[HN Gopher] Jessica Wade made more than 1k Wikipedia bios for un...
___________________________________________________________________
Jessica Wade made more than 1k Wikipedia bios for unknown women
scientists
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 291 points
Date : 2022-10-16 14:43 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.today.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.today.com)
| yegle wrote:
| I'd like to ask a couple questions for me to form my own
| conclusions:
|
| 1. What's the gender ratio of scientists with h-index >100? >50?
| >10?
|
| 2. What's the ratio of scientists with missing wikipedia pages
| breakdown by gender, with h-index>100? >50? >10?
|
| 3. What's the gender ratio of scientists of first/second/third
| authors, on papers with citation >500, >200, >100.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I suspect you will need to do the research to answer these
| questions yourself. Sadly you can't even just run a name join
| because humans don't have primary key uniqueness.
| z7 wrote:
| What conclusions would it offer? Among the top 100 chess
| players I think there are three women. Most people seem to
| think it's due to some cultural factors or gender
| discrimination. This could be applied to any asymmetries you
| might find.
| Ferrotin wrote:
| Right now it's zero women. Hou Yifan just dropped out of the
| top 100.
| yegle wrote:
| I can ask follow up questions if the answer is known.
|
| But mainly, I want to know if the ratios from my questions
| don't match the gender ratio in the general population, at
| which point does the ratio start to diverge?
|
| Was it when a student needs to choose a major? Or when a
| professor interviews a PhD candidate? Or when assigning tasks
| and someone getting a less impactful part? Or when deciding
| the ordering of the authors based on (very subjectively) the
| contribution?
| [deleted]
| jackmott wrote:
| MisterSandman wrote:
| > However, not all of Wiki-world was happy with her. Several of
| her entries were deleted by other Wikimedians, as the most
| influential contributors and editors are called. She told
| TODAY.com that they said a handful of the women she wrote up were
| not all that well-known.
|
| > Wade said that's right, that's the problem: they should be
| better known.
|
| This is my biggest problem with Wikipedia, it sees itself too
| much as an encyclopedia, when it's clearly more than that.
| Wikipedia is already full of boring and random stubs, I don't see
| the obsession editors have with making sure that a person is
| "important enough" to have an article. I feel like the bar should
| be lowered - not too low, obviously.
|
| Important is fairly subjective, and you're limiting yourself to
| things people in the past have written about. Original research
| shouldn't be discouraged to the extent it is, as long as it is
| backed up with valid sources.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I don't see the obsession editors have with making sure that
| a person is "important enough" to have an article. I feel like
| the bar should be lowered - not too low, obviously.
|
| Wikipedia wants to document the notable things, it does not
| want to make notable the non-notable things.
|
| Much like newspapers want to report the news, they don't want
| to _be_ the news.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| If you hit random on Wikipedia you usually get a stub for a
| random town or a random sports team of a random town.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > Wikipedia is already full of boring and random stubs, I don't
| see the obsession editors have with making sure that a person
| is "important enough" to have an article
|
| I hate one off article based on say just one news article or
| personal knowledge or something. It makes it impossible for
| someone to add anything or edit the article. It's very clear
| that the the person in the article wants to just add entries
| not maintain it for multiple years. Also as far as I can find,
| she didn't object to any deletion[0].
|
| Basically I am sure she has good intentions, but optimising on
| number of pages created is not a good metric as all.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jesswade88 . She
| didn't object to any
| leereeves wrote:
| Why would she object to deletion on her own talk page instead
| of the deletion discussion?
|
| She did object on at least one of those:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio.
| ..
| varenc wrote:
| > I feel like the bar should be lowered - not too low,
| obviously.
|
| I suspect many Wikipedia editors believe exactly that. They
| just think they're enforcing that low bar, but not too low. No
| matter where you make the cut off there's going to be debates
| about things on the edges.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > I feel like the bar should be lowered - not too low,
| obviously.
|
| I mean, I think that's the issue. Seems like you agree with
| Wikipedia that there's a minimum requirement for notoriety, but
| want it to be lower than it is: how low? What's the cutoff? How
| would you define that clearly and have volunteer editors
| enforce it consistently, so that everybody looks at it and says
| "that's just right"? It's easy to notice the problems with
| Wikipedia, but I think it's harder to solve them.
| rrwo wrote:
| Wikipedia will allow pages devoted to individual characters
| from Tolkein stories, but not pages about real people who have
| contributed something to science or culture.
| robswc wrote:
| Looks like these are their guidelines on notability.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_n...
|
| Here is why they claim to have them:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#Why_we_ha...
|
| Honestly, looks pretty reasonable to me. Looks like its less to
| do with "we don't want less-known people to have wiki bios" and
| more to do with "many wiki bios of less-known people typically
| don't uphold the standards needed to create an entry."
|
| I do agree they should be more lax on some of the rules... but
| I say that as someone that hardly uses wikipedia, so maybe not
| the best person to consult, lol.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Makes me remember Donna Strickland, a Nobel prize winning
| physicist, whose Wikipedia article was rejected multiple
| times, saying she was not notable enough to have one.
| jacobolus wrote:
| This is a mischaracterization. The issue was lack of
| volunteer effort writing an adequate article, not failure
| of the subject to meet Wikipedia's notability guideline.
|
| See the FAQ at the top of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Donna_Strickland
|
| > _Was this article previously deleted because Wikipedia
| editors thought that Strickland was not notable?_
|
| > _No. One previous attempt to create this article, in
| 2014, was deleted because it was copyright infringement. In
| March 2018, an editor declined to publish a draft article
| on Strickland, but this draft was not deleted; it remained
| in existence until it was superseded by the current version
| of the article, created in October 2018. The reviewer 's
| pro forma reason for declining included a link to our
| notability guidelines for biographies, but in a subsequent
| discussion most editors agreed that Strickland was notable
| before she won the Nobel Prize. The reviewer clarified that
| they agreed that Strickland was notable, but had declined
| to publish the draft because at the time it did not include
| any references to independent, reliable sources._
| robswc wrote:
| I think winning a Nobel Prize is certainly enough to
| warrant a Wikipedia entry.
| croes wrote:
| If a pokemon gets an article on Wikipedia so should a real
| person
| robswc wrote:
| The sad fact of life is that pokemons will probably be more
| popular than many "notable" people. More famous than any of
| us, for certain, haha.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| >A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article
| or list when it has received significant coverage in reliable
| sources that are independent of the subject.
|
| I don't love that criterion, because it just ends up
| upholding biases from other media. That's how you end up with
| situations like how the Gorn (a throwaway character that
| Captain Kirk encounters in Star Trek) has a more thorough
| Wikipedia article than many Nobel Prize winners.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Nobel Prize winners are without question notable. The
| reason random pop culture stuff has more thorough articles
| is due to Wikipedia author interest and commitment of
| effort, not the notability criteria.
| jl6 wrote:
| Lowering the standard of notability starts to create problems
| for the even more fundamental policy of verifiability. If
| articles are allowed without having even a couple of
| independent sources discussing the subject, it's harder to
| weed out the self-promoters, spammers, and hoaxes.
| robswc wrote:
| >it's harder to weed out the self-promoters, spammers, and
| hoaxes
|
| That is a very good point. I assume this is why they have
| the rule then.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Also because articles about people are inherently more
| sensitive than other topics. An article about a town that
| doesn't actually exist or a garage band that's never
| played a show is merely an annoyance; an article about a
| real person that makes false claims about them is a
| defamation lawsuit in the making. To protect the site
| from this, Wikipedia has stricter policies for articles
| about living people than most other topics:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_li
| vin...
| leereeves wrote:
| In the US, section 230 protects Wikipedia from defamation
| lawsuits. A victim of defamation via Wikipedia would have
| to sue the people who wrote the page, and that's unlikely
| to be worth the trouble.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Whether Wikipedia is fully protected by Section 230 is
| unclear. While they do host user-generated content, they
| also exert a substantial amount of editorial control over
| it, which could potentially nullify those protections. I
| suspect we'll never know without an actual court case,
| and it's in Wikipedia's interest to avoid that happening.
| And Wikipedia has operations and staff outside the US,
| including in some countries with significantly stricter
| defamation laws (like the UK), so relying on Section 230
| protections wouldn't be sufficient anyway.
|
| Besides, it's the right thing to do. There's a very real
| potential for harm by hosting authoritative-looking but
| false information about real people. Wikipedia can
| prevent that harm by refusing to host those articles.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > In the US
|
| What about the rest of the world?
| JamesianP wrote:
| I remember the hoax that led to that policy. I think it
| was as much about embarrassment and trying to improve the
| integrity of wikipedia
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Seigenthaler_biog
| rap...
| richbell wrote:
| Relevant story from earlier this year:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32377063
| rossmosley wrote:
| Let me tell you a story of a self-promoter from Italy.
|
| This individual has been active for more than 10 years.
| He's promoted himself as an world record holding
| programmer, a metaverse expert, a university professor, the
| owner of an academic cheating service, a politician, and
| more recently an honorary consul and knighted individual.
|
| He created an article on a programming competition 10 years
| ago on Italian Wikipedia. The article was created
| specifically to promote himself as a record holder in the
| competition. He was actually a record holder for a period,
| but not in any notable sense.
|
| He uploaded a couple of academic articles to Wiki Commons
| covering a school he'd created in Second Life. He also
| wrote a book on Second Life which he attempted to integrate
| into numerous articles on Italian Wikipedia in 2014.
|
| He managed to score a position at an upstart online
| university in 2015. He created an article on Simple English
| Wikipedia and incorporated himself as faculty. He created
| numerous fake articles off Wikipedia about his new position
| to use as sources. Reports online suggest he lied about his
| academic credentials and was subsequently canned after a
| month.
|
| He ran an academic cheating service which helped students
| circumvent anti-plagiarism tools for several years
| (~2016-2018). There are several English Wikipedia articles
| with histories littered by links to his LinkedIn articles
| promoting the service and links to the service itself.
|
| He ran in the 2018 Italian elections through his own
| political party with his mother. I found on Wikipedia
| evidence of him promoting this party going back to 2015. He
| tried to create articles on the party numerous times, and
| he also integrated the party's website into several
| articles which were later removed. My favorite one was
| where he utilized an article about a plane crash to promote
| a "memorial service" by his party. There were a lot of
| unanswered questions about his candidacy at the time.
|
| He most recently tried to recreate his own English
| Wikipedia article by claiming to be an honorary consul for
| Panama in the US and British Virgin Islands. This prevent
| the article from being deleted right away. He needed a
| source to support his claim, so he created a website.
|
| He registered a .org domain. The naked domain redirected to
| the Panamanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs website. He
| copied that site's look and feel to create a page about his
| being an honorary consul. This was also the source for him
| being a knight in the Order of Vasco Nunez de Balboa.
|
| He also copied an MIT website under another newly
| registered domain to support his claim to graduate
| education. It contained a single article about him.
|
| This doesn't include the multitude of websites that he runs
| attacking people and institutions who've "crossed him" in
| the past. He edits numerous Wikipedia articles to try and
| slant the tables against these people and organizations.
