> 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.
I cannot access the paper, but in the introduction it also says that only 40% of new members are women.
The most likely conclusion is probably a convex combination of
1. Most of the time it is quite clear who is the best candidate and no gender-based tie-breaker is required
2. Publication- and citation records (which anyway are a lousy measure for scientific merit) are very heavily gender-biased (this was asserted in another comment)
3. The AAAS and the NAS use saner criteria than those publication- and citation records.
My guess would be that 3. has the highest weight of these.
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.
> 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.
Wrong. The problem is not that girls are unable to feel a connection with Newton or Fleming (Most genius lives are not orbiting around sex after all). This plan don't understands (or simply choose to ignore) how many woman were inspired to became scientists after a father figure, or because their (male) fathers were scientists yet.
The real problem is that the model of "scientist girl" must compete with other --feminine-- roles. Models that show ways much more efficient and easier to became a rich, successful and popular woman. Models that spend trucks of money to assure that young girls notice them. The scientist girl must compete with one hand tied to her back, because this society choose to reward more a woman able to sing and dance, than a woman able to do research.
This is mostly a problem of woman versus woman, not of woman versus man.
Probably decades of dubious, non-reproducible, sociological research, without a real idea of how things really are in the field. Is just another case of blinded by ideology.
As a zoologist, I am perfectly able to appreciate the work of Jane Goodall and what she achieved. I don't need a "Peter Goodall" at all. This is why science was great twenty years ago and not-so-great now.
For as many centuries men have been called out to go to war, work and die in mines, sail the seas where many met their end and do other hazardous and often rather unpleasant work from which women were spared. Following your logic it would be necessary to ensure that women start working and dying in hazardous professions for a long time, dying or getting maimed at least as much as men do before there is a risk of 'overshoot' (no pun intended).
It’s as irrelevant to the core of the subject as the post it is replying to and is trying to pit against each other unrelated issues of the past. As it is a sterile way of discussing the very real issue of gender inequality today and - let’s face it - we all know where this strand of thought is coming from and where it’s going, people are downvoting.
Remember that poor men were historically just as disadvantaged as poor women. And they were never expected, or forced, to go die or get maimed in pointless wars.
The idea that women don't do science because they are dumb is correctly dismissed. But let me introduce a different, more interesting, idea. What if most women don't do science because they are smart?
Young people don't care about the numbers, they are impressed by success, and bios of most obscure figures doing science, lets face the ugly truth... aren't good models of success.
We are fixing the wrong problem here, with too simplistic premises (the problem is that people is ignorant / that we don't have exactly the same number of people in each demographic category doing science / That everybody should have the same interests and goals and think in the same way)
When the real problem to address is that working conditions in science are, often, terrible and that our society punish people in many different ways for wanting to be scientists
> When the real problem to address is that working conditions in science are, often, terrible and that our society punish people in many different ways for wanting to be scientists
Part of that problem was that the tenuous professional environment meant that very few scientists were willing to speak up when the science becomes politicized. With good reason, we saw the few that did get absolutely obliterated and their careers-ended - often going as far as then tarnishing them at a personal level.
As far as societal trust, scientists are not as bad as journalists yet, but they're going to get there[1]. The replication crisis was the backdrop of this, but the COVID pandemic made it very clear to anyone paying attention that the government dictates scientific consensus and any disagreement is squelched both by fellow scientists, and the prestige organizations in each field.
Now that this is being compounded with Woke-testing hires and publications, you've effectively ended the legitimacy of most publications, institutions, and papers.
I agree with the gist of what you say. Although I wouldn't say it's about smart or stupid - men are smart too, yet we make those questionable career choices.
It's rather about people understanding their situation pretty well. I think that we should assume that for ANY large group of people which isn't pathologically self-selected, they understand their own situation pretty well. They know what they have lose. They know what they stand to win. They know the tradeoffs they face. Better than those outside their group do.
It sounds trivial, but a ton of gender justice arguments just ignore it. For instance, tge big splash a while back arguing that women could get paid better if they only were as bold as men in asking for a raise, was suggesting women are systematically wrong about their own situation. As a group, not merely the odd individual. And I don't buy that.
The most plausible argument for the lack of women in X (or the lack of men in Y) to me always was simply that people don't want to be in a small minority if they can choose. Schelling's segregation model. That IS an argument for gender quotas, but is an argument AGAINST "sensitivity training" or similar efforts, at least for thinking they will fix balance problems.
> When the real problem to address is that working conditions in science are, often, terrible and that our society punish people in many different ways for wanting to be scientists
My wife was certainly smart enough to bail on science for the corp. software world for this reason, so count that as one data point in the women are smart category
There is/was an MIT computer scientist who argued that the reason why fewer female students stay with CS is that they take a more pragmatic view of the career prospects.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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... :)
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.
That relies on the person the article is about being notable enough to have sources. You won't get sources (let alone reliable ones) for my neighbour Barry. So any article about Barry (or any non notable person) is going to be unsourced...
