Hello,
I am preparing some slides for the Dutch Wikiconference this Saturday and
wanted to share some interesting data on female artists. This year I have
been working on various museum collections of paintings, while continuing
to work on painter biographies. I am a big user of the Dutch RKD database
of artists, which Magnus has kindly placed in Mix-n-Match. Just using the
matches I made and the automatic matches, it is now possible to see some
interesting data on how artists are represented across wikis.
The RKDartists database metadata was downloaded this year and contains
94,944 males and 60,282 females, or roughly 24% females, of which most were
born after 1850. I have said before that part of the gendergap in the arts
is caused by copyright issues (copyright-gap), and since most notable women
artists were born after 1850, it would always appear that women are
significantly less represented than men. The good news is that Wikimedia
projects are much more welcoming to female artists than museum collections,
where the percentage of women tends to be less than 3%. The data I have now
shows that most Wikimedia projects have a percentage of women artist
biographies that are well above 5%, or more than double what museums have
on show.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Females_in_matched_RKDartists.jpg
I gathered the data using autolist and various combinations of the queries
below
1) claim[21:6581072] and claim[650]
2) claim[650] and link[enwiki]
I assume similar results could be seen for the Joconde database, which I
may do later.
Best,
Jane