|
| He's been blocked on Wikipedia numerous times. Counting the
| number of socks that I'm aware of the number is 20+, but
| that doesn't include his use of IP edits. They're usually
| on his home ISP, but he sometimes uses rented residential
| IPs.
|
| It's mind blowing the depths this guy goes to promote
| himself.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| And just a few hours sgo, he published a detailed write-
| up of his exploits on HN. ;-)
| JamesianP wrote:
| He has the initiative, just needs to get better at taking
| credit for others' accomplishments and he could be
| famous.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| So Wikipedia should enforce its standards of verifiability
| strictly, but there's no reason to use the standard of
| notability as a proxy for that.
|
| If Wikipedia ended up often having to say "we're going to
| delete this content because it isn't verifiable, even
| though its subject may well be notable enough for our
| current standards otherwise", I don't think that would be a
| problem in itself.
| jl6 wrote:
| What standard of notability would you propose?
| mjw1007 wrote:
| I think Wikipedia's current standard in this area is
| fine.
|
| But I also think Wikipedia has historically mixed up
| discussion of notability and verifiability standards in a
| way that has been unhelpful to both.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| To be the most useful you have to go a bit beyond the
| edges of what a reader will want, to avoid holes. That
| means you should have stubs up already about barely-
| notable people who are in the news. That provides a
| meeting spot with a talk page for people to discuss or
| build the actual article. If in a year the article didn't
| get any traction and the person is out of the news cycle,
| delete it.
|
| Wiki is for its users, and that means as casual editors,
| not just the dedicated editors who think they own it.
| That means that the rules for casuals have to be quite
| relaxed in enforcement.
| trynewideas wrote:
| The notability standards aren't remotely as much of a problem
| as the inconsistent enforcement of them. Some articles deemed
| non-notable are rapidly deleted, some are flagged for
| improvement, some are moved to draftspace, some are put up
| for a request for deletion and pass or fail, some are ignored
| for years or decades.
|
| Notability is held up as a core concern of Wikipedia mostly
| by editors who want to delete specific articles, and who
| measure the value of their contributions through deletion by
| the barnstars they're awarded for it. For the rest of the
| non-notable articles, it's like any other Wikipedia guideline
| - a point to discuss and iterate on, if anyone's even paying
| attention.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Notability is a core concern of Wikipedia by anybody who
| cares about Wikipedia being a useful place to get
| information. People who delete are generally more useful on
| wikipedia than those who add, because there are way too
| many people on wikipedia who add articles relative to those
| who delete them which is gradually degrading the quality of
| the site over time.
|
| More articles of low notability means worse searchability
| and editing inherently. The issue as somebody who has
| fought to delete far more articles across knowledge bases
| than anybody I've met (also somebody who had ADDED an
| unusually high amount of articles), you have to fight for
| every inch, and reasonable people eventually people give up
| because they get nothing but abuse for their labours and
| just let things decay. Of course, this only makes it easier
| to berate anybody so unreasonable as to keep up the fight.
|
| Look at the people who fought edit wars for notability over
| these articles, they are literally now in an article about
| "gender bias on wikipedia", what sane person would wilfully
| inflict such reputational damage on themselves? Did the
| people who added all the articles of men but never added
| articles of women end up in such an article? Honestly the
| person in the OP would be more useful deleting the articles
| of irrelevant men than adding those of under-represented
| women which addresses the exact same issue of gender bias,
| but then she would likely receive several times the hate.
| The neutrality of her edits would receive several times the
| scrutiny despite having the exact same agenda.
| RunSet wrote:
| > The notability standards aren't remotely as much of a
| problem as the inconsistent enforcement of them.
|
| My current wikipedia pet peeve:
|
| Session Private Messenger[0] is absent from Wikipedia's
| comparison of cross-platform instant messaging clients[1]
| because it doesn't have a wikipedia entry. Session does not
| have a Wikipedia entry, despite having a well-sourced
| draft[2] because "github, medium, app stores are not
| sources".
|
| I note that github is cited throughout the Wikipedia entry
| for Signal messenger[3]. Furthermore, _why_ is Session 's
| page on the Apple App Store not a valid source for the
| claim that Session is available on the Apple App Store?
|
| [0] https://getsession.org
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cross-
| platform_i...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Session_(software)
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| > Furthermore, why is Session's page on the Apple App
| Store not a valid source for the claim that Session is
| available on the Apple App Store?
|
| Because that's a primary source which Wikipedia tries to
| avoid. Obviously this can get quite weird, but good luck
| arguing with a wiki rules lawyer fixated on that. People
| are often more reasonable than that though.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| There are a lot of details that don't seem to get covered
| in secondary sources that a snapshot of a primary source
| would be better for anyways.
|
| If I'm writing an article about you from scratch then I'd
| want to look for sources, to see if you're notable - etc.
| But if I was updating an existing article and just trying
| to find a source for your address it would seem easier to
| take it from _your_ website than wait for a third party
| to write about it. At some point ideological purity gets
| in the way of practicality. And there 's no need, you
| could easily tag first-party data so it could be audited
| and replaced.
| archon1410 wrote:
| > Furthermore, why is Session's page on the Apple App
| Store not a valid source for the claim that Session is
| available on the Apple App Store?
|
| you're conflating two different things. the sources
| required to establish notability are different than those
| than can be used to say something more mundane, like when
| something was released. it's a higher bar. a product's
| own website can be a source for basic things, but it
| can't be a source to establish that it's notable.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| To be fair so did the person who rejected their article
|
| > Comment: github, medium, app stores are not sources.
| Not seeing any indication of notabilty, just an ad
| [Slywriter]
|
| I think Sylwriter reached the right conclusion but for
| the wrong reasons. I also think it would have been polite
| to write a more substantive message considering the
| amount of work that clearly went into the draft.
|
| Edit: I read the article more careful and I now think
| Sylwriter was wrong and didn't read the article
| carefully.
|
| The article cites to articles published in NDTV Gadgets
| 360, itsfoss, MUO, Fossbytes, TWN Plugged,
| RestorePrivacy, and Cointelegraph. I'm not familiar with
| Wikipedia policy enough to say whether in this context
| these sources count. However, Sylwriter should obviously
| have addressed them. They're not "GitHub, medium",
| they're secondary sources in publications that are okay
| by the standards of software reviews and poor by the
| standards of something like the New York Times.
| archon1410 wrote:
| I'm sure Slywriter knew the difference, and probably
| meant "... are not sources that establish notability".
| You're right though, a more polite and detailed message
| would have been more appropriate. It is difficult to do
| that in every case, considering the sheer volume of
| drafts and the low number of reviewers.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Edit: Sorry. I wrote this thinking you were replying to
| my edit but on more careful though I realized you might
| have been replying to my original comment. If this isn't
| a reply to the edit please disregard all of this:
|
| Saying the article fails due to only primary sources when
| it has secondary sources is flat wrong, though. Simply
| reading the list of references would have cleared this
| up. Despite volume I find that inexcusable. I'd expect a
| reviewer to at a minimum read the first few hundred words
| and then skip to the generated references list and skim
| for source type.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Are there news articles, peer-reviewed journal or
| conference papers, published books, etc. discussing
| Session messenger? If so there should be no problem
| establishing notability. If not, you can wait until some
| future time when Session messenger either (a) gets more
| popular and makes enough mark on the world to be noticed
| outside of first-party marketing statements and blog
| reviews, or (b) fades into oblivion.
|
| If Wikipedia had an article about every start up company,
| every product, and every software application, it would
| be filled with unmaintainable / uncheckable marketing
| spam. (To an extent it already is.) Wikipedia's goal is
| to be an encyclopedia, not a software project directory.
|
| Note that there's a somewhat different standard between
| establishing notability vs. verifying particular claims
| in article content. Primary sources can sometimes be used
| for the latter. But it's also plausible that the Signal
| article doesn't establish all of its claims to the
| satisfaction of Wikipedia guidelines.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Are you saying peer-reviewed conference papers make
| something "notable" for mentioning in Wikipedia (next to
| historic and outdated 20 yo material on the subject)?
| That's not been my experience at all; what is or isn't
| notable seems completely arbitrary to me.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Yes, if you can find a subject mentioned (by third
| parties, not just people discussing their own project) in
| multiple peer-reviewed papers, that is better for
| establishing notability than blog posts, arxiv preprints,
| github repositories, pages in SEO content farms, web
| forum comments, or first-party white papers or press
| releases.
|
| The criteria are that the coverage is "significant" (i.e.
| more than just a throwaway mention) and made in "reliable
| sources" that are independent of the subject of the
| article. This certainly includes peer-reviewed papers.
| For examples of reliable sources, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:SOURCETYPES
|
| I don't understand what you are getting at with "... next
| to historic and outdated 20 yo material..."
|
| * * *
|
| Once notability for the main topic has been established,
| the criteria for validating specific claims is a bit
| looser. For example a company's own website could be used
| to demonstrate the current version number of a piece of
| software, a press release (or even a tweet) could be
| quoted to describe the company's first-party response to
| some event, an arxiv preprint from a tenured scientist or
| mathematician could be used to support some mathematical
| formula, a blog post by a living person could be used to
| validate their birthday or the name of their spouse, and
| the like.
| arpstick wrote:
| most academic peer review is at this point is a joke
| though. i know everyone wants to hold onto it as some
| kind of high standard but it really isn't all what it
| used to be, it functions almost identical to SEO for
| academics at this point. this dated mentality combined
| with wikipedia's culture of inconsistent topical
| gatekeeping is the source of much strife.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| I'm surprised that page on Session even exists. The only
| articles are news outlets (itsfoss, Fossbytes, etc.) that
| are all about showcasing various small projects. Also
| some random blog post as reference? Really? Compare with
| Signal that has been covered on big newspapers and
| mentioned by big organizations. (Let alone having
| countries block them.)
| RunSet wrote:
| I would say the apples-to-apples comparison is with the
| _original_ version of the Signal wikipedia entry, and
| that comparison is favorable to the draft page for
| Session:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Signal_(softwa
| re)...
| skybrian wrote:
| Inconsistent enforcement certainly seems unfair, but
| consistency is difficult across millions of articles.
| Attempting to achieve it may cause other problems due to to
| volunteers spending time on rules-lawyering rather than
| moving on to more productive things.
|
| Which is to say, the optimal amount of inconsistency is not
| zero. How do we know whether they got the balance right?
| themitigating wrote:
| That amount is difficult to obtain and for everyone to
| agree on.
|
| More importantly people who bring it up aren't interested
| in finding out since they can use "inconsistent
| enforcement " as an argument for the rest of time
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Some articles deemed non-notable are rapidly deleted,
| some are flagged for improvement, some are moved to
| draftspace, some are put up for a request for deletion and
| pass or fail, some are ignored for years or decades._
|
| Wikipedia is a living document and so expect the entries to
| continue to evolve [0] Besides, editors work on whatever
| they think is worthwhile; Wikipedia is not compulsory [1]
|
| > _Notability is held up as a core concern of Wikipedia
| mostly by editors who want to delete specific articles, and
| who measure the value of their contributions through
| deletion by the barnstars they 're awarded for it._
|
| As someone who edits Wikipedia on a fairly regular basis,
| it is annoying to come up against such editors [2], but
| this pretty much is working as-designed unless someone's
| actively trying to game the system, which is not encouraged
| [3] and you can definitely call them out on it [4].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:BRICK_BY_BRICK
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VOLUNTEER
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:NOFUN
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:GAME
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:REDRESS
| robswc wrote:
| I can totally see this being true. I know YouTube and
| Twitch are kings when it comes weird enforcement of rules.