That's one of the issues with articles about non noteworthy people...
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.
> 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.
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.
> “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.
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.
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.
If you want to be an X and are female, and then you see that 95% of people who do X are male... it's pretty rational to wonder if there's some social or selection barrier coming up that's going to make it difficult or impossible for you to do X. And that's if you even get to explicitly thinking about it: the message is so strong that "Xers are male" that many people will never take the leap of imagination.
> . it's pretty rational to wonder if there's some social or selection barrier coming up
That's a very modern take
Where I am from 90% of the people were farmers or worked in construction
I liked math and then I discovered computers, nobody in my circle knew about 'em, except one of my youngest uncles
People used to refer to it as "wasting time in front of a screen"
I have become a computer programmer nonetheless
People must understand that bubbles are much older than social networks and they were real bubbles, like people that never moved farther than a 100 kms from where they were born.
If this "theory" was true, we would all still be hunter gatherers.
People evolve despite the odds.
Columbus parents had a small shop that sold wine and cheese in a small city called Savona.
He became an explorer
Science as a profession is still not mainstream, there still an high chance of failing at it, it's pretty obvious that it is more common among people who are less risk adverse: young men.
> Columbus parents had a small shop that sold wine and cheese in a small city called Savona. He became an explorer
Outliers aren't too helpful in analyzing this. The question is: do people get discouraged from seeing few people like them doing something? Yes, in general, they do.
e.g. even if 99.9% of women get discouraged and avoids the profession as a result, every single one that doesn't is an exception one can point to. Individual outliers don't lend any basis for argument.
> If this "theory" was true, we would all still be hunter gatherers.
This isn't a very meaningful point. I'm not talking about things in disequilibrium. I'm saying, if you're a kid looking at a whole bunch of basketball players that are very differently shaped than you: maybe there's something wrong with your shape to go to the NBA. If you're a girl and see everyone working in math is male, you may rationally wonder about whether there's a path for you to succeed working as a mathematician.
(And you might also rationally wonder what life will be like if you're female in a 95% male industry).
> The question is: do people get discouraged from seeing few people like them doing something?
that's a good question and the answer is not definitively yes.
For a number of reasons.
First of all, there's the outlier and there are the pioneers.
Columbus was a pioneer (among others), not just an outlier.
Secondly, we don't have the data.
From my anecdotal experience as a long time tech worker, women are hired in greater numbers compared to the number of applications.
From my anecdotal experience and context (Europe, Italy) it's much harder to find them than men.
But when companies find them, they have no bigger problems than men to get the job.
I would say that if there are ten open positions and 20 men apply, 8 get the job, for the same job 3 women apply and 2 of them get the job.
I've been interviewing for the company I work for and I've adviced them to hire all the women that applied, not so much for men, approximately 1 in 2 is coming to the interview either under prepared or to test how much more they could ask to their actual employer.
> if you're a kid looking at a whole bunch of basketball players that are very differently shaped than you
There's a good chance that you are not fit for basketball.
Listen, I understand your point, I was a volleyball player in my teen years, I was good, not great, but I was shorter than most of the other players.
Turns out that's important to succeed as a professional player because other teams will get the tallest player they can find to win.
You are actively encouraged to persist if you're taller than average and discouraged if you're not and I think it's completely normal (of course there are exceptions, but the Karch Kiraly(s) don't grow on trees)
I did not succeed and that's ok. I wasn't crushed by that discovery, I just understood I wasn't playing in the same league of professionals.
It's nobody's fault.
In the same ballpark there's the fact that I probably succeeded as a programmer because I wasn't fit for volleyball and computers were much more satisfying.
If I was born 2 meters tall, maybe I would have abandoned CS for volleyball, who knows.
Maybe it's the same for other people too, they get more satisfaction from other jobs than science and choose them.
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.
> It includes six large posters of women scientists. This is not “inclusive”.
Yes it is. The aim of the diversity initiatives isn't to be neutral in their representative, pretending they exist in a vacuum, they are there to counter-act an existing bias in the world[1]. No boy is going to see that poster and think they can't be a scientist, because they're going to have grown up hearing about Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Hawking and listening to people like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson.
The reason you think that the inclusion initiative is exclusionary is because you are factually wrong about the likelihood of women going into certain careers in the USA today. From that source I cited:
>For the 2017-2018 academic year, women secured 22% of all bachelor’s degrees in engineering, and just 19% of degrees in computer science.
So you can say airy things about the USA being biased towards promoting female achievement, but the fact is the statistics show that there are still lots of areas in which women demonstrably don't see certain career paths as options.
Has it ever occurred to you that men and women often have different interests and value different things, and what impact that might have on career paths?
90%+ of elementary school teachers are women, which means almost all kids are taught from a young age that women are teachers. Should society be doing more to get men into teaching young kids? Or can we accept that maybe most guys don't want to deal with kids all day long?
