How have you modelled my gender? Reconstructing the history of gender representation in Wikidata

This paper presents a historical account of the representation of gender in the Wikidata knowledge base. Wikidata is a collaborative, multilingual project edited by an international community of users, and one of its goals is to represent biographical knowledge about people, including gender. Since Wikidata’s launch in 2012, the community has been discussing the best approach to conceptualise gender within a shared ontology, showing an increased awareness of the complexity of this task. Although there is still no universal consensus on the treatment of gender identities in Wikidata, it is interesting to reconstruct the history of the decisions made by the community in this regard, which are often influenced by historical events happening outside of the platform. Since the Wikidata gender model has changed significantly over time, the Wikidata Gender Diversity (WiGeDi) project has built a timeline of events to track its evolution from a very narrow interpretation of gender as a binary, to a representation that is more inclusive towards marginalised identities such as those of trans and non-binary people. Looking at this process under the lens of critical data studies allows us to understand how the community overcame linguistic, cultural and generational barriers to reach a deeper understanding of the complexity of gender.