| I don't see why Wikipedia would be immune from it... but I
| don't know enough about the community to say for sure, only
| that this particular case looks pretty reasonable.
| chaostheory wrote:
| This is exactly why I stopped contributing. I don't think why
| an entry needs to be deleted if someone arbitrarily decides
| it's not "notable" enough
| crazygringo wrote:
| I disagree completely.
|
| I can get original research anywhere on the internet.
|
| Wikipedia is valuable precisely because I know it's a tertiary
| source that tries to cite only secondary sources and not
| primary ones. I _want_ it to be an encyclopedia that separates
| the wheat from the chaff, that represents some level of
| consensus academic thought and cultural /historical notability.
| I _don 't_ want it to be the entire internet.
|
| And important _isn 't_ really that subjective -- the notability
| guidelines are extremely extensive with lots of examples for
| each type of person (researcher, actor, etc.). Sure there will
| always be edge cases, but the guidelines really are quite
| thorough.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| I can't get a wiki page about my father (https://eddhayes.com/)
| and he's got 60+ monuments across the globe. Was rejected a
| decade ago or so for not being noteworthy. Fair enough.
| yreg wrote:
| With all respect, I don't think one should create or edit
| articles about themselves or their loved ones, no matter how
| important they are.
|
| Those articles should be written by someone else.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| I don't mean I personally did it, I just offered what I
| could for news articles at the time for a page that had
| been up and then got removed for not being noteworthy
| enough. And then I think the authors argued amongst
| themselves about what constituted relevancy.
|
| Regardless, the barrier to entry seemed unnecessarily high
| at the time.
| rchard2scout wrote:
| >60+ monuments across the globe
|
| That might be impressive, but it doesn't prove that he's
| notable. Have there been articles about him or his work in
| newspapers, art magazine, etc? Have art critics commented on
| his work? If so, that could be used to establish notability,
| and be used as sources for an article about him.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Couldn't we somehow fork Wikipedia into a version that is a
| superset, containing many deleted pages as well?
| notatoad wrote:
| this is essentially what wikia is, but focused only on
| specific niches rather than all content that wikipedia
| doesn't want to include.
|
| if you wanted to create a wiki that included all the stuff
| you wished wikipedia hadn't deleted, you could. but that
| doesn't really solve the problem, because the problem isn't
| that there's nowhere on the internet to post information
| about topics you are interested in - the problem is that
| people want to use wikipedia's authority and importance to
| promote topics that they are interested in. posting that
| content on some other site that isn't wikipedia doesn't
| accomplish that goal.
|
| if jessica wade didn't want her work to be subject to
| wikipedia's notability requirements, she could have made a
| blog and written a series of posts highlighting different
| female scientists.
| tptacek wrote:
| You obviously could do exactly that. What upsets people about
| the way Wikipedia is run is that they know their "better"
| fork would attract no meaningful usage.
| watashiato wrote:
| > Wikipedia is already full of boring and random stubs, I don't
| see the obsession editors have with making sure that a person
| is "important enough" to have an article. I feel like the bar
| should be lowered - not too low, obviously.
|
| I agree that there's a lot of chaff on wikipedia, but your
| complaint is immediately followed by a method to make the
| problem worse. One of the bigger problems I've observed when
| the (high?) bar isn't enforced is things like people writing
| their own articles for the sake of self promotion.
| concinds wrote:
| Wikipedia is so huge that it's hard for editors to police
| effectively. All new articles are reviewed by one editor, but
| they'll likely be low-traffic enough that 90%+ of the page
| will be written by one person, and pages that are non-notable
| may survive for many years.
|
| Look at how awful some of Wikipedia's "1000 most vital
| articles" are
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vital_articles) and
| you'll get an idea for how neglected Wikipedia is. Most of
| these articles haven't seen significant content edits since
| 2010, when Wikipedia had far more editors.
| rexreed wrote:
| And of course, here's her Wikipedia entry:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jess_Wade
| greazy wrote:
| Her wiki entry is far too verbose for the number of published
| articles, I've never seen another scientists page that
| references all the publications and authors they've published
| with. This section should be a few lines at best summarising
| her research work.
| arcanus wrote:
| Her h-index is 8
| 5555624 wrote:
| Maybe someone will edit it and get her birthday narrowed down.
| Even one year, instead of two, would be an improvement. An
| article written in 2018, with a heading saying she was 29,
| doesn't seem reliable.
| z7 wrote:
| I notice these unknown male Fields Medalists have much sparser
| entries:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Christophe_Yoccoz
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Smirnov
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scholze
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Lindenstrauss
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Huh
|
| ;)
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Then flesh them out. We're all rooting for you!
| z7 wrote:
| It's actually not that difficult in the case of someone
| like Peter Scholze. There's a good deal of scientific
| journalism available and some more accessible meta
| publications. But I guess public interest in crystalline
| cohomology isn't very distinct. Turns out a scientist's
| lack of visibility in the public eye via publications like
| Wikipedia is shaped by more than their gender.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Seems like this would have the opposite effect - increase the
| proportion of sub-notable women on Wikipedia makes it look like
| male researchers standout and female researchers are mediocre. It
| also discounts the prestige of any Wikipedia article about a
| woman that deserves to have one - since people will know there is
| a much lower bar for women.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 100% no.
|
| You're assuming that these pages are all for "sub-notable"
| women, which is flat-out wrong. The ones that don't meet
| notability standards get deleted (as the article describes),
| just as happens with "sub-notable" men who people try to create
| pages for. Jessica Wade is simply filling in the gaps. Nobody
| is lowering the bar for women.
|
| And even if that _were_ the case, nobody is randomly browsing
| thousands of Wikipedia researcher pages where they could even
| make a judgment like that. It 's an entirely fantastical
| concern.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| The central concept of this work is that adding more women to
| Wikipedia will inspire girls to become scientists. But now
| you're saying that nobody is going to notice the thousands of
| insignificant Wikipedia pages this woman has added. So, on
| the one hand, the Wikipedia articles are so meaningful they
| are going to change the career path of young girls, but so
| insignificant that nobody will notice there is a much lower
| standard for women to get Wikipedia articles than men. Hmmm.
|
| The article is about a woman creating Wikipedia articles for
| random female academics and scholars who are below the
| notability thresholds. It's not reasonable to say this isn't
| lowering the bar for women to get a Wikipedia article.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Are you deliberately misunderstanding this?
|
| The article says people below the notability thresholds get
| deleted. How are you not understanding that? _Nobody_ is
| setting a lower standard for women. You are making that up
| in your own head.
|
| And obviously it's not about people randomly coming across
| articles of women researchers on Wikipedia. It's more like,
| oh my professor has her own page on Wikipedia, I didn't
| realize she was so respected. Can you understand that
| there's a complete difference between people visiting
| 1000's of pages and noticing some lower bar for women
| (unrealistic) vs discovering professors you know are
| notable enough to have pages (realistic)? "Hmmm" indeed.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| The article says that many of her articles are deleted
| for being unimportant and she contests that and brings
| them back. Beyond that, if the subjects were sufficiently
| notable, why is it they are only documented by an
| activist working on documenting less notable women? If
| common sense is insufficient, you could simply look at
| the articles she has added to confirm they are sub-
| notable.
|
| In general, a social activist doing activism by editing
| Wikipedia is a red flag.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Beyond that, if the subjects were sufficiently
| notable, why is it they are only documented by an
| activist working on documenting less notable women?_
|
| Again, you misunderstand totally. Subjects that _are_
| sufficiently notable, but had been missed on Wikipedia.
| This is filling in gaps, pure and simple.
|
| > _If common sense is insufficient, you could simply look
| at the articles she has added to confirm they are sub-
| notable._
|
| Yes, please see "itishappy"'s comment above that lists
| men of similar notability on Wikipedia. So from her
| articles that are up now, it seems like they're perfectly
| fine.
|
| You are bringing utterly _zero_ evidence that she is
| somehow lowering standards for notability, rather than
| filling in gaps. She 's a contributor, _not an editor_.
| Notability rules _aren 't being changed/lowered_. We
| should be _welcoming_ people who want to fill in gaps on
| Wikipedia.
|
| People are motivated for lots of reasons, and "activism"
| is a perfectly valid one. It's not a red flag in any
| sense. Motivations are irrelevant -- correct/sourced and
| notable information is all that matters. Because
| Wikipedia is collaborative, anything that doesn't meet
| standards is quickly removed/fixed. So there's literally
| nothing to worry about here.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| It is simply uninteresting to keep repeating the same
| obvious point - the activist focused on adding
| unrecognized women to Wikipedia is using a lower bar than
| the typical Wikipedia article. That is obvious and not
| debatable, so I'm just going to ignore your gaslighting
| on the subject.
|
| Regarding other men on Wikipedia of similar low
| notability - I'm not sure what you think this shows. If
| there is a male article below the bar, remove it. My
| claim is not that there are no low notability figures on
| Wikipedia, but that activists should not intentionally
| erode Wikipedia by adding low notability figures of their
| preferred demographic groups.
|
| If you point out a French astronomer who has a barely
| substantiated blurb on Wikipedia I will think nothing of
| it. Some Wikipedia articles aren't great and perhaps some
| should be removed. If this French astronomer is below the
| bar, remove him. If, on the other hand, you point out a
| French chauvinist who is adding French academics of any
| kind for the sole purpose of increasing French
| representation on Wikipedia - then I will say that's a
| problem and bad for the exact reasons I've outlined here.
| Wikipedia should be about true things that people want to
| know, not an outlet for social activism.
|
| Finally, more as an aside, I'll just say that my personal
| preference is that Wikipedia _should_ have a lower
| notability bar. I don 't understand why Wikipedia doesn't
| keep unimportant articles, perhaps just marking them with
| a "low reliability" indicator if there are too few
| legitimate sources to substantiate the article. If I were
| king of Wikipedia I would like to have an article on
| every professor and academic and author and so on. Why
| not? But, given that Wikipedia does have a notability bar
| articles should clear that bar. If you want additional
| articles you should remove the bar, not selectively
| ignore the bar to favor your preferred demographic group.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _It is simply uninteresting to keep repeating the same
| obvious point - the activist focused on adding
| unrecognized women to Wikipedia is using a lower bar than
| the typical Wikipedia article. That is obvious and not
| debatable, so I 'm just going to ignore your gaslighting
| on the subject._
|
| You're just... factually wrong. I don't know what else to
| tell you. That's not what the article says. It is not
| "obvious". All I can assume is that you're deliberately
| misreading the article in order to promote some agenda of
| your own. Why, I don't know.
|
| There is literally no sentence in the article you can
| point to that says she was trying to use a lower bar (or
| that she "succeeded" and Wikipedia was somehow accepting
| a lower bar in her articles). You have made that up. All
| it says are there were "several" entries that were
| deleted (out of over 1,600) and one that bounced back and
| forth, and ultimately her article was accepted. That's...
