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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

#111

Post by prvc »

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.

In this case you may be perceiving a different type of bias than you assume.

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

#112

Post by 908B64B197 »

bArray wrote: post #101

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 rol…

> 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.

I've also seen studies (I can't find them but I recall them) where they looked at Open Source contributors and the authors defaulted to male if there was no gender information available.

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

#113

Post by ilamont »

jessaustin wrote: post #104
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.

Absolutely. Wikipedia itself acknowledges the problem:

Many Wikipedians have seen the effects that paid advocates can have on an article. These paid editors tend to make obviously biased edits, be very persistent, and are easily identifiable. But some of them are much more sophisticated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...

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

#114

Post by nsajko »

jessaustin wrote: post #30
Grollicus wrote: post #12

Why does this article about notability deletions not link the notability criteria of wikipedia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#...

"Notability" is an idiosyncratic, illogical, fringe, inconsistently-enforced criterion, and no one cares about it other than a tyrannical minority of wiki editors.

> "Notability" is an idiosyncratic, illogical, fringe, inconsistently-enforced criterion

Disregarding the rest of the sentence, would you mind expanding on this? TBH currently your comment just seems flippant, ignorant and without substance otherwise, but perhaps you could edit it to improve it?

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

#115

Post by LatteLazy »

pastage wrote: post #92
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…

The point being that using a uniform standard when you compare women and men will always have a systematic bias.

If thats true then isn't equality of any sort impossible?

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

#116

Post by nsajko »

mcguire wrote: post #98
JohnWhigham wrote: post #27

Some 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.

Please stop cherry picking minor quotes and consider the entire argument. " Strickland's case wasn't an anomaly, said Tripodi. "What I discovered is even women who are meeting these notoriously difficult hurdles of notability are still twice as likely to be considered non-notable and nominated for deletion." " " The Wikimedia Foundation, which funds Wikipedia, acknowledges that articles on the online encyclopedia are…

> > [...] "What I discovered is even women who are meeting these notoriously difficult hurdles of notability are still twice as likely to be considered non-notable and nominated for deletion.""

This fact is irrelevant (and misleadingly presented), it is about nominations, not deletions.

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

#117

Post by nsajko »

fitchjo wrote: post #86
JohnWhigham wrote: post #27

Some 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.

Why do you feel so attacked about the subject of this article such that you have concluded this is part of a gender "war"? If I understand your claim correctly, it is just that simply there weren't any reliable sources to verify the information because there are not any articles about these women; however, the article further examines (or at least considers) that exact fact as being part of the issue - that these wom…

> Why do you feel so attacked about the subject of this

> part of the issue - that these women are not being written about at the same rate as men.

The CBC article is plainly an (ignorant) attack on Wikipedia. You say yourself that the problem doesn't seem to lie at Wikipedia, so how is it acceptable to attack Wikipedia over it?

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

#118

Post by nsajko »

MichaelGroves wrote: post #110
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.

How so? And how is this relevant?

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

#119

Post by Ensorceled »

BeetleB wrote: post #41
Ensorceled wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that's the point, a woman doing such great work that she won the Nobel Prize had her profile deleted as "not notable".

People are assuming quite a bit. If an article about a professor is written and has virtually no references, then it's not the admin's job to do research to see if she is notable or not. It should be tagged as "needs references" and if they are not provided, eventually deleted. In her particular case, the article didn't even exist - only a draft did - which was not approved because it had no references. The rejection…

We're not "assuming" anything. The article has the following quote:

> "But then [they] realized, 'Oh dear, it's even worse than we thought.' Because she did have a Wikipedia page. But it was nominated for deletion and then deleted."

If the article is misleading that's on them, not on us for believing the CBC did their homework.

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

#120

Post by mgbennet »

jessaustin wrote: post #75
mjw1007 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 edi…

It's perfectly possible to find the source of the infringement with a little investigation. The user who created the page has a comment on their talk page notifying them that Donna Strickland page has been nominated for deletion due to "unambiguous copyright deletion". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SteplightJohnson#Spe...] There's a link to the source that was copied, [http://www.osa.org/en-us/about_osa/leadership_and_volunteers...]. That leads to a 404, but in the Wayback Machine, I found this on Dr. Strickland: [https://web.archive.org/web/20130426010318/http://www.osa.or...] And the second paragraph is a word for word copy of the summary from the first edit in the history of the page, "Created page with ''''Donna Strickland''' is a past president of the Optical Society. She has worked on several committees within the OSA. She has been on the editorial board of O...'" [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...]
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