Jul | 2021 | Richard the Castellan

With the Women’s Classical Committee’s 50th Wikipedia editing event taking place today(!) now seemed like a good time to crunch some numbers and see how things are going.

Usually, I’d try to do this in December but the Denelezh gender gap analysis tool I’ve used in the past and which does a lot of the heavy lifting was down in December. It’s back online now, but the most recent data it has is from September 2020, and has been replaced by WDCM: Biases. It seems to run in a similar way by querying Wikidata around gender, occupation, and different wiki projects but seems to have fewer ways to explore the data. For example, I can find information on gender gap by profession of wiki project, but not how the two intersect. So I’ll be trying running a few manual queries to showcase the gender gap and recording the results here. As the queries are working from the live data, the figures will eventually drift what what is written in this blog.

Headline numbers

	Female	% female	Male	Other genders	Total
Classical scholars	454	17.7%	2,112	0	2,556
All of English Wikipedia	347,033	19.0%	1,479,272	1,447	1,827,752

Number of biographies of classicists on the English Wikipedia as of 28 July 2021

So as of 28 July 2021, the English Wikipedia has 454 biographies of female classicists, which is 17.7% of the total. This is progress from December 2019 when the 384 biographies of female classicists made contributed 16.3% over the overall biographies of classicists on the English Wikipedia and the proportion continues to climb.

It’s worth noting that Wikidata can accommodate information on different genders – it’s not just binary – but verifying that can be tricky. For modern classicists, this information may be highly sensitive and for historical classicists many of the sources won’t address the issue. Hence, there may be a gap as a result.

Date	Female	% female	Male	No data	Total
Jan 2017	36	5.3%	645	0	681
Dec 2017	176	10.0%	1,586	3	1,765
Dec 2018	268	12.8%	1,820		2,088
Dec 2019	384	16.3%	1,975	0	2,359
Sep 2020	424	17.1%	2,053	0	2,477
Jul 2021	454	17.7%	2,112		2,566

Number of biographies of classicists on the English Wikipedia over time

Change since December 2019

The last 19 months has been a time unlike any other we’ve lived through as for most of that time we’ve had to deal with a pandemic. The Women’s Classical Committee already ran monthly online editing events, so were well placed to continue those. The potential difficulty is that Wikipedia editing is largely extra-curricula, and when you’re dealing with a crisis non-essential activities can naturally contract.

#WCCwiki persevered and continued to make a different which is all the more important give how much academics have had to deal with due to the shift to online teaching, and not to mention the general precarcity of academia.

	Female	% female	Male	Total
English Wikipedia	70	33.8%	137	207

By comparison, in the whole of 2019 there were 271 new biographies of classicists on the English Wikipedia, and 42.8% were about women. That was an excellent result, and the progress made in 2020 and 2021 represents the resilience of #WCCwiki.

Other languages

I miss the Denelezh tool. It made this bit so easy. Where it gives you an overview by Wikipedia language, I have to run a query for each. I’ll focus on the languages which had more than 450 biographies of classicists in December 2019. Apologies for the monster table below.

	Dec-19	Dec-19	Dec-19	Dec-19	Jul-21	Jul-21	Jul-21	Jul-21	Change	Change	Change	Change
Wikipedia	Female	% female	Male	Total	Female	% female	Male	Total	Female	% female	Male	Total
German	322	10%	2973	3295	376	10%	3238	3614	54	17%	265	319
*English*	384	16%	1975	2359	454	18%	2112	2566	70	34%	137	207
French	92	9%	885	977	106	10%	994	1100	14	11%	109	123
Italian	42	5%	737	779	53	6%	854	907	11	9%	117	128
Russian	42	6%	658	700	54	7%	735	789	12	13%	77	89
Swedish	10	2%	536	546	14	2%	561	575	4	14%	25	29
Arabic	68	14%	423	491	74	14%	459	533	6	14%	36	42

The important bit is how the change in the English Wikipedia compares to other languages. 34% of the new articles about classicists on the English Wikipedia were about women. This is twice that of the German Wikipedia, and triple that of French. It shows very clearly what that without the efforts of the Women’s Classical Committee new Wikipedia biographies would have a much stronger male bias.

Percentage of biographies on different Wikipedia about classicists that are female. The graph is my own work based on data in denelezh and queries run on 28 July 2021.

