Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia points to wider bias
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
How? Like, I don't really have anything else to add - I'm just curious how could you possibly be so sure before you even opened the article.
>> At some point we can't hide behind correlation is not causation anymore.
Is it still hiding if it's true?
And this proves what exactly? Putting aside that you didn't "know" anything, all it shows is that you made a correct guess. On what basis? Well, probably because the media have been yammering on about gender bias for years. So you're confusing your own prior bias with reality. Congrats. You've discovered confirmation bias.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#...
Disregarding the rest of the sentence, would you mind expanding on this? TBH currently your comment just seems flippant, ignorant and without substance otherwise, but perhaps you could edit it to improve it?
Normally, when you read a story like this, someone created an article and someone else petitioned to have it deleted (with an "AfD") and there's a whole debate log you can read, and you could try to assess people's biases from the comments they left in the AfD.
Here, though, no article was ever created (prior to 2018, when Strickland was awarded her Nobel). Instead, a beginner editor wrote a draft of an article through the "Articles for Creation" ("AfC") process. AfC drafts are, apparently, reviewed by admins before being promoted to the "mainspace" of real articles. You can read the draft here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=842614385
This is a stub article --- merely the beginning of a real article. And that's fine; it's how lots of good articles start out. But it's easy to see how an admin churning through AfC stub drafts might not have clearly understood the notability of the subject. The article links mostly to the professor's own research group. There are hundreds of thousands of academics whose position in the encyclopedia could also be established with links to their research groups!
What I think is probably more important here though is that the original article, the one we talk about as being "deleted", was created with a special process where the author asked for permission to have it added. That's not how Wikipedia ordinarily works; you have to opt in to the permissions process. The author could just as easily have simply created a Strickland article in the mainspace, and the process that deleted it would have been more formal, would have included appeals, and there'd be a log of the reasoning. It likely would have survived. The author of the draft essentially asked for that not to happen, by using the AfC process.
It seems important to add here: had it been an actual article, and had it been deleted through a speedy deletion or a full-blown AfD process, it would be more difficult to get a Strickland article onto WP in the future (not "difficult", just "more difficult"). But there wasn't, so, in the entire span of time prior to Strickland's Nobel, anybody could have created a stub article for her and her work. From what I can tell, nobody did. That, to me, is the more telling phenomenon here, not the draft deletion.
Late edit
Complicating this story a lot, something I missed earlier: there was a tiny stub article on the site in 2014, but it was speedy-deleted for copyright infringement. (Thanks, commenters below!)
If articles such as this get stricken off and she hadn't won a novel prize someone would just cite "deleted as before" when someone attempts to start a new article again.
(There was a deletion on this topic, which I missed and someone pointed out upthread --- but it was for copyright violation, not for notability, so again: there's no "as per" bias against an article for this subject.)
Yup, that's really the crux of it. Wikipedia isn't meant for every tenured professor to have a page, the same way an actor with only one IMDB credit doesn't get a page either. And sadly that stub article doesn't seem to clearly explain why this particular professor does.
In hindsight "Nobel prize laureate" is obviously notable... but it's the job of someone creating a page to make the notability rationale clear.
The lightbulb came about through small revolutions and breakthroughs but nobody remembers the early ones to show the idea of the concept.
I'm not saying we need 7-8Bn pages for every human, but frankly a professor has made an impact on their field of they're at that level. It's not "just another job" in the same way that a CEO gets a higher salary than a cleaner.
Plus professor in the rest of the world outside of the US tends to be held to the US tenure standard from what I can tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(academic...
If the Wikipedia editor didn't just Google the person if there were no links why didn't they go to some minor effort rather than just assuming said article is bunk.
Or again, after a very quick search realise the person is senior and publish asking for more public input on the topic/atricle.
The fact it was deleted instead shows either a problem with the mods or a bias among the mods. I fail to see how that isn't becoming more the case.
Most conversation on this is around defending a wiki admin from not being capable of determining good from bad which is getting stupid.
It is not their role to do so. Or put another way, it is no more their role to do it than yours.
Furthermore, the admin is likely not a domain expert and it makes sense to send it back to the author who clearly knows more to say "Hey, we need citations." Which is what was done.
> Or again, after a very quick search realise the person is senior and publish asking for more public input on the topic/atricle.
This was more or less done: The rejection notice said more input was needed.
As someone who spent time in academia: I'm definitely against creating pages for researchers who merely have published a lot. Their work has to be significant. While hers clearly was, it was not referenced.
> The fact it was deleted instead shows either a problem with the mods or a bias among the mods
Frankly, the fact is that you are not aware of Wikipedia's AFC submission process. Please take a look here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio...
