David Palfrey (User:Dsp13)
I started editing Wikipedia in 2006. My experience has been mostly en.wikipedia (100K edits, 2K new en.wp pages) and wikidata (425K edits, 17K new items). On en.wikipedia I've particularly benefitted from support from participants in the fantastic Women In Red wikiproject. Though I’ve helped organize local meetups in Cambridge UK, but never before been to Wikimania!
A former history lecturer, I'm currently working as Chief Scientist for mindmage.ai, an online RPG technology platform. I've been involved in some research into Wikipedia in the past - I was research assistant on a project at the Oxford Internet Institute which examined wikipedia representation of MENA countries, and have coauthored on knowledge graph bias. I regard global inequality, and its relation with technology, as a crucial matter of human and environmental concern.
Sessions
🎥 Session recording: https://youtu.be/ojbuIcX6LVg?list=PLhV3K_DS5YfIr2HbYikIz4XMBXKTGytWY&t=23750 🎥
10 years ago Roger and Rosie made a short presentation at Wikimania in Mexico suggesting that every editor should take an interest in the low number of women on Wikipedia. The idea took off and the resulting wikiproject was called Women in Red. Wikidata had only just started, but it soon told us that there were 15.5% of biographies that were about women. Over thirty sister projects looked at other languages. Over ten years, hundreds of editors, over 400 editathons from Norway to Kenya and New Zealand and a budget of zero, has resulted in an increase in the percentage to 20%. What did we learn?
🎥 Session recording: https://www.youtube.com/live/8pN9qxWPBOs?feature=shared&t=24945 🎥
How can we best address global unevenness in Wikidata representation? First, let’s measure it. Let’s divide the world twice, by gender and by geography, to yield four approximately equal population quarters. Now, here’s the bad news: in December 2024, women from under-represented countries - 25% of world population - were only 0.83% of the people on Wikidata with assigned gender and country of citizenship. But here’s the good news: the relatively small numbers involved make it feasible to change that situation!