131–140 of 147 posts
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> She is notable now for having won a Nobel Prize That's not right. The Nobel Prize didn't bequeath notability to her, it recognized the notability she already earned for herself.
That's not the definition of notability used by Wikipedia.
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Sorry, but the onus is on you as well. > Because she did have a Wikipedia page. But it was nominated for deletion and then deleted." The assumption people are making is that the Wikipedia page was appropriately written. If the page was just one line: "Blah blah is a tenured professor at a university", it changes the perspective completely.[2] Additionally, as a reader, you should read a bit critically: Did you not th…
I see. The onus is on me to personally verify the details of a large, well respected news source. But you are defending a Wikipedia editor for deleting a entry on a prominent scientist whose work eventually earns her a Nobel prize without any research at all...
I did not say that.
At all.
The onus is on you to understand what the article does and does not contain. The criticism of the article is about possibly vital pieces of information that are excluded. It's pretty obvious on a single read of the article that there is information missing.
The "extra work" is to uncover that missing piece, which is not your responsibility. However, being aware that then article is excluding relevant information is. You and only you are responsible for what you believe, and how you evaluate information coming to you.
Sorry, I do not want to engage with you if you don't read my comments properly.
> But you are defending a Wikipedia editor for deleting a entry on a prominent scientist whose work eventually earns her a Nobel prize without any research at all...
Yes, because that Wikipedia editor is not getting paid to do the research. Nor is it the editor's defined role. The journalist, however, is, and it is their role to do so.
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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…
> 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. It is not their role to do so. Or put another way, it is no more their role to do it than yours. Furthermore, the admin is likely not a domain expert and it makes sense to send it back to the author who clearly knows more to say "Hey, we need citations.…
Before Donna Strickland was awarded her Nobel, nobody opted to do this. So the real critique here isn't that Wikipedia admins are hostile to women scientists (though, for all I know, they may be), but rather that Wikipedia volunteers don't generate articles for them spontaneously. That's a problem, but it's a different kind of problem.
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.
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> 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. It is not their role to do so. Or put another way, it is no more their role to do it than yours. Furthermore, the admin is likely not a domain expert and it makes sense to send it back to the author who clearly knows more to say "Hey, we need citations.…
I'm beating a dead horse here, but I want to repeat myself: you don't have to use the AfC process at all. You can just create a new Wikipedia article directly, without any admin review. You go through AfC because you choose to do so, not because Wikipedia has a whole complicated flowchart that gates which new articles can be created. Before Donna Strickland was awarded her Nobel, nobody opted to do this. So the real…
It's a bit sad that so many commenters do not understand this basic fact.
Looking at so many of the comments here: People have no idea how Wikipedia works, and to a certain extent, even what it is. People are treating it and its admins as a separate entity from the rest of the world, when in reality both contributors and admins are you and me. Whenever I see a comment here saying "Well, the admin could have at least done a Google search...", I realize people have no idea what they are talking about. Why are they expecting an admin to Google about every single article they review? It's like asking the editor of a newspaper to go do some research himself instead of complaining about a freelancer submitting a poorly sourced article.
I can now relate with those teachers who in the early days of Wikipedia kept forbidding it as a source in school papers. It's been around 20 years, and it's quite clear from the comments that even well educated folks do not understand it. Wikipedia has lots of problems, but also lots of benefits. It's critical to understand its shortcomings if you intend to rely on the information contained within.
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If you’re not (auto-)confirmed you have to go through AfC now, right? I don’t recall.
I believe it may be the case that you have to edit under a registered account (that is, not anonymously with an IP address) to directly create new articles --- it's an anti-abuse mechanism.
Main space articles are restricted to people like me: confirmed and auto-confirmed users (I.e. some small number of unreversed edits over some short time).
I was correct after all. I should have just checked but I thought perhaps the rules had changed since I last contributed. Unsurprising that that comment was downvoted haha! Classic HN.
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I believe it may be the case that you have to edit under a registered account (that is, not anonymously with an IP address) to directly create new articles --- it's an anti-abuse mechanism.
I actually don’t know why I asked. As a long term contributor, my instincts were right and I was able to confirm it here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Your_first_article Main space articles are restricted to people like me: confirmed and auto-confirmed users (I.e. some small number of unreversed edits over some short time). I was correct after all. I should have just checked but I thought perhaps the rules ha…
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I actually don’t know why I asked. As a long term contributor, my instincts were right and I was able to confirm it here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Your_first_article Main space articles are restricted to people like me: confirmed and auto-confirmed users (I.e. some small number of unreversed edits over some short time). I was correct after all. I should have just checked but I thought perhaps the rules ha…
Autoconfirmation occurs after 4 days and any 10 accepted edits to the encyclopedia. It's purely an anti-abuse mechanism. To a first approximation, nobody needs to use AfC --- if the article they want to create is literally the first thing they've ever done on Wikipedia, they will need to wait 4 days and fix 10 typos to prove they're not a bot, and then they're off the races. If they've ever created an article before…
I didn’t mean to imply it’s hard. Just that the default way to create an article is to use AfC for someone new to WP. It’s not surprising that someone used that because it is pushed really hard. That is, it’s easy to bypass, but the fact that they picked this method isn’t surprising.
It’s like saying “Sure, you took the photo of your brother the President so you could just use OTRS and it’ll be fine to include” but like most people are going to give up once they hit OTRS.
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Autoconfirmation occurs after 4 days and any 10 accepted edits to the encyclopedia. It's purely an anti-abuse mechanism. To a first approximation, nobody needs to use AfC --- if the article they want to create is literally the first thing they've ever done on Wikipedia, they will need to wait 4 days and fix 10 typos to prove they're not a bot, and then they're off the races. If they've ever created an article before…
Are typos that common? I recall there are at least some bots or human-assisted bots that clean those up. I didn’t mean to imply it’s hard. Just that the default way to create an article is to use AfC for someone new to WP. It’s not surprising that someone used that because it is pushed really hard. That is, it’s easy to bypass, but the fact that they picked this method isn’t surprising. It’s like saying “Sure, you to…
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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.
One can disagree with their goal, but their goal is not to be a repository for all the worlds knowledge, but to be a summary of attributable, notable knowledge.
The problem is not citing out of print inaccessible paper journals, but about only citing that, and not citing secondary sources that helps establish notability. If nobody has talked about the primary source elsewhere, that means it likely does not belong in Wikipedia. Your out-of-print paper journal cite is useful to allow people to (with some effort, to be sure) verify the facts of the article, though.
One of the downsides, I feel, about the prominence of Wikipedia is indeed that people fight over inclusion in Wikipedia rather than accept that many things belong in other datasets instead. E.g. descriptions of possibly important overlooked research would be valuable. I have my own little collection of papers that have had little direct impact that I personally believe should have, for example, and I wish I had time to write about them.