Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2014-01-15/WikiProject report

Social inequality

I am curious in regards to the statement:

I am still surprised that the topics related to social inequality are drawing so little attention; for all the press they are getting in media, and professional literature, there are very few Wikipedians working on them.

@Piotrus:@Meclee: Would you kindly elaborate. Why do you believee that the topic of social inequality is drawing little attention. Are there statisticsl measurements that determine this? Thanks in advance, XOttawahitech (talk) 19:56, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

@User:Ottawahitech It's a biased sample, but for example I was surprised that I was the first to create the entry on gender inequality in the United States a year ago or so. And most entries in the series "poverty by country" are missing (see how many red links are in the "Poverty in Europe" template visible in the poverty in Poland article - sorry, template not linkable directly). I could give you more examples, but wherever I look I see either articles that are missing or that are pretty poor (yeah, there are exceptions - and they are just that, exceptions). So, concluding, in the context of significant popularity for those issues - with the Occupy movement and whatnot - I am surprised all that activism/ranting (however one wants to call it) is not translating into significantly improved Wikipedia content. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 23:06, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

@Piotrus: Well I am glad I am not the only editor on Wikipedia who believes that NOT all notable subjects have alrerady been written about (as I have heard many, many times). XOttawahitech (talk) 23:28, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech:: As I argue in User:Piotrus/Wikipedia interwiki and specialized knowledge test we are still under 10% of complete coverage. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:41, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

@Piotrus: Impressive! I hope I can find the time to check it out carefully, and I wonder if user:The ed17 will consider covering this in the wp:signpost. Here is an old discussion I dug out on this issue that may interest you: Book_talk:Wikipedia:_The_Missing_Manual#Wikipedia already has articles about the most important topics?. XOttawahitech (talk) 15:37, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

I agree with Piotus that there is a lack of coverage. I would add that what we do have often contains outdated data and statistics. I wish I had more time to cover it, I spend quite a it of time putting together the most recent inequality data and statistics for classes I teach, but haven't been able to turn that into articles, yet. There are a number of statistics that can be used; the Gini coefficient was developed to compare inequality between countries, but I see it used now to even compare states in the USA. Meclee (talk) 05:31, 21 January 2014 (UTC)