Male or Female?
I've added a new meme page for "Male of Female?" (see yours or mine). The page is similar to Dead or Alive?. It's based on our Common Knowledge, an editable, fielded wiki for author and work information. So if someone shows up under "Uncertain" you can edit in the right gender.
This feature is, of course, frosting. The cake was released Saturday: Introducing Distinct Authors. Check that out.
Labels: authors, new feature, new features
posted by Tim at 6:44 AM
26 Comments:
You realize, I hope, that some of us are going to concentrate on the women in our catalogs now.
MarthaJeanne
Give me the possibilty to do this in batches. What is now many hours of tedious work in front of me would be accomplished in minutes...
Cool idea.
About the "dead or alive" feature, I think there should be a way to set an author to alive, or even dead, without the need to enter actual dates, maybe a select box similar to the one in the male/female field. Many authors don't provide their birth information (not even the year or decade), while for others who're dead both data can be difficult to get. In one case I wrote "c. 20th c." as birth data, but I don't think this is appropriate.
And since I'm making suggestions, another one: living in Brazil I have many books in Portuguese (as well as a few in Spanish) whose data isn't available in any of the current search sources, but which other LibraryThing users already had the trouble to add to their profiles. Thus, I find it a little frustrating that, when I find one such book and click the "Add this book to my library" button, I'm sent to the full search, where it doesn't appear, what means I have to add all its data again. So, could you please add an option that would copy the information exactly as provided in LibraryThing itself, instead of searching from other sources? It'd make my data entry life extremely easier!
Thanks!
I hope you're going to have more than two genders for people to choose from. For example, Kate Barnstein, who wrote _My Gender Workbook_ identifies as "gender-as-neither".
To get some ideas for the number of different genders and maybe what to call them, there is _Evolution's Rainbow_ by Joan Roughgarden.
Can we show all percentages, not just percentage male? That's not very equal...
Can you fix it please?
It's a good meme by the way (apart from my previous comment, which is easily fixed...)
Like it!
This makes me want to complete all the authors sexes. I suggest the same for author's nationalities.
can we have a comparison thing on this as well?
tcarter
In obsessively trying to reduce the size of my 'unknown gender' list, I've come across quite a few authors who are not linked to any books. Case in point, Wall Systems and Shelving by Scott Fitzgerell.
Click on the author, and the author page says that he has no books, even though 48 people own this book.
I would also like to second the request for a power edit mode where one could add this information more easily.
Otherwise, another very fun meme.
craigim
Let me add another vote for batch selection.
If, on the meme page itself I could tab through, for example, and check boxes I'd get all 445 of my unknowns out in minutes. Until then I can't really be bothered.
-thecardiffgiant
I can tell I'm going to be needing to check on this one regularly. Someone had already moved Raphael Carter to "male", whether through malice or stupidity I don't know (I'm tempted to blame malice, though, nobody who actually has one of zir books in their catalog could be so ignorant as to not KNOW the correct gender, and change it from the correct value, could they?)
"Zir" just bugs me, I must admit.
lorax: dude, simmer down. There's no need to get so offensive towards someone who appears to have made an honest mistake. You catch more flies with honey and all that.
I hope you rethink your binary categorization of gender. "Other/contested/unknown" is not a particularly useful third category -- it lumps too many different kinds of people together and it may be a tad problematic to refer to anyone whose gender identity is neither male nor female as "other". I hope we will be seeing more choices on this page as per Sara's suggestion.
Anonymous 2:07:
That problem often arises when a book has multiple authors, and a different author than yours is dominant. It also happens when some jackass over at Amazon thinks that a book about an artist should be shown as by the artist.
I really wish the books would show up on both author pages. This problem has caused me to separate my copies from others because, frankly, I don't want junk data and I want my books on the correct author page.
Completely off-topic: the word verification thing has "equerms". That sounds like it ought to mean something! But I can't think what right now.
Would it be possible to add another option along the lines of "not an individual" or "collaborative pen-name" or similar?
I've changed Grant Naylor from 'Male' to 'N/A' twice now as it was actually Rob Grant and Doug Naylor writing together.
Or should I be changing it to "other/contested/unknown"?
Another suggestion -
Show the number of books for wach categoty as well.
Wondering if I have more books per author in the male or female category.
I see that the new "Gender" field appears untranslated on the UI for non-english languages.
Why not make the same for all the others fields? (or use english as default value)
New functionalities are ok... but the old fields of "common knowledge" is not "common" for all the languages.
It's not binary. Binary means two, see, and it's not two.
The current standard was hammered out long ago, with considerable debate from all sides—and acceptable to all, as I remember. Come join us on talk and we can talk it through again.
There are 10 kinds of people : those who understand binary and those who don't.
~BarkingMatt
I'm finding that some authors' genders don't "take" - they are showing up on my page as "not set," although on the author page they are.
I did not know this feature existed, so I had to go check it out and see where mine count stood. I expected it to be 99.9% male. Boy was I in for a shock:
Male: 131
Female: 125
NA: 167
That's 51.1% male. Almost even! I never expected that!
Curious if there is a correlation between the %male/female and %dead/alive.
Is there any way to change the feature so that it shows all of the percentages instead of only percent male?
I also think it's important to make sure that authors who don't strictly identify as male/female are counted.
>I also think it's important to make sure that authors who don't strictly identify as male/female are counted.
Yeah. That's an option.
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