Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 147 posts

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#71

Post by tptacek »

rob_c wrote: post #46
tptacek wrote: post #24

What 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…

Not sure I actually agree. If articles such as this get stricken off and she hadn't won a novel prize someone would just cite "deleted as before" when someone attempts to start a new article again.

No, because the article we're talking about wasn't deleted. The rejected draft isn't even tied in Wikipedia metadata to the mainspace article.

(There was a deletion on this topic, which I missed and someone pointed out upthread --- but it was for copyright violation, not for notability, so again: there's no "as per" bias against an article for this subject.)

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#72

Post by rob_c »

the_third_wave wrote: post #25
rob_c wrote: post #13

Typical 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…

> it's moving closer to a collective "what we want to know" service I'd say it is moving towards a "what we want you to think" corpus, with politically motivated activists taking over from objective editors. Those activists will use the language of editors, calling upon the myriad of policies put in place when Wikipedia was growing, while bending and changing that language towards their own goals.

Unfortunately I have to agree which is a shame.

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#73

Post by jhgb »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #67
jhgb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the problems with binary classifiers is that you can't simultaneously make low errors in both directions. That's not "an institutional failure", that's practically a law of nature. You have to live with the fact that sometimes you're wrong. What errors to make is the core of the feud between deletionists and inclusionists.

>You have to live with the fact that sometimes you're wrong. You don't have to live with the fact that your institutional process for sending articles to this binary classifier is biased, per the published study discussed in the article. Women's profiles make up 19% of the profiles on wikipedia but 25% of deletion nominations. Even if your classifier was totally gender-blind (unlikely), by virtue of the process that…

The problem is that those numbers apply to articles that have already been written. Such small discrepancy could easily be explained by other things, such as editors writing new articles with their own bias. If you then apply even objective criteria to those articles and end up with deleting a larger portion of some group, I don't see how you can claim that the deleting classifier is biased without knowing what was deleted.

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#74

Post by rob_c »

vidarh wrote: post #34
rob_c wrote: post #13

Typical 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…

While I get this is frustrating, original research is explicitly against Wikipedia rules.

And citing out of print inaccessible paper journals is not regarded as evidence. (Apparently)

Again I provided diagrams explaining how a piece of scientific equipment work in detail and this was disregarded because I didn't attach a link from some news outlet.

This is just brain damagingly stupid.

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#75

Post by jessaustin »

mjw1007 wrote: post #66
jessaustin wrote: post #20

Earlier 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…

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=... says that the 2014 version was deleted as "Unambiguous copyright infringement". That will be why those revisions are no longer accessible.

That would be a valid justification in general, but I'm curious in this particular case. Was this an infringement of another encyclopedia? Perhaps that publication could have been identified in the deletion note? Maybe even cited in the page itself? Basic facts about a human (birthdate, alma mater, publications, etc.) are not subject to copyright anyway, so a long flowery essay about the scientist could have been edited to the bare essentials. However, I suspect no such long flowery essay actually existed in 2014. After all, Strickland was a woman who hadn't won the Nobel.

Of course these questions are unanswerable due to the specific type of the deletion. Curious.

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#76

Post by renewiltord »

tptacek wrote: post #24

What 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…

If you’re not (auto-)confirmed you have to go through AfC now, right? I don’t recall.

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#77

Post by emmelaich »

not2b wrote: post #48
jhgb wrote: post #29

Earlier 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…

Not only people in pop culture, but fictional people in pop culture!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daenerys_Targaryen

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#78

Post by gambiting »

nashalo wrote: post #58
AHappyCamper wrote: post #51

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 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.

>>Clicking on this headline I knew for sure that the person was a woman

How? Like, I don't really have anything else to add - I'm just curious how could you possibly be so sure before you even opened the article.

>> At some point we can't hide behind correlation is not causation anymore.

Is it still hiding if it's true?

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#79

Post by MichaelGroves »

crazygringo wrote: post #37
rob_c wrote: post #13

Typical 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…

You're being downvoted because everyone knows Wikipedia is built on citations. There's no way for any reader or editor to know whether you know how it works or not. So Wikipedia is built primarily around not even primary sources but secondary sources for a good reason. Yes it may lose out in some valuable knowledge such as yours in the process -- but it achieves a greater good of minimizing Wikipedia being flooded by…

> You're being downvoted because everyone knows Wikipedia is built on citations.

Got a citation for that supposed common knowledge? I couldn't resist myself, but seriously, wikipedia purports to be built on citations but how often have you tried checking citations to see if they contain the information a wikipedia article claims? Many times I have found that information in a wikipedia article is nowhere to be found in the citations given.

People often claim as I just have, criticizing wikipedia without providing specific examples, which wikipedia apologists seize on to dunk on the criticism. I don't think this is fair, keeping logs of wikipedia errors is a tedious hobby that most people aren't going to bother with for a number of reasons (because correcting wikipedia means wading into the bureaucracy which produced/permitted the errors in the first place, because 'everybody knows' that wikipedia is riddled with bullshit and pointing it out is thankless, etc) Nevertheless, I do have a specific example off the top of my head, which I found a few days ago:

> Brilliant Pebbles was a non-nuclear system of satellite-based interceptors designed to use high-velocity, watermelon-sized, teardrop-shaped projectiles made of tungsten as kinetic warheads.[64][65]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#B...

This sentence has two citations, and has the smell of truthiness. Tungsten kinetic impactors in space? I've heard that before somewhere, it sure sounds true! Besides, pebbles are like rocks, and a big ball of tungsten is like a rock. It all seems to jive and the claim has survived on this page for almost a decade.

The problem? It's bullshit and neither of those citations back it up. Follow either citation and look for any claim of the PB interceptors being made out of tungsten; neither citation claims it. And if you read what they actually say about the interceptors, you'll see that tungsten interceptors don't even make sense in the first place. The Brilliant Pebbles system was meant to put thousands of tiny "hit to kill" (kinetic) interceptors into orbit, which would detect and intercept ballistic missile launches during the boost phase. To do that, they would need to be nimble, and to be nimble they would need to not be a watermelon sized chunk of tungsten. You can't move that much tungsten around quick on very short notice without large rocket motors, but those citations describe tiny interceptors. Furthermore, launching thousands of chunks of tungsten like that into orbit would scarcely be practical, even by SDI standards of practicality. And why would tungsten even be needed? They're meant to intercept ballistic missiles during the boost phase; just about anything more substantial than a sea gull should get the job done.

If you want to get this fixed, be warned that this bullshit has been copied from wikipedia into 'reputable' publications like Popular Mechanics. So have fun explaining XKCD #978 to a wikipedian editor. I'll leave it for you to fix, if you care.

Re: Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

#80

Post by civilized »

rob_c wrote: post #70
crazygringo wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The answer to your question is set out in excruciating detail at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic...

Again. Said professor will have passed said criteria by definition of their employment and their position. If the Wikipedia editor didn't just Google the person if there were no links why didn't they go to some minor effort rather than just assuming said article is bunk. Or again, after a very quick search realise the person is senior and publish asking for more public input on the topic/atricle. The fact it was dele…

No, it's definitely, absolutely not the case that every single tenured professor deserves their own Wikipedia page. That's ridiculous.
Post reply on HN