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.
