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Comment by hackinthebochs | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what the problem is. Should every published scientist have a wikipedia page? It's not obvious that they should, not every scientist is notable to the general public. The fact that they received a Nobel doesn't mean they were notable before they received the Nobel.

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> "The fact that they received a Nobel doesn't mean they were notable before they received the Nobel."

It does, pretty much by definition of a Nobel prize.

What I can see happening sometimes is that the author doesn't have a page, but the page on the science clearly cites the person that ended up winning the Nobel.

In this case, the Wikipedia article on chirped pulse amplification has cited Donna Strickland as a co-inventor since 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chirped_pulse_amp...).

For phage displays, George P. Smith is not mentioned but at least cited as far back as 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phage_display&old...). By 2012, George P. Smith is directly mentioned. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Phage_display&old...)

Notable in this context meaning notable to the general public. But wikipedia isn't for original research, and so it needs some external institution to validate notability to the general public. A Nobel prize is one such mechanism.

Wikipedia is not just for the general public, many pages go into a lot of detail, and to people who understand the details of certain subfields of chemistry, these people might be well-known. I'm not a chemist, so I wouldn't know in this case.

The novel prise isn’t given to people already considered notable by the general public. Of the 200 and some physicists who are Nobel laureates most dedicated physics students would struggle to name more than a dozen, let alone arbitrary members of public.

They become notable to the public when they receive the award because if it’s public recognition, but they are awarded it based on their research contributions being notable.

> Should every published scientist have a wikipedia page? It's not obvious that they should, not every scientist is notable to the general public.

To me it rather shows what a bad judgement the Wikipedia moderators have on notability.

I really don’t think that is fair. Wikipedia mods aren’t expected to be experts on research chemistry or theoretical physics. As had already been noted before you commented, in many cases, including the ones cited above, the researchers in question were credited in the pages on the research. I think that’s reasonable for a resource intended for a general rather than specialist audience.

> Wikipedia mods aren’t expected to be experts on research chemistry or theoretical physics.

I agree. That is why they should not make a judgement to delete a Wikipedia page because of irrelevance before people who are knowledgeable on the respective topic have been consulted/given their opinion.

Wikipedia is fundamentally maintained by a pseudononymous swarm of editors who communicate asynchronously. This necessitates that all editors be more or less fungible. The average editor is not equipped to judge the statement "This work is scientifically important". The average editor is much better equipped to judge the statement pair "The Nobel committee holds this work to be scientifically important", "The Nobel committee constitutes a reliable third-party source".

No, you've got that all backwards. The Nobel recognizes the well-established notability of seminal work. It is not somehow an announcement of freshly discovered notability.

I don't disagree, but it does seem like if someone discovers something Nobel worthy that the discovery itself or the paper should have been cited within Wikipedia somewhere.

That said, Prof. Arnold definitely deserved a Wikipedia page before winning the Nobel: she had trained multiple students that had Wikipedia pages, won numerous awards, been elected to all three National Academies, did seminal work using DE, and has had many other research accomplishments.

In fact there are nearly always a series of prizes one typically sees before the Nobel, e.g. the Wolf Prize, Boltzmann medal, etc. It would be odd that someone comes out of left field and takes the Nobel.

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