Hello all
I'm new to Wikitree (less than a week) and doing my homework so far, adding my ancestors to the global tree, seeking connections.
A bit of background. I've been involved in linked data since about 2001, and interested in genealogy data bases seriously only since last year. Of course I've been looking to genealogy with my linked data glasses on, and have looked in particular to Wikidata (of which I am an episodic editor).
From a quite long list of questions at the interface of Wikitree and Wikidata, I would like to begin by one which I hope will drive attention from some people in this community, and not only women!
I shortly describe the issue in this short page in my Cahier de généalogie Half the sky of Wikidata. In short, it points at the strong gender bias in Wikidata at large, and in Wikidata genealogy data in particular. For example, over 200,000 "items" of type "human" are linked to their father, less than 45,000 to their mother.
There is in Wikidata (like in Wikipedia) this rather vague thing called "Notability". My take on this is that among all human achievements, being a mother is one of the most notable, without which no one of us would be here to speak. And being the mother and spouse of two "notable" people should be enough to be notable. So, the number of mothers in Wikidata should be roughly the same as the number of fathers.
What has Wikitree to do with this? I have built a simple query selecting son-father both declared in Wikidata, both bearing a Wikitree ID, but mother missing in Wikidata. As I write, this query yields 9979 results. If you switch father and mother properties in the query, there is only 425 results! See above for interpretation ...
If you take one of those son-father pairs and look them up in Wikitree, most of the time the mother is identified there. If you can edit Wikidata, it's easy to go back there and create the mother "item", of course with her Wikitree id, link her to her spouse and child(ren), and maybe to other relatives, because this mother will also often be a daughter, sister ... of some other "notable" people. And while you are at it, add some missing Wikitree ids around the family, as needed. Of course this should be limited to people with no privacy issues.
Adding those "missing mothers" in Wikidata is a good opportunity to strengthen the Wikitree-Wikidata connection, hit the nail of motherhood as a sufficient reason for notability, and qualify Wikitree as a reliable source for it.
If enough people are interested in working on this missing mother project and need a little help in editing Wikidata (which is not harder than editing Wikitree) I can provide a few slides of tutorial.
Thanks for your attention!
EDIT : Issue partially adressed by the Data Doctors team with the new Data Error 544 : https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:DBE_544