| it.
|
| There are lots of women who were missing from Wikipedia
| but who were notable enough to be included. And she
| included them. It's called filling in gaps.
|
| You should really reserve accusations of "gaslighting"
| for instances where you can actually point to evidence
| that you're correct.
| nnopepe wrote:
| I randomly picked one of her contributions and it reads like
| a travel blog of a random canadian[1], a second pick brought
| me to a dead french woman[2] whos claim to fame is being "one
| of the first" to do something
|
| By the sound of it Jess's reputation is so obnoxious people
| simply can't be arsed to contest her article creations
| anymore
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_Farmer
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genevieve_Hidden
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'm sorry but I just can't take your comment seriously.
|
| You think... "dead French women" don't belong on Wikipedia?
|
| Do you have any idea how many dead French _men_ are on
| Wikipedia?
|
| I cannot fathom what leads you to describe someone as a
| "dead French woman"... or even as a "random Canadian", as
| if any Canadian that nnopepe has never heard of sure
| doesn't belong in Wikipedia...!
|
| I have no idea if these two meet the standards for
| notability or not. But I do know that being obnoxious never
| stopped deletionist editors before. I'm not sure there's
| anyone in the world more stubborn than Wikipedia
| deletionist editors.
| bakugo wrote:
| > I cannot fathom what leads you to describe someone as a
| "dead French woman"
|
| Maybe the fact that the article contains very little
| information beyond that and the fact that she was a
| surgeon? It also mentions that "She was the first to
| demonstrate that lymph node transplantation could be a
| safe procedure" but the cited source contains no mention
| of this as far as I can tell.
|
| > Do you have any idea how many dead French men are on
| Wikipedia?
|
| If you have any examples of articles of "dead French men"
| that are as barebones as this one, feel free to share.
| itishappy wrote:
| > If you have any examples of articles of "dead French
| men" that are as barebones as this one, feel free to
| share.
|
| Look through some of the links on this page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:French_surgeons
|
| At a glance I've found:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Sebileau
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Lassus
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xavier_Delore
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Ren%C3%A9_Sigault
| hinkley wrote:
| I recall taking a class from an author who had some pretty cool
| ideas. But he had one of those vanilla names with a
| disambiguating page but he wasn't on it. So I made him a link and
| a page and put what I knew down.
|
| It got deleted instantly. I am not sure how I feel about that but
| I remember thinking I bet this pisses people off.
| jumelles wrote:
| The issue is that on Wikipedia, you knowing something is not a
| reliable source.
| snacksy13 wrote:
| faeriechangling wrote:
| That's a very nice story, it makes me happy.
| 34675904565 wrote:
| Are women (in science or other areas) underrepresented as
| subjects of Wikipedia articles relative to their notability (as
| defined by Wikipedia)?
| justshowpost wrote:
| Yet another
|
| _A Bored Chinese Housewife Spent Years Falsifying Russian
| History on Wikipedia_
|
| She "single-handedly invented a new way to undermine Wikipedia,"
| says a Wikipedian.*
| dig1 wrote:
| > "People assume girls don't choose science because they're not
| inspired," Wade, 33, said in a recent interview. "Girls are
| already interested.
|
| When I worked in the math department, most scientists were male.
| However, the biology and chemistry departments had way more
| female scientists than male. So how does this correlate that "the
| science does not inspire girls"?
|
| TBH, I'm happy we have listed lesser-known scientists on
| Wikipedia, no matter what gender they are, but there should be
| some line. In the science community, a number of citations or
| h-index show how productive you are, and those above some X value
| should have a place in Wikipedia. Gender neutral, of course.
|
| Also, the article dabbles between girls and students of color -
| is this about women scientists, a clickbait article, or does the
| author have some identity crisis?
|
| As someone said here, she _is_ hurting Wikipedia 's credibility.
| Recently I spoke with some high schoolers about "how they are
| lucky to have Wikipedia these days" and they mentioned that their
| teachers are actively dropping Wikipedia as an information source
| for being too unreliable. So I'm guessing, inflating numbers to
| prove something doesn't benefit anyone in the long run.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Wikipedia these days " and they mentioned that their
| teachers are actively dropping Wikipedia as an information
| source for being too unreliable._
|
| The original stance from teachers back in the 00s when
| Wikipedia was new was _" Never cite wikipedia"_. If the message
| is now _" No longer cite wikipedia"_, does that mean there was
| a period between then and now in which teachers thought highly
| of wikipedia?
| [deleted]
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > TBH, I'm happy we have listed lesser-known scientists on
| Wikipedia, no matter what gender they are, but there should be
| some line.
|
| Wiki has notability guidelines for scientists, regardless of
| the gender.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic...
| Generally, if someone has a Wikipedia article as an academic it
| means that they're known for their clearly above-average
| achievement and/or impact, as reflected in available sources.
| louwrentius wrote:
| errantmind wrote:
| SNR is important for information sources. If people don't meet
| the notability standards of Wikipedia they need to be removed.
| pavon wrote:
| How does non-notability decrease SNR? Does the existence of
| articles for non-notable people decrease the likelihood that
| people will find articles for notable ones? Does it lower the
| quality of other articles? As long as the articles for "non-
| notable" people are well-sourced and accurate, I see no reason
| why their existence lowers the SNR of Wikipedia. And if they
| are of low quality then there are more justifiable reasons for
| removing them than notability.
| errantmind wrote:
| Yes, non-notability decreases SNR because it ends up crowding
| articles into disambiguation pages which makes it more
| difficult to traverse related articles on the site. It is
| generally preferable not to stumble across non-notable
| articles when browsing Wikipedia.
|
| It is also more work for editors to 'maintain' non-notable
| articles over time. Having notability standards significantly
| reduces this burdain.
| mctt wrote:
| SNR Signal to Noise (ratio).
|
| In this case the comparison would be; Citation to Citation
| needed (ratio).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed
| mantas wrote:
| swayvil wrote:
| [deleted]
| rajin444 wrote:
| No, it's the definition of sexist. Her criteria for submitting
| these women / minorities is that "they should be noticed but
| aren't" and this criteria applies to all humans. Choosing to
| only help out selective groups purely because they're female or
| minority (not because they were passed over) is the definition
| of sexism / racism / etc.
| jmull wrote:
| (Wish I'd read this before my sibling reply, I probably would
| have replied to this since it goes directly to my point...
| but I guess it doesn't hurt to clarify)
|
| According to the definition, there would have to be
| "prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination".
|
| (I realized that's three more words to look up, but believe
| me, it's worthwhile to understand these powerful words if you
| want to use them without harm.)
| swayvil wrote:
| Listen closely for I illuminate a mystery. There is a
| reality deeper than words. A substance that makes words
| look like mere windblown fartgas in comparison.
|
| Penetrate the floofy fartgas, touch the substance.
| swayvil wrote:
| Flagged and censored. These people. I swear.
| jmull wrote:
| Here's the definition I got when googling it:
|
| > characterized by or showing prejudice, stereotyping, or
| discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex.
| nullc wrote:
| Having a Wikipedia article about you is _not_ doing you a
| service. Unless you 're high enough profile that people will
| actually care to remove bullshit (and have non-bullshit to
| replace it with) it'll just end up a random magnet for random
| innuendo, any random controversy you were even peripherally
| involved in, and other such highly unrepresentative coverage (if
| not outright defamation).
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| >>> Girls are already interested. It's more about making students
| aware of the different careers in science and getting parents and
| teachers on board."
|
| This rings so true - even in my career, good mentorship (at the
| right time) would have very different outcomes.
|
| I think of all the productivity statistics we worry about, and
| yes when productivity was lifting heavier piles of earth, capital
| investment mattered.
|
| Today's productivity comes from better organisation and better
| capabilities- either do more with less or invent new things to
| do.
|
| And those are deep educational and social issues.
|
| As an example I suspect YC itself is good proof that there is not
| a fixed pool of entrepreneurs but that by improving the fertility
| of the VC soil more people fall over that weird line of risk-
| taking.
|
| Imagine there was a pill that would turn regular folks into
| people willing to stop at nothing to make their idea a success.
| Now with a million fired up entrepreneurs do we have enough early
| stage funds? Enough lawyers with startup experience, enough HR
| Saas accounts?
|
| If inspired entrepreneurs were not a limiting factor (which seems
| to be what VCs say when they look for a great founder) what else
| is broken about our eco-system?
|
| And if we could fix that, what else is broken about the eco-
| system for getting young girls (and boys) into scientific
| productive careers?
| JamesianP wrote:
| To me science as a field is somehow more primitive and backward
| in that it's still first and foremost about building one's CV,
| like an explorer putting their name on places before the other
| guy gets there. This doesn't generally match the current
| environment where everyone is pursuing the same incremental
| advances and will get there sooner or later. Yet we pretend the
| one person who's paper got past reviewers first deserves all
| the credit for that increment plus the increments that follow.
| The first implementations often don't even work.
|
| Presumably the reason it works this way is because the funding
| process in research rewards this approach. Elsewhere like in
| engineering, results are what matter. Science will probably
| evolve in this direction as we need more and more of it, and
| results are produced in more shared-credit environments like
| big labs instead of academia. Then it won't be so much about
| the Matthew effect which favors those who got started the
| earliest (which tends to be boys).
| goethes_kind wrote:
| > "Ultimately, we don't only need to increase the number of girls
| choosing science, we need to increase the proportion of women who
| stay in science,"
|
| We need to do neither of those things. Women who are smart enough
| to contribute to science are also smart enough to make their own
| mind about whether or not they want to contribute to science.
| areoform wrote:
| When I was growing up, I was told that women were by and large
| too dumb to do any real science by teenage boys _and_ girls.
|
| I found great solace in Joan Feynman's story,
|
| > "Women can't do science, because their brains aren't made for
| it," Lucille Feynman declared to her eight-year-old daughter
| Joan. The news was a huge blow to the little girl's ambitions
| which, at the time in 1935, were firmly set on following her
| brother Richard into a life scientific. "I remember sitting in
| a chair and weeping," she recalls.
|
| > whilst the doubts about a woman's abilities to undertake a
| career in science, planted in her by Lucille, remained, Joan's
| interest in science continued to be fuelled by Richard's
| progress through university. Before he'd left home, her brother
| had made a deal with her that whilst away at the Massachusetts
| Institute of Technology (MIT), studying for his bachelor's
| degree, he would answer any science question that she sent him.
|
| > "So I did," says Joan, "and I got a little further each time.
| And then one day there was a figure in the book of a spectrum
| and underneath it said 'the relative strengths of the Mg+
| absorption line at 4,481 angstroms... of Stellar Atmospheres
| from the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin'." The caption was a
| revelation to Joan. Cecilia was a woman's name, and the
| hyphenated family name indicated she was married. It was proof
| that a married woman was capable of doing science.
|
| Representation matters. That one hyphenated name, proof that
| someone like her could contribute, gave us an exploration of
| auroras and solar wind. It enriched our world immensely.
|
| If some other little girl, even one, can find solace in one of
| these wikipedia articles, then it's worth it.
