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misleading title, the scientist Donna Strickland had had her page deleted before she won the Nobel prize and therefore did not have a page at the time she won t
by fsckboy 5y ago
misleading title, the scientist Donna Strickland had had her page deleted before she won the Nobel prize and therefore did not have a page at the time she won the prize.
- codezero 5y agoThis is covered in the article. Also, most Nobel winners are notable for their work long before winning the actual prize.
- youeseh 5y agoEasy enough to fix: "Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia before rise to prominence points to wider bias" I wish news outlets would stick to reporting the news.
- cool_dude85 5y agoBefore rise to prominence? Presumably she did not publish the work that won her the Nobel and win it on the same day. Surely publishing Nobel-level work in your field means you have already "risen to prominence."
- jhgb 5y agoHow do you tell before such an award is granted whether someone's work is Nobel-worthy or not? There's plenty of already-published works right now that will earn dozens of Nobels to some people in the next decade -- care to tell us which works we should be looking for?
- cool_dude85 5y agoLuckily for me I'm not an admin on wikipedia, so I don't have to decide whose work is notable enough to justify a page. That's their problem. And it's fine for them to get heat when they make bad decisions, or when people notice that those decisions are systematically biased. I don't have to solve the problem to say it's bad.
- cf100clunk 5y agoOr better yet: "You'll read this if we say 'Nobel scientist' instead of just 'Academic', right?" Anyway, as an admitted pedant, even I didn't make a big deal of the title.
- rob_c 5y agoModern research doesn't consist of magical researchers discovering new things in isolation. This is not some marvel movie. If someone has won the Nobel prize they've been changing and contributing in a huge way to their field of interest for many years.
- Ensorceled 5y agoYou are missing the point of the article. This woman WAS prominent AND doing notable work AND was still deleted. The Nobel Prize, for the most part, recognizes notable work by prominent scientists.
- jhgb 5y agoProminent to optics experts before the award [EDIT: or perhaps not? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236537 ], clearly, not to Wikipedia editors. It's easy to tell who's prominent in distant past (it's the people in history textbooks), but if your guide to recent prominence is things like lists of awards or frequent mentions in the media, you may be getting some corner cases from time to time.
- cool_dude85 5y agoWell, when you're wrong, and especially when you're exceptionally wrong as in this "corner case", it makes a lot of sense to try to understand what kind of process failure and institutional biases may have played a part in the bad decision. That's what the article's about.
- jhgb 5y agoOne of the problems with binary classifiers is that you can't simultaneously make low errors in both directions. That's not "an institutional failure", that's practically a law of nature. You have to live with the fact that sometimes you're wrong. What errors to make is the core of the feud between deletionists and inclusionists.
- cool_dude85 5y ago>You have to live with the fact that sometimes you're wrong. You don't have to live with the fact that your institutional process for sending articles to this binary classifier is biased, per the published study discussed in the article. Women's profiles make up 19% of the profiles on wikipedia but 25% of deletion nominations. Even if your classifier was totally gender-blind (unlikely), by virtue of the process that leads to the classifier being invoked, more women's articles will be deleted.
- mcguire 5y ago"Strickland's case wasn't an anomaly, said Tripodi. "What I discovered is even women who are meeting these notoriously difficult hurdles of notability are still twice as likely to be considered non-notable and nominated for deletion.""
- Ensorceled 5y agoNo, that's the point, a woman doing such great work that she won the Nobel Prize had her profile deleted as "not notable".
- rob_c 5y agoThank you for saying it.
- BeetleB 5y agoPeople are assuming quite a bit. If an article about a professor is written and has virtually no references, then it's not the admin's job to do research to see if she is notable or not. It should be tagged as "needs references" and if they are not provided, eventually deleted. In her particular case, the article didn't even exist - only a draft did - which was not approved because it had no references. The rejection notice specifically suggests resubmitting with references. The story/study about bias is interesting, but they picked a poor example to showcase.
- rob_c 5y agoFrankly when did Wikipedia admins start getting praised for not doing a thorough job and acting as gatekeepers? This is likely the source of most biases. Again. Leaving an article and requesting additions from the public is drastically different to deleting it because it doesn't meet some arbitrary standard. This case proves that something in that process is making Wikipedia all the poorer for this being the case.
- BeetleB 5y ago> Again. Leaving an article and requesting additions from the public is drastically different to deleting it because it doesn't meet some arbitrary standard. Correct, but irrelevant. There was no article. Only a draft specifically created and submitted to be reviewed. It was reviewed and fair feedback was provided. This is different from the process where an article already exists and is marked for deletion. Edit: See here for more details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237054 Edit 2: There apparently was another article in 2014 which was deleted. The information above is about the more recent AFC that was deleted.
- jessaustin 5y agoThe current page was created in 2014. [edit: Although it looks like everything before 2018 got deleted in 2018? I don't understand all the notation on the history page. [0]] This is after she served in various roles (including president) at The Optical Society, and of course after developing chirped pulse amplification, for which she won the Nobel, during the 1980s. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&dir=prev&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...
- tptacek 5y agoAre we looking at different things? I just wrote a whole long comment on this after poking around on WP about it, and I'd be glad to know if I got things completely scrambled. Because what I see is a page created in 2018, and a _lot_ of intra-WP coverage of the process that led to there not being a page before 2018, all of which squares with what this article says.
- jessaustin 5y agoI'm probably misunderstanding something, but I do see some 2014 dates at the bottom of the page linked above. ISTM wikipedia was informed of this scientist in some fashion in 2014, and those contributions were deleted or set aside or whatever. I'm happy to be educated on this, but at least we can say that the process is obscure. Of course the point is that GP's whinging about headlines is silly. Her Nobel paper was published in 1985.
- tptacek 5y agoYou're right, I missed the stub from 2014. It was speedy-deleted for copyright infringement.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mjw1007 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Donna+Strickland https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=... says that the 2014 version was deleted as "Unambiguous copyright infringement". That will be why those revisions are no longer accessible.