Non-binary gender identities in Wikidata
10-30, 17:30–17:55 (UTC), Room 3

In this presentation, we will explore the representation of gender in Wikidata, focusing in particular on non-binary gender identities. We will look at the way gender is currently modeled, at how it has been modeled in the past, an also at the user discussions that shaped the current status of gender representation. We will discuss the inclusion of non-binary gender identities in Wikidata, how it has evolved over time, and the issues that still persist.


Link to notes

https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikidataCon2021-NonbinaryGenderIdentitiesinWi

What will the participants take away from this session?

The participants will be able to grasp the complex issues around gender representation, and especially the representation of non-binary identities in Wikidata. They will be shown concrete examples of how the modeling of non-binary identities has evolved over time, how it has been discussed by the community, and what steps have been made to improve it.

Language

English

Recording

Yes

Daniele Metilli (they/them) is a Research Fellow at the Department of Information Studies of UCL, London, working on the Sloane Lab project. Daniele works at the intersection of knowledge representation, digital humanities, and collaborative online projects. They hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering from the Polytechnic of Milan, a Master’s Degree in Digital Humanities from the University of Pisa, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pisa. Over the years, they have been active in several Linked Data projects, including DanteSources, Hypermedia Dante Network, and Mingei. They have also been an administrator of the Wikidata and English Wikipedia projects.

This speaker also appears in:

Chiara Paolini (she/her) is a PhD student in Linguistics at KU Leuven, under the supervision of Benedikt Szmrecsanyi.
She is involved in the FWO project “How much does meaning matter? A fresh look at grammatical alternations”, where she is investigating how the choice between competing constructions in the grammatical alternation phenomenon depends on the semantic characteristics of the lexical context in which those variants are embedded, using quantitative and corpora-based methodologies.

Chiara obtained both her degrees in Digital Humanities (BA) and Applied and Theoretical Linguistics (MA) at the University of Pisa, under the supervision of Prof. Alessandro Lenci. In her master’s thesis, together with dr. Denis Paperno (Utrecht Universiteit), she implemented a distributional model for the exemplar representation of derivational meaning, taking as case study the Italian action nouns -ata, -zione and -mento.

Chiara’s research interests include usage-based theories of language, distributional semantics, lexical semantics, and language change, as well as inclusive and gender linguistics.