| onos wrote:
| I don't think many people have a problem with the concept of
| representation. Eg conservatives can have daughters and want
| them to be happy as well.
|
| The issue that rubs many the wrong way is that advocates
| often simply replace one form of exclusion with the other.
| For example, at my local children's science museum they have
| a large exhibit titled "this is what a scientist looks like".
| It includes six large posters of women scientists. This is
| not "inclusive". It's also not uncommon. I've seen similar
| within some of my kid's science classrooms.
|
| Lastly, I think it's not surprising that the example you
| quote is from the 1930s. Today's bias (in the usa at least)
| is most definitely towards promoting female achievement.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Representation matters
|
| For some.
|
| I wanted to be a Formula 1 pilot as a kid because I liked
| fast cars, not because pilots were men.
|
| I wanted to be an astronaut because I was obsessed with space
| and spacesuits, but I saw them in comics where the
| protagonists where animals and I clearly wasn't.
|
| You know, sometimes people like stuff because they like it,
| not because they saw a male or female name somewhere.
|
| Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper existence has not discouraged
| me from becoming a male programmer and the fact that when I
| was a kid everyone said that knitting and crocheting were a
| girls' thing hasn't stopped me from learning them, it was a
| fun thing to do with my aunt.
|
| > If some other little girl, even one, can find solace in one
| of these wikipedia articles, then it's worth it.
|
| I read this sentence a lot, but there is no reason why we
| should believe it could happen.
|
| If the fact that these people exist and are alive wasn't
| enough to make them known, what can a Wikipedia article about
| unknown people actually do?
|
| Unless a marketing department with a budget pushes them to a
| larger audience under the assumption that they are important
| because they are women, regardless of the importance of to
| actual body of work they produced, they're gonna stay
| unknown.
| reocha wrote:
| Do you not think people are less likely to go into fields where
| they don't see themselves represented?
| goethes_kind wrote:
| Why would representation be an issue? You make it sound like
| there are no women at all in male-dominated fields, but the
| gender ratio lies around the 30% mark. So although they are
| not the majority, nobody will bat an eye that a mathematician
| or a physicist is a woman. If by representation you mean
| support, women have way more support than men in terms of
| funding and ease to get fixed positions.
|
| And frankly I do not think young people are making career
| decisions based on representation. That's more of an
| academic's way to look at life.
| raziel2701 wrote:
| "You make it sound like there are no women at all in male-
| dominated fields"
|
| Where in their statement did they make that claim?
|
| You're inventing arguments.
| akira2501 wrote:
| What's the case? That people won't naturally come to the idea
| that they could do something unless they are "represented" in
| that field already? How does any new field form, then?
|
| Or, is it the case that people are actively discouraged
| because they aren't "represented" in the field? If they can't
| overcome that challenge, then how are they going to make any
| real progress in the field?
|
| I think there's a valid question of, do people want these
| jobs for the status of having them, or do they want these
| jobs because they have a deep passion for the subject itself?
| I presume that if it's the latter, then simple
| "representation" poses no barrier to those people. If it's
| the former, then I'm not at all bothered by their inability
| to chase status in a particular field.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| > Or, is it the case that people are actively discouraged
| because they aren't "represented" in the field? If they
| can't overcome that challenge, then how are they going to
| make any real progress in the field?
|
| The challenges of fighting unethical social and political
| resistance to your inclusion in a community are distinct
| from the intellectual challenges of the associated field of
| study. Having to overcome both is certainly not fair to
| anyone.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > The challenges of fighting unethical social and
| political resistance to your inclusion in a community are
| distinct from the intellectual challenges of the
| associated field of study.
|
| And, "representation" fixes this? I see the connection
| between the two, but I don't think it's direct.. and I
| think calls for "representation" step over this chasm
| entirely in the hopes that the solution will sort of just
| materialize.
|
| I also think it is highly likely that focusing on this
| alone creates the opposite social pressures, pushing
| people into highly competitive landscapes filled with
| driven people just to serve as an undistinguished poster
| child who's meant to merely be a token of "representation
| in the field."
|
| I don't think genuine "unethical social" or "political
| resistance" to inclusion is solved this way. Further, if
| there are these gate-keeping mechanisms in front of what
| should be pure meritorious pursuits, then all you might
| be doing is forcing those gatekeepers to put a different
| face on their lack of ethics rather than throwing them
| off the sciences entirely.
|
| It's not so much that I disagree with it or think it's
| not a valid concern, I just think this sole focus on
| "inclusion" and "representation" is entirely half thought
| out will only serve to make the actual problem worse.
| version_five wrote:
| I think most people don't consider identity politics when
| choosing a field. Anyway, equating "seeing themselves
| represented" to some shallow race and gender stuff reflects
| reality for very few.
| gspencley wrote:
| I usually shy away from these conversations because of how
| politically toxic they are, and how easily people can twist
| and manipulate words to fit any meaning they want to
| ascribe.
|
| But you've just echoed a sentiment that I've had for quite
| some time relating to the "representation matters" claims.
|
| I grew up loving Star Trek. DS9 is one of my favourite of
| the series and I considered the character of Benjamin Sisko
| to be a huge role model and influence on me. I felt similar
| sentiment towards the characters Katherine Janeway and
| Seven of Nine on Voyager. Seven of Nine was particularly
| relatable to me as a nerdy outcast trying to fit in with
| "normal society." More recently, I felt a powerful
| attachment and kinship to the character of Elizabeth Harmon
| in The Queen's Gambit. To the point where I have never felt
| so personally represented by any fictional character in my
| life. The obsession, drive, ambition, social awkwardness,
| the anger issues, being ruthlessly self-critical and even
| the drug abuse (was stimulants for me as a teenager) were
| all characteristics that felt like they were taken directly
| from my own life.
|
| But according to many, that shouldn't be possible because
| those characters have different skin pigmentation and
| genitals than me.
|
| What a racist and sexist proposition that is. Almost as if
| ideas, character, personality and morals don't matter. We
| just need to go back to assuming those things based on
| little more than superficial irrelevancies.
| hexane360 wrote:
| >But according to many, that shouldn't be possible
| because those characters have different skin pigmentation
| and genitals than me.
|
| [Citation needed]
|
| I don't think you could find an example of even one
| feminist claiming that you can't find representation from
| people with different demographics to you. This is not
| what people are claiming when they say "representation
| matters". In fact, minorities are MUCH more likely to
| find representation outside their demographic, out of
| necessity if for no other reason. What people are
| claiming (many from personal experience) is that a lack
| of representation in a given pursuit makes it harder for
| people to imagine those pursuits as something available
| to them.
|
| In other words: Yes, a black woman can empathize and
| relate to characters of any gender and race. But that's
| not a good argument that we shouldn't correct the
| underrepresentation of black women in media and STEM.
| It's also not an argument that black women won't be
| helped by seeing increased representation in media and
| STEM.
|
| I'm assuming this is a good faith misunderstanding, but
| if it's not, it's a very good example of what you call
| "twist and manipulate words to fit any meaning they want
| to ascribe".
| gspencley wrote:
| The problem with discourse today is that people don't
| listen to understand. They listen to react.
|
| > What people are claiming (many from personal
| experience) is that a lack of representation in a given
| pursuit makes it harder for people to imagine those
| pursuits as something available to them.
|
| Having gone back and re-read my comment, I have a
| difficult time seeing the distinction between your choice
| of words and how I expressed the sentiment.
|
| To illustrate why: what does "relate to" or "empathize"
| mean if not to imagine yourself in the shoes of another?
|
| I think where the disagreement might enter the picture is
| in the emphasis on systems and institutions. You
| specifically used the words "available to." I've never
| looked at the world in terms of what is or isn't
| available to me. Not when it comes to how I choose to
| live my life. Maybe it's because I grew up in an era
| where we taught kids that they were capable of anything
| they put their mind to. I actually believed it. And I
| certainly never considered that I couldn't do something
| because of my race or gender. If I had then I wouldn't do
| so much cooking in my household.
|
| When it comes to personal anecdotes, empirical data is
| always called for. I can [Citation Needed] your clarified
| statement of the claim just as easily as you can mine.
| These are just claims, at the end of the day. A claim
| that I find suspect because, to restate my position, if
| someone has a difficult time imagining themselves in the
| shoes of others because they see race and gender (even if
| it's a belief in societal systems rather than
| individually held prejudice), it is still a personal
| choice to see the world that way. And it's not a very
| good look on the person making that choice in my humble
| opinion.
| hexane360 wrote:
| It seems you're having trouble understanding my comment.
|
| My [Citation needed] was for your assertion that "many"
| are making that claim. I emphasized the difference
| between the two claims. Your version of the claim is that
| it's impossible to relate to characters of different
| demographics. The non-strawman version of the claim is
| that the how and when demographics are represented
| impacts people's perception of those demographics. If you
| want me to cite people claiming the above, I can. If you
| want me to cite evidence for the claim, I can also do
| that.
|
| >You specifically used the words "available to." I've
| never looked at the world in terms of what is or isn't
| available to me. Not when it comes to how I choose to
| live my life. Maybe it's because I grew up in an era
| where we taught kids that they were capable of anything
| they put their mind to. I actually believed it. And I
| certainly never considered that I couldn't do something
| because of my race or gender. If I had then I wouldn't do
| so much cooking in my household.
|
| For someone complaining about people not imaging
| themselves in the shoes of others, you're sure slow to
| imagine yourself in the shoes of others. Read some of the
| comments in this thread, and you'll find plenty of
| examples of people who never considered that they _could_
| do something, because of their race or gender. At least,
| _until_ they saw examples of positive representation in
| media.
|
| Have you considered that the reason other people had
| difficulty imagining themselves doing something when you
| didn't may be because of the different messages you
| received growing up rather than them being prejudical?
|
| >it is still a personal choice to see the world that way
|
| This isn't as relevant to my point, but I would
| absolutely argue this isn't true. If societal systems
| exist (as you seem to admit) that discriminate based on
| race and gender, is it a personal failing when those
| systems make you aware of your race and gender? Have you
| considered that the reason you are less aware of your
| race and gender than others may be due to the fact that
| your race and gender has had less impact on you than
| others' has on them?
| selljamhere wrote:
| I disagree. It isn't about smartness. There are plenty of
| intelligent women who may enjoy and be well suited for science,
| but were discouraged from pursuing it at a young age.
| goethes_kind wrote:
| First of all my comment is not about intelligence. It is
| about the patronizing attitude of people who think they can
| brainwash young women into fulfilling their own political
| goals, as if these smart young women are not more than
| capable enough to think for themselves.
|
| As for your comment, your sentiment is based on no evidence
| what so ever, and prolonged efforts to attract more women to
| male dominated STEM fields results in zero gains.
| worik wrote:
| > ....brainwash young women into fulfilling their own
| political goals
|
| It is not a matter of brainwashing. It is a matter of
| giving young people the tools to overcome the intrinsic
| bias they encounter.
|
| My experience of computer science labs in the 1990s were
| testosterone drenched pits of bullying and bragging
|
| It was not just women put off by that. Brilliant women were
| not, they achieved. It was the average women, and average
| indigenous, average queer, etcetera who were driven out.
|
| It is not sustainable to keep out people who do not look
| like, sound like, and smell like the main stream.
|
| "brainwash young women into fulfilling their own political
| goals" Pfftttt
| 30amxn30 wrote:
| [deleted]
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| If you believe IQ testing, then why women aren't equally-
| represented in STEM is mysterious, cognitively.
|
| That leaves you with the notion that maybe something innate
| to the female brain simply makes them less interested.
|
| But a funny analogy I've heard is: why are there way more
| woman cellists (people who play the cello) than woman
| guitarists? We know women can play instruments, but is
| there something in the female brain that makes them more
| interested in cellos and violins than in guitars?
|
| For that, the cultural explanation, that guitars are more
| masculine-coded in our culture, is way more compelling. And
| then I wonder what other trends culture could be enforcing.
|
| > _the patronizing attitude of people who think they can
| brainwash young women into fulfilling their own political
| goals, as if these smart young women are not more than
| capable enough to think for themselves._
|
| I think the concept of libertarian free will that you're
| assuming here is a religious one. It doesn't really exist.
| Your sense of pride has been wounded on others' behalf by
| the assertion that forces outside of people's control
| influence people. But of course they do. We're all products
| of our environment. Being mad about it and denying it only
| distances you from the goals you want to accomplish.
|
| > _As for your comment, your sentiment is based on no
| evidence what so ever, and prolonged efforts to attract
| more women to male dominated STEM fields results in zero
| gains._
|
| Is there evidence for that?
|
| Here's some claiming a huge increase in women participating
| in STEM: "Women made gains - from 8% of STEM workers in
| 1970 to 27% in 2019 - but men still dominated the
| field."[0]
|
| 0: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/women-
| making-...