The field of classics on Wikipedia was in a bad state at the start of 2017. While it has been gradually improving since, it still languishes behind the overall gender gap on Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia’s proportion of biographies about women has outpaced any other Wikipedia. Arabic Wikipedia had a remarkable 2019, but at the other end of the scale the Swedish Wikipedia has a lot of ground to cover. Worryingly, Italian and French appear to have a downward trend.

Archaeology

In 2018 and 2019 I included some figures on classical archaeologists, and for some effort of completeness here they are with an update:

Language Wikipedia	Female	% female	Male	Total
English, 14 Dec 2018	37	19.2%	156	193
English, 6 Dec 2019	85	29.1%	207	292
English, 28 Jul 2021	109	32.3%	228	337

In 2019 there was a roughly even split between the number of new biographies of men and women who are classical archaeologists, and since December 2019 the new biographies of women have slightly outnumbered those of men. It was already tracking above classical scholars as a whole, so this is very encouraging. As it’s a small group, progress can be much quicker.

Though it’s not specifically about classics I’m happy that the number of medieval archaeologists with biographies has increased from 4 in December 2019 (1 male, 3 female) to 23 in July 2021 (9 male, 14 female), but at least part of this must be due to the underlying data being improved rather than brand new articles.

Conclusion

The Women’s Classical Committee have been working together to improve Wikipedia for several years. They are an outstanding example of what can be accomplished, and longevity. Way back in 2016, the data I had indicated that 7% of the English Wikipedia’s biographies of classical scholars were about women, and in absolute terms that meant fewer than articles. The data above makes it clear that the intervention of #WCCwiki has enriched Wikipedia.

This only scratches the surface as it doesn’t take quality into account. As well as creating new pages, #WCCwiki revisit pages and update them, quantity and quality going hand-in-hand.

I visited a castle today for the first time in ten months, and even better it was for some fieldwork. Knepp Castle in Sussex is off the beaten track, but in the middle of a rewilding area it’s a beautiful spot and it was lovely to talk to the occasional visitor about what we were doing.

Since I finished my PhD on slighting, I’ve been looking for ways to carry on the research, looking at different sites, trying to find new ways of looking at the information. Knepp is a site which cropped up in my research back in 2011 as royal documents from 1216 record an order to destroy it. Well, a couple of orders really – one of which specified the castle should be burnt – which opens up questions about whether any of them were followed.

Until today, there hadn’t been any archaeological investigations at Knepp – no excavations, not building survey, no topographical survey, and no geophysics. Conducting a geophysical survey seemed like a good way to find out the extent of the castle and see if there were any structural remains related to the tower. So I managed to secure a research grant from the Society for Medieval Archaeology to do some fieldwork.

At this point, I should mention that I thought it best to involve someone with more experience of geophysical survey than me. Scott Chaussée is doing the hard work, and also carried out a survey at Pevensey Castle, another place which John gave orders to slight in 1216. Today and tomorrow we (mostly Scott) are conducting a gradiometer survey. This should give us an idea of structural remains, and just maybe it will have something to say about whether the castle was burned – but that’s a secondary objective, there’s a lot more to learn about Knepp.

*I made strategic use of the shade and look contemplative which Scott ran the gradiometer over the site.*

Looking at photos and maps never does a place justice, and to be honest I’d been wondering just how substantial the ‘motte’ really was. It’s at least partly natural, and is actually quite impressive close up. It doesn’t tower above you, but it is noticeably steep in some places, and from on top of it you get a good view of the area.

*Looking at the tower from the other end of the motte*

The more I looked at the tower, the more confusing it seemed. From a distance, it looks like a simple wall from a rectangular tower, but it has some quirks. It survives pretty much to its full height, but the question is how far did it extend to either side. Both ends look like they are could be corners, so this would be an almost intact face, but at one end the wall batters inwards so perhaps I’m missing something. The point of this fieldwork is to see what survives beneath the surface, and I don’t think I’ll be able to work out what’s going on with the tower at this stage.

*This is the triangular bit. I wondered if it was added later, to reinforce the tower but looking again I think it was part of the original design.*

I’ve no idea what the data will show. Hopefully there’s something out there as King John liked visiting Knepp Castle, and since he and his queen stayed here several times there must have been decent accommodation for them. It could have been the tower, but I wonder if it might have been a cosy for them.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to another day’s fieldwork tomorrow (thank you Scott) and the prospect of ground penetrating radar at some point when the grass is a bit shorter.