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Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias

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

#101

Post by bArray »

This article title is clickbait, it can be interpreted as her being removed after being awarded the Nobel Prize.

> It found that women make up only 19 per cent of all profiles, but account for a quarter of page-deletion recommendations.

So, 19% of profiles, "25%" (no percentage given) of deletions - it's not insanely far off being the ratios I would expect. There are going to be some bias in there due to historic roles of men and women in society (a large number of historic politicians will be men for example).

> A well-known example is what happened to Canadian scientist Donna Strickland, who couldn't be found on Wikipedia immediately after she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 (although she does have a Wikipedia page now.)

Tonnes of University Professors also don't have Wikipedia pages, despite being well published and contributing tonnes to their fields. At best they can hope to be a reference on a Wikipedia page. Some even prefer it like this.

> Another issue is that most of Wikipedia's editors are men.

Is there actually any evidence at all that gender is a notable factor? It just seems like speculation. From the original numbers, it seems like deletions are roughly equal to representation.

What this article really _fails_ at though is to actually review the Wikipedia edits [1]. In 2014 it was requested for deletion due to 'G12. Unambiguous copyright infringement' [2].

Ultimately though, if you don't like what Wikipedia are doing, stop giving them money and start your own - there is nothing stopping anybody. For example, RationalWiki was created after their articles were attacked on Conservapedia [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:G12&red...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalwiki

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

#102

Post by BeetleB »

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…

> 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." Which is what was done.

> Or again, after a very quick search realise the person is senior and publish asking for more public input on the topic/atricle.

This was more or less done: The rejection notice said more input was needed.

As someone who spent time in academia: I'm definitely against creating pages for researchers who merely have published a lot. Their work has to be significant. While hers clearly was, it was not referenced.

> The fact it was deleted instead shows either a problem with the mods or a bias among the mods

Frankly, the fact is that you are not aware of Wikipedia's AFC submission process. Please take a look here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio...

And the guidelines for reviewers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles...

Specifically, look at the review flowchart:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a8/Flow_ch...

It very clearly states that if an AFC article is not reliably sourced, it should be rejected.

While I can't speak for the actual biases of the admin, the article would have been rejected by any unbiased admin who follows the process.

> Most conversation on this is around defending a wiki admin from not being capable of determining good from bad which is getting stupid.

I agree it is stupid, but the stupidity arises from the CBC article: They chose to highlight this without doing the appropriate work to understand how Wikipedia works. While the bias they speak of may well be very real, they didn't pick a good example - opting instead for sensationalism.

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

#103

Post by jhgb »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #89
jhgb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

"Such small discrepancy"? Women's articles are 30% more likely to be nominated than by random chance. That's actually quite a large discrepancy to be explained away by handwaving about how editors might be biased in including too many non-notable women. The journal article even claims it's exactly the opposite: "Studies show that women’s biographies are slightly more notable than men’s (Wagner et al., 2016)"

To me, 30% does absolutely not seem like a large discrepancy if there's push for inclusion of more women in Wikipedia and if these efforts are trying to compensate a 4:1 discrepancy in current articles. At that point you'd need several times more women's articles than you currently have so the idea that slightly more poor quality articles may be being deleted is definitely one of the obvious options.

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

#104

Post by jessaustin »

ilamont wrote: post #7

pretty soon scientists are going to have to start doing what celebrities and corporations have been doing for years: paid swarms of contributors and PR teams who write articles that are too robust to be deleted, and negative facts/citations are kept to a minimum.

I think some wikipedia editors (and editor brigades like "Philip Cross") are making a living from the activity you describe.

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

#105

Post by pomian »

This is so disappointing, and confusing. But then again, it is a human controlled organisation, so human errors, issues, politics? Over the years I have heard of people adding and correcting topics that they know about, are even experts in, only to have their edits removed or deleted. (No communication options either.) Is wiki status truly more important than verifying a 'posters' qualifications? So that is the disappointing part. A bit like down voting for personal reasons. But we expect more from Wikipedia.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #69
jessaustin wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

You're right, I missed the stub from 2014. It was speedy-deleted for copyright infringement.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by renewiltord »

rob_c wrote: post #94
renewiltord wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The danger of the unpolished article thing is that if there is a falsehood on it people will publish the equivalent of this article but with the title: How a Wikipedia Lie Ruined This Man’s Life. Or some such thing.

So nothing should go on the internet unless it's fact checked?

It can go on the Internet. It’s just that this subsector of the Internet has rules. I don’t think anyone will complain if you blog about your thing.

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

#108

Post by MichaelGroves »

jhgb wrote: post #97
MichaelGroves wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

The existence of bad citations does not get away with the need for good citations, though. Why haven't you fixed the tungsten thing, though? This seems like an obvious mistake.

Citing reputable sources is necessary but not sufficient. In practice, wikipedia seems to care about the appearance of citation more than citation itself (a number of studies have shown that using [bracketed footnote numbers] boosts the perceived credibility of preceding claims. [1][2]) On wikipedia, citing claims is a cargo cult.

As for fixing errors on wikipedia myself? I gave up on that years ago when I tried to fix a few mispellings and had my changes reverted by bots within a minute.

[1] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/nrcs142p2_0...

[2] https://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/environment/nutrient-manag...

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

#109

Post by pomian »

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…

This is a similar sentiment to many people who originally posted valuable information to Wikipedia, which later was deleted. What about historical people? Or historical actions? Science? Just because it is not a modern science fact, and is not always citable, doesn't mean it didn't happen. For example anecdotal science history, which can be fascinating. I hate to sound like an old guy, but in the old days, the whole point of Wikipedia was that we could learn things beyond Britannica and company. Ideas and history from all corners of the planet, painstakingly recorded by someone who took the time to write on a topic they had unique knowledge. Maybe we need a dual track Wikipedia - One moderated by the present wiki system, and the other, moderated by the public, as originally. I think the amount of people scamming the world is 1000's of times less than those who want to improve it. It's a shame to lose their knowledge and voice.

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

#110

Post by MichaelGroves »

kevinpet wrote: post #81

I know there are people who consider it important to raise the profile of prominent women because of perceptions of bias like this. This could be a self-perpetuating cycle if that initiative results in creating more profiles of women of borderline notability, you would expect people following a uniform standard to be more likely to nominate women's articles for deletion. She is notable now for having won a Nobel Priz…

> 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.

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