Let's assume you're 100% right, and that men and women simply just have different interests and values (which seems a bit of a push, since that's completely confounded by the fact this issue varies wildly internationally), then these outreach programmes will let girls and women know the options available to them, and the women will choose not to take those opportunities.
Society should absolutely be encouraging more men into teaching. But that's the classic conundrum - people are working to fix a problem and you come in and say "No, no, don't fix that problem, fix this problem instead". I agree with you - more men should be encouraged to go into teaching, we need great teachers and it can be a very rewarding career - why don't you go and do something to make that happen.
>But that's the classic conundrum - people are working to fix a problem and you come in and say "No, no, don't fix that problem, fix this problem instead".
That's a complete strawman, nobody is saying that. People are pointing out the hypocrisy. The only problems in society that get widespread attention and support, are problems that impact women.
So no, if you want to be taken seriously then there would need to be parity in how these issues are treated.
It's not a strawman, you literally are saying that people shouldn't work on women getting into STEM because they aren't also working on getting men into education. What I'm saying is those are two different tasks, and it's unreasonable for you to ask someone who is doing 1 good thing to stop doing it because you want them to do another thing that you think is good.
>So no, if you want to be taken seriously then there would need to be parity in how these issues are treated.
Firstly, they already are taken seriously. Secondly, go ahead and look, there are plenty of campaigns to try and get more men into early years education.
>you literally are saying that people shouldn't work on women getting into STEM because they aren't also working on getting men into education.
Are you replying to the wrong message, or intentionally not quoting what you say I "literally" said?
Meanwhile, I have also noticed there aren't enough women working in mines and on roofs, collecting garbage etc. so I'm off to start my campaign to help.
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.
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.
> ....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
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]
I believe the guitar player demographics is now roughly at gender parity, at least in the UK/USA, so presumably whatever it was was cultural and the culture changed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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".
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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].
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you take a reductive point of view, everything in life – school applications, job interviews, business deals, legal battles, courtship, .... – involves some amount of self promotion and every form of social proof can be gamed/hacked to some degree.
(For example, in 2005 Google made up a brand new prize to award to Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson expressly for the purpose of padding out his O-1 visa application to move to the USA. Does that mean the O-1 visa requirements/criteria are bullshit? Maybe.)
(a) Wikipedia notability guidelines can certainly be gamed to some extent by motivated self-promoters who are willing to jump through hoops to place their pet topics in newspaper articles, research papers, published books, etc.
(b) Sometimes Wikipedia ends up rejecting topics that should be included based on a lack of sufficient third-party write-ups in secondary sources.
But Wikipedia still has to have some kind of guideline to prevent itself from being flooded with self-promotion spam, and the current notability guidelines and reliable source guidelines work better than many suggested alternatives.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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:
From what I can tell, Session does not have any Wired or TechCrunch articles written about it. Signal does have such articles in the original wikipedia entry.
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.
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?
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
> 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].
I would hope it's obvious that I've been pointed to these policies many times before, and acting on them didn't help the problem any.
It's exhausting as a volunteer with limited time working on a narrow area to have drive-by administrative editors who don't contribute to the subject, and bots with broken or overzealous criteria, snipe one of a half-dozen similarly sourced articles on the same subject that I've contributed six months after the last edit, with no meaningful means of redress no matter how many times someone links WP:DR to me.
The end result isn't a better Wikipedia, it's one fewer contributor.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Núñez 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I realize I'm biased, but considering the amount of extremely obscure people on Wikipedia it didn't seem like that much of a stretch.
I look at it this way: if I'm driving down the highway and see a giant bronze monument and I go to ask wikipedia about the artist, I'd just expect to find that information (regardless of how obscure they are).
Just some quick examples:
Texas A&M campus, there's a statue there honoring the lives lost in the bonfire collapse, wikipedia has no idea who the artist is.
A statue of Michael E. Debakey outside the DeBakey Museum and Library at Baylor College of Medicine... Wikipedia has no idea who the artist is.
A 27ft tall monument in the middle of Colorado Springs that millions of people pass a year, Wikipedia has no idea who the artist is.
A 22ft tall, 200ft monument outside NRG Park where the Houston Texans play, wikipedia has no idea who the artist is.
To me its more a case of "general information" I'd want to learn vs "oh this person is famous enough" to learn about.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
the previous commenter wasn't entirely being sarcastic. You are correct, a big part of the reason that certain topics are covered more than others is literally just interest by authors. There are many many more people interested in writing about video games etc than there are interested in writing about field's medalists. The best way to solve that problem is to either get writing yourself or encourage others to write.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>>> 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?
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).
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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, unless you have a credible source other than the article which you haven't shared. All it says are there were "several" entries that were deleted (out of over 1,600) and one that bounced back and forth but was ultimately accepted. That's... it.
There are lots of women who were missing from Wikipedia but who are 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.
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.
> “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.
> 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?
> 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.
It's a Very Bad Thing™ 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.
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.
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?
(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.
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.
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'.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w30510
The paper is not peer reviewed.