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| there are also a lot of intelligent men who may enjoy and be
| well suited for science, but were discouraged from pursuing
| it at young age.
|
| Up until a few decades ago being a scientist was not
| imaginable for more than a few thousand people in all the
| West.
|
| Up until 80 years ago, the west wasn't even a thing.
|
| My dad was a huge fan of science, unfortunately his small
| town in Italy was invaded by Nazis when he was a kid and he
| had to survive and then take care of a widowed mother.
|
| In Spain they had a fascist dictatorship till 1975.
|
| The fact that in such a short timespan the presence of women
| in science is at the level it is today is frankly something
| that should be considered a huge success, not a failure.
| slooonz wrote:
| So, the flagship of the article is the wikipedia entry for
| "Clarice Phelps", notably for "her work on a team that discovered
| a new periodic-table element at the Oak Ridge National
| Laboratory". The article (heavily) implies that Clarice Phleps
| not having a wikipedia entry is her "not having her dues" because
| she's a woman.
|
| However, if we look at the authors of the original article, there
| is no mention of her :
| https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Synthesis-of-a-new-ele....
| Of the 30 authors of the article, only two have a wikipedia entry
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Oganessian and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_H._Hamilton).
| ineedasername wrote:
| Then perhaps that's a failing of the linked article to
| adequately convey her contribution, not an indication of
| anything else.
|
| Same for the other authors without a Wikipedia entry. Their
| absences don't indicate that Phelps too shouldn't have an
| entry. Instead, for a significant discovery, it perhaps means
| that other people are similarly lacking in recognition.
|
| Is your point that she shouldn't have a Wikipedia entry, or
| that it's absence was not necessarily related to her being a
| woman, or something else entirely?
| belorn wrote:
| The written goal of Wikipedia is to be a recording of what
| other sources in the world are stating, and explicitly not to
| be a primary source. Wikipedia is not a substitute when there
| is a lack of original sources reporting on a subject.
|
| Because of this, there are a lot of experts and advocates
| that simultaneously dislike Wikipedia, want to fix it, and
| have a terrible experience while doing so. They want
| Wikipedia to represent the truth, and if there is a lack of
| original sources they want Wikipedia to fix that so people
| can access the truth. This in turn makes other people
| suspicious when advocates or experts edits Wikipedia,
| furthering the conflict.
| ineedasername wrote:
| None of this addresses the issues I raised with the GP
| comment, which did not cite a lack of original sources for
| Phelps or other scientists involved in related work as an
| explanation for the absence of Wikipedia articles on them.
| The GP also did not raise it as an issue at all that
| Phelps' article might cross into the territory of sounding
| too much like a primary source.
|
| Phelps is mentioned in many media sources so it would be
| difficult to claim she does not have enough original
| sources to support a wikipedia entry.
|
| Here are some from prior to the creation of her Wikipedia
| page. The first 3 include the announcement of her winning
| an award, news coverage of the same, and a TED talk. https:
| //www.google.com/search?q=%22clarice+phelps%22&rlz=1CD...
| belorn wrote:
| I must have misunderstood you. I read it as you arguing
| that some people are lacking in recognition despite
| significant discoveries.
|
| This is why I highlighted the The written goal of
| Wikipedia. It is not peoples achievement or work that
| qualify them for articles. It is the secondary sources
| that write about people that qualify those people for
| articles, regardless if those people deserve it or not.
|
| If there is a lot of secondary sources then there should
| very likely be an article. That is after all the purpose
| of Wikipedia.
| [deleted]
| brap wrote:
| How many people are actually searching for and reading these
| bios? Is this effort at all useful?
| freebreakfast wrote:
| I cannot answer your questions directly, but page view
| information is available for all Wikipedia articles.
|
| https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/
| lucb1e wrote:
| It is also an effect that drives itself. If you look for
| someone and they essentially don't exist online, you are less
| likely to tell a friend about this person because you don't
| learn as much about them, which then drives even fewer views to
| the page. Now that they exist, it might take years before one
| can tell something based on views.
|
| Searches are hard to map, because searching for POTUS 2008
| might get you to Barack's article... but only if it exists.
| Wouldn't know that someone was looking for this person if they
| don't type the name exactly and correctly.
| onos wrote:
| It got this woman some publicity.
| brosinante wrote:
| Is read count the metric we're using?
| brap wrote:
| I don't know, but surely there should be a metric, and I
| don't think number of entries is a good one.
| aaaaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| slibhb wrote:
| It's somewhat ironic that Wade has received many honors for her
| activism -- but not for her science -- which involves promoting
| the science of other women.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| [fixed, so please disregard this comment now]
|
| Cool. But "BIOS"? Seems sort of a misleading headline (especially
| since its not in the headline in the linked article).
| rany_ wrote:
| It's probably some Hacker News rename rule.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| Edited. Sorry, I realize HN does some edits for the title when
| we submit articles.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| I didn't know that either!
| caramelcream wrote:
| This serves as a great illustration of the "women are wonderful"
| effect, which was featured on HN the other day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33175754
| [deleted]
| dandare wrote:
| > In the early years of our sample, women were less likely to be
| selected as members [of AAAS and NAS] than men with similar
| records. By the 1990s, the selection process at both academies
| was approximately gender-neutral, conditional on publications and
| citations. In the past 20 years, however, a positive preference
| for female members has emerged and strengthened in all three
| fields. Currently, women are 3-15 times more likely to be
| selected as members of the AAAS and NAS than men with similar
| publication and citation records.
|
| https://www.nber.org/papers/w30510
|
| The paper is not peer reviewed.
| klipt wrote:
| Intuitively, it makes sense that decades of Diversity Training
| could ultimately change people's biases. That means it
| succeeded.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| The point was correcting the factors which lead to women
| avoiding or not succeeding in STEM not creating an opposite
| bias.
|
| Maybe a positive bias is still needed to tip the scale but we
| have to be careful of not drastically overshooting.
| iampims wrote:
| Women have "centuries" of not being treated as equals
| before we can talk about "overshooting".
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| This take doesn't make sense. The goal never was to make
| up for centuries of inequality (as if we could - that's
| going to be of little help to the disadvantaged women,
| they are dead now) or punish modern men for a past they
| had nothing to do with. The goal is equality, period.
|
| Creating a world where men are disadvantaged in a mirror
| situation would be an abject failure. Positive bias is
| good as a bootstrap because feminine role models are a
| necessity for young girls to be able to identify with
| someone in the field and the situation was so unbalanced
| something had to be done to seed the field.
|
| But in an equal playfield, women don't need help to stand
| for themselves. At some point, we will have to stop
| artificially advantaging them and recognising this point
| is important.
| Beldin wrote:
| Given that women tend to be cited less than men [1], I
| don't think you need to worry just yet.
|
| [1] e.g. https://www.science.org/content/article/women-
| researchers-ci...
| hunglee2 wrote:
| Good and bad together here.
|
| On the one hand Jessica Wade's commitment elevates the under
| appreciated achievements of these women scientists, in so doing
| exposing the bias in how we record history and attribute credit.
|
| On the other, it also reveals the vulnerability of open edit
| repositories where the 'truth' can be determined by those with
| the most time and motivation. What is to stop politicisation of
| the content? Nothing at all.
|
| Indeed, seeing as Wikipedia has become the de facto source of
| truth for many, it would be surprising if government does not
| already have a program to ensure edits and articles support
| designed narratives and justify domestic and foreign policy
| behaviours
| jmull wrote:
| > Nothing at all.
|
| I think you could look up how wikipedia is moderated. I
| wouldn't say it's perfect or anything close, but you'll quickly
| find that "nothing at all" is very wrong.
| soheil wrote:
| OK this is just annoying and borderline spamming Wikipedia. She
| is creating new wiki pages for people with their primary
| qualification being a woman/minority group in academia [0]. Again
| and again from history we learn fundamentalism doesn't work yet
| here we are showing its ugly head even in sciences, not only
| she's getting away with it she's even being praised for this.
| Wikipedia has very clear notability guidelines [1].
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Jesswade...
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic...
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Does an unworthy Wikipedia bio page somehow harm anybody (aside
| from the hosting cost itself)? Honest question - I don't see how.
|
| On the flipside, does adding these pages do anything to increase
| visibility for these women? Honest question here as well, but
| again I don't see how it would. I would only end up on one of
| these if I specifically searched for it, which implies she was
| already known to me.
|
| Really this seems like a no-op to me.
|
| Maybe I can grant some tiny positive value in that if I have an
| interest in one of these women, I can now go get a tiny amount of
| additional information about them.
| onetimeusename wrote:
| Yes. People add themselves for self promotion which is at worst
| useless bandwidth but sometimes in cases of fraud/deception. I
| have seen cranks add pages about themselves as if they are
| experts on a subject which they are definitely not. That is
| harmful because you can mislead people since part of the appeal
| is the effect this has on google search results and the
| authoritative appearance of Wikipedia can mislead people.
| somenameforme wrote:
| The primary motivation for including individuals here seems to
| be academic achievement. Worldwide there are tens of millions
| of people with doctorates and this number is growing _rapidly_.
| A large percent of these individuals would fulfill the standard
| set forth here.
|
| At the time of this post the English language Wikipedia has
| 6,562,981 articles.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Sooner or later you get down to billions of stub articles. I
| wrote a research paper once, it even got published in a fairly
| large journal. But I am not noteworthy and don't need an
| article on wikipedia. You need to have some lower bound to stop
| egomaniacs like me from writing our own 10k world
| biographies...
