4 ms·
Easy 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
by youeseh 5y ago
Easy 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.""