What I don't like about this article (besides the very obvious conclusions that it starts out with and then hits you over the head with) is that it doesn't attempt to reach any wikipedia mod or reviewer for a comment. It's only the author's side and the author's narrative. Also, correlation does not imply causation. The fact that women's pages get deleted more often doesn't mean that there is a gender bias against women.
Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
51–60 of 147 posts
Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#52Some critics say it was gender bias, while others say it was a problem with notability, a gauge editors use to determine if a topic deserves a Wiki page. Wikipedia editors must be able to verify facts about any Wiki entry against published reliable sources, from publications to the press. Actual crux of the issue. Stop trying to turn every fucking thing into a gender war.
Yes, but there is a stark and important difference between "this looks sensible and isn't going to cause problems but needs improvements" and "must contain BBC or CNN link or it not be real" which I think has been lost on the editors of Wikipedia.
If biases have been introduced in one way then there well could be additional biases which need to be checked for or which have come about through the first bias through correlation.
Whilst I don't agree with turning everything into a gender war I do feel Wikipedia as a "factual resource" is open for correct ridicule if it's not being fair and unbiased. Otherwise it's not truely factual.
Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#53Typical Wrote up a long description about how the equipment I used for my master's worked (fleshing out a stub article). Only to have some moderator (being extremely polite here) revert the whole thing because it was "uncited". When challenged I ended up getting temp banned for telling them "I know how it works I just built one". Haven't trusted or contributed since it's moving closer to a collective "what we want to…
The point is, that they don't know if you're telling the truth when you say "I just built one", there's no real way to ensure that they are knowledgeable enough in every single topic to be able to figure it out. So they adopted the sensible rule of requiring citations.
This annoys people like you, who know stuff that isn't in Wikipedia, because it raises the effort required to get it in.
But at the same time it stops Wikipedia being swamped with fabricated stuff.
And provided a tractable problem whenever a dispute arises. Not "is this true" but "has this been cited in a trusted set of well known sources".
In this particular case, this possibly has the unfortunate side effect of reflecting the biases of the well known sources, which is a shame.
Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#54What happened here was atypical for Wikipedia "deletionism" debates. Normally, when you read a story like this, someone created an article and someone else petitioned to have it deleted (with an "AfD") and there's a whole debate log you can read, and you could try to assess people's biases from the comments they left in the AfD. Here, though, no article was ever created (prior to 2018, when Strickland was awarded her…
> There are hundreds of thousands of academics whose position in the encyclopedia could also be established with links to their research groups! Yup, that's really the crux of it. Wikipedia isn't meant for every tenured professor to have a page, the same way an actor with only one IMDB credit doesn't get a page either. And sadly that stub article doesn't seem to clearly explain why this particular professor does. In…
So how small of a contribution is too small? Or is a negative result still a result?
The lightbulb came about through small revolutions and breakthroughs but nobody remembers the early ones to show the idea of the concept.
I'm not saying we need 7-8Bn pages for every human, but frankly a professor has made an impact on their field of they're at that level. It's not "just another job" in the same way that a CEO gets a higher salary than a cleaner.
Plus professor in the rest of the world outside of the US tends to be held to the US tenure standard from what I can tell.
Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current page was created in 2014. [edit: Although it looks like everything before 2018 got deleted in 2018? I don't understand all the notation on the history page. [0]] This is after she served in various roles (including president) at The Optical Society, and of course after developing chirped pulse amplification, for which she won the Nobel, during the 1980s . [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Don…
Are we looking at different things? I just wrote a whole long comment on this after poking around on WP about it, and I'd be glad to know if I got things completely scrambled. Because what I see is a page created in 2018, and a _lot_ of intra-WP coverage of the process that led to there not being a page before 2018, all of which squares with what this article says.
I'm probably misunderstanding something, but I do see some 2014 dates at the bottom of the page linked above. ISTM wikipedia was informed of this scientist in some fashion in 2014, and those contributions were deleted or set aside or whatever. I'm happy to be educated on this, but at least we can say that the process is obscure.
Of course the point is that GP's whinging about headlines is silly. Her Nobel paper was published in 1985.
Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are hundreds of thousands of academics whose position in the encyclopedia could also be established with links to their research groups! Yup, that's really the crux of it. Wikipedia isn't meant for every tenured professor to have a page, the same way an actor with only one IMDB credit doesn't get a page either. And sadly that stub article doesn't seem to clearly explain why this particular professor does. In…
So how small of a contribution is too small? Or is a negative result still a result? The lightbulb came about through small revolutions and breakthroughs but nobody remembers the early ones to show the idea of the concept. I'm not saying we need 7-8Bn pages for every human, but frankly a professor has made an impact on their field of they're at that level. It's not "just another job" in the same way that a CEO gets a…
The answer to your question is set out in excruciating detail at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic...
Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#57Typical Wrote up a long description about how the equipment I used for my master's worked (fleshing out a stub article). Only to have some moderator (being extremely polite here) revert the whole thing because it was "uncited". When challenged I ended up getting temp banned for telling them "I know how it works I just built one". Haven't trusted or contributed since it's moving closer to a collective "what we want to…
At this point I'm willing to go to go toe on this on a typical debate perspective. If I'm being voted down what is so great about the ignorance of the masses here? Wikipedia has some serious (and in come cases concerningly anti-science) biases. Which is honestly love for them to address at a community level.
Wikipedia is essentially just an echo chamber for western propaganda. Good luck if you have an actual primary source instead of some nonsense from a reliable "secondary source" like uncited junk from NPR.
Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#58What I don't like about this article (besides the very obvious conclusions that it starts out with and then hits you over the head with) is that it doesn't attempt to reach any wikipedia mod or reviewer for a comment. It's only the author's side and the author's narrative. Also, correlation does not imply causation. The fact that women's pages get deleted more often doesn't mean that there is a gender bias against wo…
Clicking on this headline I knew for sure that the person was a woman, even if I knew nothing of the case. At some point we can't hide behind correlation is not causation anymore.
Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#59Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prominent to optics experts before the award [EDIT: or perhaps not? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236537 ], clearly, not to Wikipedia editors. It's easy to tell who's prominent in distant past (it's the people in history textbooks), but if your guide to recent prominence is things like lists of awards or frequent mentions in the media, you may be getting some corner cases from time to time.
Wikipedia editors need to fix that. The notability criteria are skewed, tending to think that every minor person in the pop culture is notable, but regularly dumping scientists and local elected officials (the latter is a problem when they run for higher office and people can't find information about them). They could relax the standard for deletion and it wouldn't hurt anything. If some editors think someone is prom…
> The notability criteria are skewed, tending to think that every minor person in the pop culture is notable
I think that's more a reflection of current society, of which people who create Wikipedia are recruited. If you want something more isolated from the whims of common folks, you still have Encyclopedia Britannica:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donna-Strickland
Except, oops, the oldest article in EB about Strickland is from mid-2019:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.brit...
Hey, Wikipedia included her in late 2018 -- half a year before Britannica! I mean, you may be disappointed that someone didn't pick her for inclusion in Wikipedia before her Nobel award but then I have to ask what do you think about Britannica if you consider Wikipedia to be the one in need of a overhaul? Britannica is supposed to be written by subject experts, right? Not by us poor folks in our free time. Why didn't they include her years ago?
> They could relax the standard for deletion and it wouldn't hurt anything.
Then you're one of the inclusionists. It's a perfectly valid stance that some other editors will disagree with.