Wikipedia is user-contributed and therefore may read as a good reflection of the internet’s collective knowledge. But it is a very Western-centric view, and Asian women artists are extremely under-represented. There are currently only fifty-eight women categorised as Hong Kong women artists on Wikipedia, and their articles have an average length of six hundred words—half that of an average Wikipedia article.
On the other hand, there are 222 Wikipedia pages for male Hong Kong artists—four times the number of women, with the longest article at more than double the average word count.
Even within the existing articles, almost half of the women are missing basic biographical information (denoted in red), such as date and place of birth, years active, and occupation.
* According to wikicount.net, a third-party aggregator.
Help us expand articles that are missing basic biographical information (denoted in red). Help us surface more artists through this project by creating and categorising articles as ‘Hong Kong women artists’.
METHODOLOGY A list of women artists was gathered by scraping (programmatically reading through) the ‘Hong Kong women artists’ page. A list of male artists was gathered by scraping every article and every subcategory page under the wider ‘Hong Kong artists’ category and subtracting the women artists from that list. Artist details were then gathered via the MediaWiki API, which returned data such as summaries, backlinks, and references. Word count was calculated by looping through every article section and adding up the number of words.
As a user-contributed website, Wikipedia is prone to mistakes. Pages can be categorised incorrectly, such as when a male artist was accidentally tagged as female. There are also ambiguities in how a user might define ‘artist’ (does this include actresses, for example?), how they might qualify ‘Hong Kong based’, and, most importantly, how they might account for gender, which can be self-defined or non-binary. Finally, because the pages were only scraped in English, the data set is inherently skewed towards a Western perspective.
As the work continues to live online, we hope it will inspire contributions on Wikipedia. The data set will be updated every six months with articles added to the ‘Hong Kong women artists’ category.
Last updated 01 August, 2019