Wikipedia BIOS for women scientists are more likely to be flagged for removal | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia BIOS for women scientists are more likely to be flagged for removal

thenextweb.com

7 pointssahin-boydas6 comments

I'm not sure the article supports the title's claim that women scientist biographies are more likely to be removed. The only evidence provided is that one woman wrote 700 articles about women scientists and 6 were removed. I'd say that's an amazing ratio honestly, most people who've ever tried to edit wikipedia know how harsh the site is about reversing/undoing even well meaning edits so I don't exactly buy the fact that 0.9% of this person's articles on women being deleted constitutes unduly harsh or sexist treatment.

Moreover, the article even says that women are less likely to get fellowships/awards (no source provided but I believe it) that would allow them to meet wikipedia's notability requirements for an article, so if anything it sounds like wikipedia is applying it's rules without discrimination but rather it's the scientific community/academia's discrimination that would make it more difficult for an article to get made according to wikipedia's guidlines.

The claim doesn't even make sense, since she's not comparing women bios with anything at all, much less male bios. Unsurprisingly, when activist editors target people who still don't have bios in 2019, despite at least a decade of diversity drives, you are often going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

(Frankly, only 6 out of 700 sounds like they are being treated with kid gloves! Of the several hundred articles I've written or started, way more than that have been deleted or attempted to be deleted, even ones where I can provide literally hundreds of references. A group must be very privileged indeed to have a <1% deletion rate given WP's heavy-handed deletionism these days...)

Er, that's "bios", not "BIOS". As in, biographies. The article has it right.

If female scientists have a BIOS, I haven't figured it out. But they do have biographies. Or at least, they would, if overzealous deletionists didn't have it out for them.

Gwern had an article on Wikipedia's deletionist culture.

https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

Why is bios capitalized?

It appears to be an error. My guess is that this was composed using a correction system that failed to recognize the plural of bio and substituted the best match it could find. I have this problem of pluralized forms of informal words not being recognized on my Android thus triggering substitutions that do not make sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com