western Europeans; proportionally fewer died in the Anglosphere because English-speaking civilian populations escaped the worst of it, and the Spanish-speaking world was mostly uninvolved. The deaths in WWI are a lot more tightly clustered, and it’s hard to determine anything for sure here.</p> <p>The other obvious spike in deaths is very easy to understand from either interpretation of the reason; it’s in 1936, in Spanish, which coincides with the outbreak of the Civil War. Lots of people to write articles about, there, and people less likely to be noted outside of Spain itself.</p> <p>I mentioned above that (older) birthrates are more likely to represent an underlying demographic reality than deathrates are; localised death rates could be altered by a set of editors who choose to write on specific themes. You’d only get a birthdate spike, it seems, if someone was explicitly choosing to write about people born in a specific period; it’s hard to imagine it from a historical perspective. Historically linked people are grouped by when they’re prominent and active, and that happens at a variable time in their lives, so someone specifically writing about a group of people is likely to “smear” out their birthdates in a wide distribution.</p> <p>So, let’s look at the historic births graph and see if anything shows up there. German and French show <i>very</i> clear drops in the birth rate between 1914 and about 1920, round U-shaped falls. German appears to have a systemic advantage over the other projects in birthrate through the 1930s and 1940s, though as the data is normalised against an average this may be misleadingly inflated – it doesn’t have the post-1970 bulge most languages do. The very sharp drop in births in 1945 is definitely not an artefact, though; you can see it to a lesser degree in the other languages, except English, where it’s hardly outside normal variance.</p> <p>So, there does seem to be a real effect here; both these phenomena seem predictable as real demographic events, and the difference between the languages is interpretable as different populations suffering different effects in these periods and being represented to different degrees in the selection of people by various projects.</p> <p>The next step would be, I suppose, to compare those figures to known birth and death rates both globally and regionally over the period; this would let us estimate of the various degrees of “parochialism” involved in the various projects’ coverage of people, as well as the varying degrees of “recentness” which we’ve seen already. Any predictions?</p> </div> <footer class="entry-footer"> <span class="posted-on"><span class="screen-reader-text">Posted on </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/demographics-in-wikipedia/" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date published" datetime="2010-01-29T17:30:05+00:00">January 29, 2010</time><time class="updated" datetime="2010-01-29T12:02:30+00:00">January 29, 2010</time></a></span><span class="cat-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Categories </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/authors/andrew/" rel="category tag">Andrew</a></span><span class="tags-links"><span class="screen-reader-text">Tags </span><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/statistics/" rel="tag">statistics</a>, <a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/tags/wikipedia/" rel="tag">wikipedia</a></span><span class="comments-link"><a href="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/2010/demographics-in-wikipedia/#comments">6 Comments<span class="screen-reader-text"> on Demographics in Wikipedia</span></a></span> </footer> </article> </main> </section> </div> <footer id="colophon" class="site-footer"> <div class="site-info"> <a href="https://wordpress.org/" class="imprint"> Proudly powered by WordPress </a> </div> </footer> </div> <script src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/themes/twentyfifteen/js/skip-link-focus-fix.js?ver=20141028" id="twentyfifteen-skip-link-focus-fix-js"></script> <script id="twentyfifteen-script-js-extra"> var screenReaderText = {"expand":"<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">expand child menu<\/span>","collapse":"<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">collapse child menu<\/span>"}; </script> <script src="https://www.generalist.org.uk/blog/wp-content/themes/twentyfifteen/js/functions.js?ver=20221101" id="twentyfifteen-script-js"></script> </body> </html>