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| I don't really see how B's of stub articles hurt though. I
| don't even see them, if I'm not looking for them. Maybe if
| they share a name with a more note-worthy person, and then
| clutter search results for that person and cause confusion.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Your premise is fundamentally wrong, you DO see stub
| articles you aren't searching for, that's actually the
| BIGGEST issue with them. If you have articles literally
| nobody wants to read on wikipedia, eventually quite a
| number of people are going to navigate to them accidentally
| over the years, and get annoyed. The more useless articles
| they are, the worse and worse this issue becomes, because
| you can only index and filter SO well.
|
| The second issue is that if you scale the amount of
| articles without scaling the amount of editors you reduce
| the overall quality of the articles. Quality is ensured by
| having more editors relative to the amount of articles,
| removing standards to increase the number of articles
| relative to the number of editors invariably degrades
| quality, meaning even when somebody DOES find the right
| article it's inevitably going to be of lower quality.
|
| Just mindlessly adding information without standards isn't
| helpful, or useful, it's hoarding and it's corrosive. It
| has nothing to do with maintaining a useful body of
| knowledge for people to reference, it's a problem
| maintainers of a body of knowledge have to fight an eternal
| and ultimately losing war against for as long as they can.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| Because the credibility of articles on wikipedia rests on
| having multiple editors. Having one (likley biased) writer
| for billions of entries means that most of the info on
| wikipedia would be false. It's better to have less info and
| be more accurate than become a glorified ad space.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Just off of the top of my head...
|
| * Those pages have to be stored somewhere. They're all MB
| of space and they make DB tables longer and introduce other
| issues and generally clog up the rest of the site
|
| * Those pages all have to be moderated (and who will
| moderate irrelevant pages), all open wikipedia to charges
| of copyright infringement, slander/liable and other issues
|
| * Those pages distract from actual, useful pages. At best
| they actually distract from it, at worse they will actively
| contradict it
|
| * It encourages people to edit wikipedia for the wrong
| reasons. We already have issues with politicians and CEOs
| editing wikipedia for personal gain.
|
| * Privacy. I am not notable. There should not be an article
| about me, even though I have published research. The last
| thing I want is an article about me I then have to either
| correct or leave incorrect, that pops up when you google
| me. I have more than enough social media already thanks,
| the last thing I want is an "account" where I am not even
| in charge of what it says...
|
| * Lack of sources. If you let in 1000 small articles, you
| have to allow articles with few to no sources. If you do
| that, you will get important or popular articles being
| created also with no sources. Banning non-noteworthy
| articles also bans un-sourced articles.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| As somebody who has had a lot of interest in maintaining
| knowledge bases, yes it does, and the biggest problem is
| compromising search. It doesn't matter how good your approach
| to indexing is, there's no better approach to filtering out
| irrelevant rarely used information other than deleting it.
| Obscure entries in a knowledge base nobody cares about actually
| have a negative value.
|
| A secondary negative effect is administrative and technical
| overhead. As knowledge bases expand and the number of editors
| stays about the same, the quality of any one entry in the
| knowledge base will tend to be worse since quite simply people
| are stretched thinner.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'm on board with the more information side and am not a
| deletionist but this is an adversarial environment with few
| resources.
|
| Essentially, for all us inclusionists, very few of us will
| actively help curate Wikipedia to remove spam.
|
| This is why Blastoise is a safer topic than the Charles Reed
| Professor of Futurism at Salesforce University. There is no
| adversary who is attempting to promote Blastoise and
| consequently it is safer to include.
|
| The greater the outside incentive to popularization, the less
| inclusionist we must be if we want to preserve a non-spam WP.
|
| But maybe we don't want to do that. And to be honest, I don't
| know why not. Perhaps it's okay for Wikipedia to have an
| article on Rene Wiltord, a software engineer in the high
| frequency trading space, etc etc
|
| Anyway, the few articles I sampled appear to be quite complete
| so I'm not going to hate. Ultimately, there's still lots of
| stuff not on Wikipedia so I feel positively about this.
| bakugo wrote:
| > Does an unworthy Wikipedia bio page somehow harm anybody
| (aside from the hosting cost itself)?
|
| Wikipedia is a massive repository of information. The more
| useless, irrelevant information is added to it, the harder it
| becomes to find relevant information, and to manage the
| repository as a whole. It's a pretty simple concept.
| pavon wrote:
| I genuine do not understand this argument. The internet as a
| whole has this problem since you can have literally millions
| of low quality SEO crap pages all targeting the same subject,
| but Wikipedia itself will only every have a single page for
| each person/subject, which strongly limits the negative
| impacts of flooding. I'm really trying to find examples of
| how this would occur. The best I can come up with is
| increasing disambiguation pages for people with similar
| names, which isn't a big deal.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| One negative impact is the administrative burden of
| moderating those pages. There are disputes, there is false
| information, intentional misinformation etc that 'editors'
| need to remove. The positive of having Muhammad Lee have a
| page on Wikipedia is I think less than this negative.
|
| We already have social media profiles for non-notable
| people's life and accomplishments. That should be enough.
| soheil wrote:
| Does an unworthy email in your inbox harm anybody? Scale this
| up to see the issue. Wikipedia notability guidelines exist for
| this reason
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic...
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| But spam emails are delivered to my inbox along with all my
| real mail, cluttering it up. Wikipedia entries are not pushed
| to my attention and do not clutter my experience. I don't
| experience them at all.
| soheil wrote:
| Yes you're right it's not like email in the sense that they
| are delivered to you.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Yeah, and some people want to use wikipedia just because
| you want to use your emails. Some people want to read
| stories about people they care about, not some random
| doctorate that added themselves to wikipedia for the sake
| of self-promotion.
|
| It's about valuing the user experience first and foremost.
| totoglazer wrote:
| If they were involved in discovering X, now they are much more
| like to be mentioned and linked in the article about X. So I
| think that would boost visibility slightly.
| louwrentius wrote:
| 30amxn30 wrote:
| bakugo wrote:
| >This is a positive effort, and that's it.
|
| Why is creating hundreds of articles of zero substance a
| positive effort?
| oboes wrote:
| You can look at Jessica Wade's contributions to Wikipedia there:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Jesswade...
| Panoramix wrote:
| I clicked through 5 of them. All were professors with no
| substantial achievement mentioned. Are we going to make a
| Wikipedia page for all university professors on Earth? Surely
| they are smart and accomplished, but at least tell me what
| separates them from the crowd. What was their major
| breakthrough? the big invention? the novel technique? Otherwise
| this is just bloat IMO.
| biztos wrote:
| I picked one at random and the subject didn't seem like someone
| I'd expect to have a bio on Wikipedia -- some awards but no big
| achievements in her field were cited, much less linked to.
| _Random Professor Earning Tenure, Watch This Space!_
|
| That said, I'm in favor of everyone on the planet having a
| Wikipedia entry if anyone wants to make it for them. I'd love
| to do the same thing for lesser-known artists, but I'm lazy and
| I assume the WikiLords would erase everything. But maybe not,
| based on this... maybe I'm just lazy!
| smt88 wrote:
| > _That said, I'm in favor of everyone on the planet having a
| Wikipedia entry if anyone wants to make it for them._
|
| I can't imagine a worse idea for some many reasons.
|
| - Wikipedia isn't supposed to have original research, and
| most people haven't been researched.
|
| - I don't want to search for composer John Williams and then
| see 300,000 other random people that fewer than 10 people
| want to read anything about.
|
| - Moderation is hard already.
| dvt wrote:
| It's a Very Bad Thing(tm) that Wikipedia has become such a
| centralized funnel for information: (a) it's governed by
| gatekeepers with agendas, for better or worse; (b) an article's
| quality is often inversely proportional to its talk page archive
| length--i.e. articles on controversial topics are basically
| worthless if you're trying to get a balanced viewpoint; (c)
| Wikipedia has become a bureaucratic behemoth sucking up
| donations; (d) it implicitly kills other competition (Wikipedia
| universally ranks above all other pages); (e) in many cases,
| sources are either fabricated outright or the source does not
| support the article or the source is itself more nuanced than the
| article (editors rarely check sources, let alone that sources
| themselves may be biased); (f) Wikipedia rules are enforced
| arbitrarily and in an ad-hoc manner (some Wiki editor communities
| are more hard-line than others); etc. I think Wikipedia is going
| to end up being a net-negative in the long run.
|
| In the 90s, Wade would've started a website/wiki called "Female
| Scientists" and she would've ranked just fine on search engines.
| But these days, Wikipedia itself has become a cultural
| battleground.
| jl6 wrote:
| (b) is something that needs to be taught in media literacy
| courses: for any controversial subject, always read the talk
| page as well as the article. Easier said than done when there
| are 300+ pages of archives, but there are often FAQs present to
| cover the biggest issues, and at any rate, who said
| understanding controversial topics would be easy?
|
| But for controversial battleground subjects, I think (e) is
| actually not so common, because the opposing sides of edit wars
| do actually ruthlessly check each others' sources, looking for
| any excuse to disqualify them.
| londons_explore wrote:
| If everyone read the talk page, then edit battles would
| happen on the talk page itself, with people removing comments
| that 'weren't in the right spirit'.
| jl6 wrote:
| This totally already happens. Well, it does for off-topic
| trash and personal attacks. If you go in with suggestions
| for improving the article (even misguided ones), your
| comment won't get deleted.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Make sure to check the talk page history for large deletions.
| Sometimes editor disputes get swept under the rug by somebody
| pruning the discussion page later.
| trynewideas wrote:
| > In the 90s, Wade would've started a website/wiki called
| "Female Scientists" and she would've ranked just fine on search
| engines.
|
| Agreed - and it isn't helped by the schisms between the
| Mediawiki community and Wikimedia. The priorities Wikimedia
| have for the Mediawiki software are so focused on Wikipedia and
| Wikidata that any potential it had as a platform capable of
| forking subject areas into domain-specific sites and merging
| those updates back into Wikipedia has long since passed. You
| can see the possibility of that still floating around in old
| import/export features that haven't been deprecated or removed
| yet.
| D13Fd wrote:
| The problem isn't Wikipedia though, it's Google's inability to
| filter all of the modern SEO crap from search results.
|
| If Wade made a website/wiki today, it's not going to be stifled
| in Google results by Wikipedia. It's going to be stifled by all
| of the meaningless, useless content-farm or even AI-generated
| junk, plus ads, that Google puts at the top.
|
| I'm not saying that filtering that stuff is easy or even
| achievable for Google. But the problem is not the fact that
| Wikipedia exists, it's the absolutely overwhelming amount of
| junk that is not really operating in good faith but that is
| really good at getting ranked in searches.
| dvt wrote:
| Totally agree. Google/Bing/etc. are offloading the hard work
| of sifting through garbage to Wikipedia. That's why the top
| result is always Wikipedia followed by about 3 pages of
| listicles and clickbait.
|
| Heck, YouTube is linking to Wikipedia for _fact-checking_
| purposes. Is that not absolutely insane to anyone else?
| [deleted]
| louwrentius wrote:
| This comment is just as part of this "cultural battleground"
| you speak of. No links to research that strengthens your point.
| We need more that just a knee jerk emotional response to
| articles than this.
