3 ms·

I'd like to see a bit more analysis past the Erdös number. What could other (measurable) notability indicators be. Number of publications, length of scientific

• olliej 9y ago
  Ok, so the fundamental issue the blog references is "women who worked with Erdos are significantly more likely to be tagged for early deletion", that statement is backed up by the actual stats. So the question is, what is the cause for this discrepancy? It is possible that the women who worked with Erdos were much more likely to be irrelevant than the men -- by a factor of 4 -- in which case this would be reasonable. The alternative (her claim) is that they were marked for deletion because other editors default to assume that women are less relevant than men, unless proved otherwise. My question is: are the people who are tagging these articles for deletion field experts -- mathematicians or whatever -- who can actually understand the relative importance of individuals, or are they running through a checklist? If they're just running through a checklist does their checklist just reinforce old stereotypes? For example, old newspapers would not bother interview women engineers, scientists, etc, and even if they were historically women were absolutely kept out of those fields, so even if interviews were random, statistics would ensure low public visibility. Hence relying on the existence of published biographies is not sufficient, and is arguably less relevant than the Erdos number. Does it treat an Erdos number as being proof of importance in some cases, but not in others? If your default view is men are real mathematicians, and women are not, it is easy to interpret a low Erdos number as evidence of importance (it confirms your belief of relevance), but if you start out with the converse -- this person isn't relevant or important -- then it's just trivia.
  • stareatgoats 9y ago
    Hard to bring any hard 'proof' other than the circumstantial evidence brought to the table by the articles mentioned in the wiki article on gender bias on Wikipedia [0]. So since we are speculating anyway, let me add some of my own: Is it possible that a significant number of Wikipedia editors involved in the maths field have never experienced discrimination against women (perhaps because they are males)? Is it also possible that they are so proud of their own genus (or insecure in their gender-role), and/or so convinced that women should not involve themselves with such a "male" activity as maths, that they (probably subconsciously) assume that women could not have contributed in any significant way? In my own anecdotal experience such reasons have often seemed to me to be behind the urge to interrupt, minimize and in worst cases, harass, women in man-dominated professions. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia
  • carlmr 9y ago
    >My question is: are the people who are tagging these articles for deletion field experts -- mathematicians or whatever -- who can actually understand the relative importance of individuals, or are they running through a checklist? If they're just running through a checklist does their checklist just reinforce old stereotypes? For example, old newspapers would not bother interview women engineers, scientists, etc, and even if they were historically women were absolutely kept out of those fields, so even if interviews were random, statistics would ensure low public visibility. Hence relying on the existence of published biographies is not sufficient, and is arguably less relevant than the Erdos number. Exactly, these are the things you need to analyze before making such a claim. If for example we look at other confounding factors and find that these explain most of the variance, then we can discuss why these other factors might be influenced by gender (e.g. less interest from contemporary news publications).
• nkurz 9y ago
  I think you are being downvoted because your last paragraph is unnecessarily derogatory. Rather than having a preconceived mindset, I think she's being honest when concluding that it's an open question: "I cannot think of the Erdős Collaboration Graph without also thinking about who is represented and who is not, and why." The statistical point you raise is excellent, though, and deserves more discussion. Besides being male and female, are there other characteristics which distinguish the "notables" from the "non-notables"? Statistical analysis would normally require that the two groups be exchangeable other than being "male" and "female", and we know in advance that this is not the case. Is Wikipedia to blame if the otherwise valid criteria it chooses for notability (publications, citations) have a disparate impact on women? Probably not, but it's still a valid question of whether a different approach would produce a better societal effect, whatever that might be.
  • carlmr 9y ago
    >I think you are being downvoted because your last paragraph is unnecessarily derogatory. Rather than having a preconceived mindset, I think she's being honest when concluding that it's an open question: "I cannot think of the Erdős Collaboration Graph without also thinking about who is represented and who is not, and why." You're probably right. I don't need to bow to PC culture here though. Honesty on her part doesn't preclude her from being biased though. With a topic like this it's very difficult not to be biased. I just wish she had at least assumed her maybe being biased and analyzed the statistics a bit to see whether her intuition stands up to scrutiny. I think it's somewhat probable that it does! But you need to show it.