4 ms·

Prominent to optics experts before the award [EDIT: or perhaps not? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236537 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236

by jhgb 5y ago

Prominent 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 ago
Well, 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 ago
  One 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.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      The problem is that those numbers apply to articles that have already been written. Such small discrepancy could easily be explained by other things, such as editors writing new articles with their own bias. If you then apply even objective criteria to those articles and end up with deleting a larger portion of some group, I don't see how you can claim that the deleting classifier is biased without knowing what was deleted.
      - cool_dude85 5y ago
        "Such small discrepancy"? Women's articles are 30% more likely to be nominated than by random chance. That's actually quite a large discrepancy to be explained away by handwaving about how editors might be biased in including too many non-notable women. The journal article even claims it's exactly the opposite: "Studies show that women’s biographies are slightly more notable than men’s (Wagner et al., 2016)"
        jhgb 5y ago
        To me, 30% does absolutely not seem like a large discrepancy if there's push for inclusion of more women in Wikipedia and if these efforts are trying to compensate a 4:1 discrepancy in current articles. At that point you'd need several times more women's articles than you currently have so the idea that slightly more poor quality articles may be being deleted is definitely one of the obvious options.
not2b 5y ago
Wikipedia editors need to fix that. The notability criteria are skewed, tending to think that every minor person in the pop culture is notable, but regularly dumping scientists and local elected officials (the latter is a problem when they run for higher office and people can't find information about them). They could relax the standard for deletion and it wouldn't hurt anything. If some editors think someone is prominent and others don't, leave the article in place, even if the "not prominent" side has a majority. If the article doesn't meet standards, tag it as a stub or with the "multiple issues" tag.
- jhgb 5y ago
  > The notability criteria are skewed, tending to think that every minor person in the pop culture is notable I think that's more a reflection of current society, of which people who create Wikipedia are recruited. If you want something more isolated from the whims of common folks, you still have Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donna-Strickland https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donna-Strickland Except, oops, the oldest article in EB about Strickland is from mid-2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donna-Strickland https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.brit... Hey, Wikipedia included her in late 2018 -- half a year before Britannica! I mean, you may be disappointed that someone didn't pick her for inclusion in Wikipedia before her Nobel award but then I have to ask what do you think about Britannica if you consider Wikipedia to be the one in need of a overhaul? Britannica is supposed to be written by subject experts, right? Not by us poor folks in our free time. Why didn't they include her years ago? > They could relax the standard for deletion and it wouldn't hurt anything. Then you're one of the inclusionists. It's a perfectly valid stance that some other editors will disagree with.
- emmelaich 5y ago
  Not only people in pop culture, but fictional people in pop culture! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daenerys_Targaryen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daenerys_Targaryen

by jhgb 5y ago

cool_dude85 5y ago

Well, 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 ago
One 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.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    The problem is that those numbers apply to articles that have already been written. Such small discrepancy could easily be explained by other things, such as editors writing new articles with their own bias. If you then apply even objective criteria to those articles and end up with deleting a larger portion of some group, I don't see how you can claim that the deleting classifier is biased without knowing what was deleted.
    - cool_dude85 5y ago
      "Such small discrepancy"? Women's articles are 30% more likely to be nominated than by random chance. That's actually quite a large discrepancy to be explained away by handwaving about how editors might be biased in including too many non-notable women. The journal article even claims it's exactly the opposite: "Studies show that women’s biographies are slightly more notable than men’s (Wagner et al., 2016)"
      - jhgb 5y ago
        To me, 30% does absolutely not seem like a large discrepancy if there's push for inclusion of more women in Wikipedia and if these efforts are trying to compensate a 4:1 discrepancy in current articles. At that point you'd need several times more women's articles than you currently have so the idea that slightly more poor quality articles may be being deleted is definitely one of the obvious options.

not2b 5y ago

Wikipedia editors need to fix that. The notability criteria are skewed, tending to think that every minor person in the pop culture is notable, but regularly dumping scientists and local elected officials (the latter is a problem when they run for higher office and people can't find information about them). They could relax the standard for deletion and it wouldn't hurt anything. If some editors think someone is prominent and others don't, leave the article in place, even if the "not prominent" side has a majority. If the article doesn't meet standards, tag it as a stub or with the "multiple issues" tag.

jhgb 5y ago
> The notability criteria are skewed, tending to think that every minor person in the pop culture is notable I think that's more a reflection of current society, of which people who create Wikipedia are recruited. If you want something more isolated from the whims of common folks, you still have Encyclopedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donna-Strickland https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donna-Strickland Except, oops, the oldest article in EB about Strickland is from mid-2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donna-Strickland https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.brit... Hey, Wikipedia included her in late 2018 -- half a year before Britannica! I mean, you may be disappointed that someone didn't pick her for inclusion in Wikipedia before her Nobel award but then I have to ask what do you think about Britannica if you consider Wikipedia to be the one in need of a overhaul? Britannica is supposed to be written by subject experts, right? Not by us poor folks in our free time. Why didn't they include her years ago? > They could relax the standard for deletion and it wouldn't hurt anything. Then you're one of the inclusionists. It's a perfectly valid stance that some other editors will disagree with.
emmelaich 5y ago
Not only people in pop culture, but fictional people in pop culture! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daenerys_Targaryen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daenerys_Targaryen