|
| For me this effort of Jesica Wade is noteworthy in the sense
| that it seems that women scientists don't seem to get the
| credit they deserve. That there seems to be a need for this
| work.
| bakugo wrote:
| >women scientists don't seem to get the credit they deserve
|
| Could you provide some links to research that strengthens
| your point?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Wikipedia has become a bureaucratic behemoth sucking up
| donations
|
| Every large organisation becomes bureaucratic - you are holding
| them to fictional standards thay have never been achieved
| [deleted]
| bergenty wrote:
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Wikipedia's credibility is not based on gatekeeping.
|
| Gender issues aside, Wikipedia could give a biography page to
| every homeless person and their credibility would only improve.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| But its usability would go down. How many people named Smith,
| Li or Gonzales are out there? Good luck finding the right one
| if the count of entries go into hundreds of thousands.
|
| Also, why limit yourself to living people only? And once you
| add, say, everybody whose name has been recorded in writing,
| you are probably looking at 15 billion or so.
| hbrn wrote:
| How exactly would it improve?
|
| Right now any person in the world can contribute to Wikipedia
| because of their notable sources policy. Any person in the
| world can validate and correct mistakes.
|
| Would homeless people write their own biography? Noone will
| be able to verify this information. How in the world this
| improves credibility?
| [deleted]
| secondcoming wrote:
| It's Wikipedia, not LinkedIn
| civilized wrote:
| Last I heard, Wikipedia doesn't want to carry an article for
| every university professor or scientist who has published some
| papers. In glancing through Wade's entries, it seems like many of
| them are just published scholars without any additional
| notability. I wonder if Wikipedia's notability rules are being
| uniformly respected here, or are they being selectively applied
| based on the gender of the person?
|
| I think it's great that Wade is bringing more visibility to
| lesser-known female scientists, but if we are valuing that, I
| think we should do so regardless of the subject's identity. Maybe
| Wikipedia should relax its notability rules a bit for scholars.
|
| If you are inspired to downvote this, I would be curious to know
| if you disagree with my proposal, or just dislike that I brought
| up the issue at all.
| robswc wrote:
| I was curious about this very thing. At first I thought this
| was a really cool thing she was doing. I think everyone should
| be rewarded for their hard work, research or discoveries.
|
| I guess I can't say I'm a fan of the way she went about this
| though, after reading some of what she's written:
|
| Her comment:
|
| "The problem is not that she's not notable, or that @Wikipedia
| editors are a bunch of sexist trolls waiting to jump on the bio
| of an impressive scientist"
|
| Seems to be in reply to this comment:
|
| "There is a lack of significant independent coverage. Getting
| an award from the local YWCA does not help her meet any
| notability criteria. As a for notability as a scientist, my
| search in Google Scholar found a grand total of 1 citation of
| papers she has authored or co-authored. Just because she works
| for the government doesn't mean she can't publish papers (and
| she has), the only restriction is if her work is classified.
| Her participation in the discovery of element 117 appears to
| have been very minor. Her name does not appear in the Oak Ridge
| publication "The Discovery of Element 117". Her Oak Ridge
| autobio says her part of the discovery of the new element was
| to "contribute ... to the purification of the Bk-249 used to
| help discover Z=117". Sounds like a very minor role in an
| undertaking involving a large number of people. I don't see
| convincing evidence that she is notable as a scientist or meets
| WP:GNG. I agree with the others who cited WP:TOOSOON as an
| issue."
|
| This is all found on the wikipage that was part of the original
| article:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
|
| Which I honestly find pretty reasonable. If you were to make a
| Wikipedia article for every college professor, we'd have a
| pretty bloated Wikipedia, lol.
|
| That said, I really do hope that maybe we could focus on
| quality vs quantity. I don't doubt that there are 1000 people
| out there deserving of a Wikipedia page... I also don't doubt
| that perhaps some of her examples don't really qualify, given
| Wikipedia's guidelines.
| berkes wrote:
| > Which I honestly find pretty reasonable. If you were to
| make a Wikipedia article for every college professor, we'd
| have a pretty bloated Wikipedia
|
| Why would that be a problem? What is such a Long Tail costing
| us? It's not like there is scarcity like a libraries'
| bookshelves or pages in a journal.
|
| And what would be the line of bloatedness? Maybe it already
| is way too bloated, and a wikipedia 10% the current size is
| better?
| robswc wrote:
| >Why would that be a problem?
|
| I imagine it would be harder to navigate, especially in a
| few decades, if every combination of First name, Last name
| had a couple entries. There's already 7 for my name. Sure,
| you could say its not that much harder to navigate... but
| you can't say it makes things easier or "better."
|
| I would honestly defer to Wiki contributors and maintainers
| on this, as I'm sure they have better reasons... but my
| intuition just tells me that letting Wikipedia be a dumping
| ground for any person that published a paper would just not
| end well.
|
| >Maybe it already is way too bloated, and a wikipedia 10%
| the current size is better?
|
| Perhaps. I think they should do a lot more "merging" of
| topics.
| ElCheapo wrote:
| Why not have 8 billion entries for each and every one of
| us? If you remove any popularity boundary then this is the
| only logical conclusion
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Names especially tend to cluster which makes signal harder
| to find in noise. Wikipedia is meant to be searchable.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| This tweet seems to be the source of that remark from her; it
| is difficult to say who exactly the sexist troll remark is
| directed at since it's worded in a sly way which says the
| problem _isn 't_ sexist trolls.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20190210190740/https:/twitter.co.
| ..
|
| It's a very trollish way to accuse somebody of being a sexist
| troll. Like if I were to say to a third party _" Jim and I
| had an argument.. the problem ISN'T that Jim is a fascist
| asshole, but rather that..."_ Strictly I'm not accusing Jim
| of being a fascist asshole, but really I am.
| civilized wrote:
| I don't know if she's trying to do that. To me it reads as
| humorous candor - baldly naming the thing people are
| probably suspecting and then saying that's not happening.
| robswc wrote:
| Yea... seems a bit immature too. Didn't address anything
| the wiki dude said and blamed "society at large" for not
| producing enough notability for wikipedia.
|
| Also in that twitter thread she says:
|
| "She may have discovered an element, .."
|
| Ironically, it seems the wikieditors did more research
| because they posted
|
| "Her Oak Ridge autobio says her part of the discovery of
| the new element was to "contribute ... to the purification
| of the Bk-249 used to help discover Z=117""
|
| Using the very source that she used to create the article,
| it is known that she:
|
| 1) Did not discover an element
|
| 2) Wasn't even on the team that discovered it
|
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessine)
|
| I really appreciate her effort and goal but with just this
| one article she's:
|
| - spread misinformation (possibly deliberately)
|
| - broke wikipedia's rules on "canvassing support"
|
| - accused people of bigotry (for merely disagreeing)
|
| All in all, not very helpful to her cause at all... instead
| of celebrating what is clearly an interesting person, we
| are now here debating accolades because the original author
| got carried away.
| petee wrote:
| Lowering notability to allow more entries will just lead to a
| flood of mediocre articles not backed by much, which wikipedia
| already has a problem with.
|
| The end effect is new articles don't get the attention they
| need, existing articles will get less attention as a result of
| more articles to patrol overall -- I've already seen less
| popular subjects become targets of vandals or activists,
| sometimes its subtle perversions of facts; with only a couple
| page watchers, these are far more likely to pass under the
| radar.
|
| Articles can go years with offensive or misleading info if not
| attended, which is fine for run if the mill articles, but not
| for pages about living people, where the content can affect
| their lives or employment.
| petee wrote:
| I wanted to write a bit extra about wiki policy, less my
| opinion and more an interpretation of the current state of
| policy enforcement:
|
| In theory wikipedia aims to be a mirror of the current times.
| As they say, if wikipedia was around in the 1500s it would
| say the sun revolves around the earth, according to notible
| sources at the time, like it or not.
|
| A gender bias in wiki entries then in theory would also
| mirror biases in our current media, i.e, if news is only
| written about men scientists, then thats all there will be
| for notible sources. It would be more effective to petition
| news sources to write more comprehensively about women in
| science, which is the real problem, instead of just fighting
| policy on one website.
|
| The end goal should be to fix the bias at the source, not
| lower wiki standards to fix a problem created elsewhere.
| tgv wrote:
| I have published, and I definitely don't want, need nor deserve
| a wikipedia entry. I'd say too many people already have one. If
| a scientist has made a bit of school, fine, but otherwise: no
| entry just for having published.
| robswc wrote:
| Yep. I've also won awards and have published a paper (co-
| authored) but I imagine if I were to create a wiki entry it
| would be deleted under the same exact standards.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Same.
|
| God help any of us if we're required to start maintaining our
| own wikipedia pages along with linked-in, pub-ed, CVs etc...
| petee wrote:
| Lucky for you Wikipedia considers editing your own page to
| be a conflict of interest, and is frowned upon. Article
| subjects are routinely reminded that they do not _own_
| their article, as it should be a reflection of notible
| sources that exist
| LatteLazy wrote:
| All the more of an issue: if an ex or disgruntled
| whatever starts a page about me, I am unable to correct
| it or get it deleted? For once I am glad us brits have
| such insane liable laws... :)
| petee wrote:
| If it were entirely factual, based on notible sources,
| and met the usual criteria, then no it probably wouldn't
| be deleted.
|
| If it is factually incorrect, or has no approved sources
| then it would be fairly easy to get help either deleting
| the offending material, or even having the article
| deleted outright. Wikipedia has a few ways to report
| issues, but even just asking an administrator on their
| talk page to take a look, is fairly common.
|
| Wikipedia takes living persons more seriously, and has
| higher standards than other articles. Beyond just
| reverting, some edits are irretrievably deleted if
| warranted.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_
| liv...
| Ekaros wrote:
| I think standard should be something like reasonably well
| known in relation to the field in question. And enough
| appearances in media at least print. It is rather hard
| standard to pin down, but at this point being scientist is
| not exactly rare job and neither is being professor. So to be
| notable you need rather decent level of visibility.
| thelock85 wrote:
| > I think it's great that Wade is bringing more visibility to
| lesser-known female scientists, but if we are valuing that, I
| think we should do so regardless of the subject's identity.
|
| _we_ are not because the initiative and productivity of Jessica
| Wade isn't there, not because of notability rules. Yes, some
| lesser known scientists were deleted but that seems to be a
| second order challenge. The "valuing" comes from the group or
| individual effort to make it happen which in turns forces a
| serious consideration of rule changes.
| civilized wrote:
| I think the gendered aspect here comes from Wade's
| willingness to disregard Wikipedia's rules and Wikipedia's
| general permissiveness toward her behavior in particular so
| far, not merely her initiative and productivity.
|
| If it had been allowed, you can pretty much guarantee there
| would have been an effort to put every scientist on Wikipedia
| by now. Wikipedians love science and they love the niche,
| which is why notability thresholds exist in the first place.
| And they are taken seriously and enforced - that's why
| there's so much discussion of them on Wikipedia. For whatever
| reason, these rules matter to the community.
|
| This is not to say Wade did anything wrong. But this is the
| context.
|
| Hopefully this all spurs a reconsideration of the rules. The
| current situation is obviously unfair.
| aaron695 wrote:
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