And the guidelines for reviewers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Articles...
Specifically, look at the review flowchart:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a8/Flow_ch...
It very clearly states that if an AFC article is not reliably sourced, it should be rejected.
While I can't speak for the actual biases of the admin, the article would have been rejected by any unbiased admin who follows the process.
> Most conversation on this is around defending a wiki admin from not being capable of determining good from bad which is getting stupid.
I agree it is stupid, but the stupidity arises from the CBC article: They chose to highlight this without doing the appropriate work to understand how Wikipedia works. While the bias they speak of may well be very real, they didn't pick a good example - opting instead for sensationalism.
Before Donna Strickland was awarded her Nobel, nobody opted to do this. So the real critique here isn't that Wikipedia admins are hostile to women scientists (though, for all I know, they may be), but rather that Wikipedia volunteers don't generate articles for them spontaneously. That's a problem, but it's a different kind of problem.
It's a bit sad that so many commenters do not understand this basic fact.
Looking at so many of the comments here: People have no idea how Wikipedia works, and to a certain extent, even what it is. People are treating it and its admins as a separate entity from the rest of the world, when in reality both contributors and admins are you and me. Whenever I see a comment here saying "Well, the admin could have at least done a Google search...", I realize people have no idea what they are talking about. Why are they expecting an admin to Google about every single article they review? It's like asking the editor of a newspaper to go do some research himself instead of complaining about a freelancer submitting a poorly sourced article.
I can now relate with those teachers who in the early days of Wikipedia kept forbidding it as a source in school papers. It's been around 20 years, and it's quite clear from the comments that even well educated folks do not understand it. Wikipedia has lots of problems, but also lots of benefits. It's critical to understand its shortcomings if you intend to rely on the information contained within.
Wait, is it somehow not still forbidden for that use? What kind of clown show are these teachers suffering?
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...
Main space articles are restricted to people like me: confirmed and auto-confirmed users (I.e. some small number of unreversed edits over some short time).
I was correct after all. I should have just checked but I thought perhaps the rules had changed since I last contributed. Unsurprising that that comment was downvoted haha! Classic HN.
I didn’t mean to imply it’s hard. Just that the default way to create an article is to use AfC for someone new to WP. It’s not surprising that someone used that because it is pushed really hard. That is, it’s easy to bypass, but the fact that they picked this method isn’t surprising.
It’s like saying “Sure, you took the photo of your brother the President so you could just use OTRS and it’ll be fine to include” but like most people are going to give up once they hit OTRS.
> The author of the draft essentially asked for that not to happen, by using the AfC process.
That’s not fair. They were just using the default flow for new users. They didn’t “essentially ask” anything.
I wish news outlets would stick to reporting the news.
Surely publishing Nobel-level work in your field means you have already "risen to prominence."
And it's fine for them to get heat when they make bad decisions, or when people notice that those decisions are systematically biased. I don't have to solve the problem to say it's bad.
Anyway, as an admitted pedant, even I didn't make a big deal of the title.
This is not some marvel movie.
If someone has won the Nobel prize they've been changing and contributing in a huge way to their field of interest for many years.
You don't have to live with the fact that your institutional process for sending articles to this binary classifier is biased, per the published study discussed in the article. Women's profiles make up 19% of the profiles on wikipedia but 25% of deletion nominations.
Even if your classifier was totally gender-blind (unlikely), by virtue of the process that leads to the classifier being invoked, more women's articles will be deleted.
"Studies show that women’s biographies are slightly more notable than men’s (Wagner et al., 2016)"
They could relax the standard for deletion and it wouldn't hurt anything. If some editors think someone is prominent and others don't, leave the article in place, even if the "not prominent" side has a majority. If the article doesn't meet standards, tag it as a stub or with the "multiple issues" tag.
I think that's more a reflection of current society, of which people who create Wikipedia are recruited. If you want something more isolated from the whims of common folks, you still have Encyclopedia Britannica:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Donna-Strickland
Except, oops, the oldest article in EB about Strickland is from mid-2019:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190601000000*/https://www.brit...
Hey, Wikipedia included her in late 2018 -- half a year before Britannica! I mean, you may be disappointed that someone didn't pick her for inclusion in Wikipedia before her Nobel award but then I have to ask what do you think about Britannica if you consider Wikipedia to be the one in need of a overhaul? Britannica is supposed to be written by subject experts, right? Not by us poor folks in our free time. Why didn't they include her years ago?
> They could relax the standard for deletion and it wouldn't hurt anything.
Then you're one of the inclusionists. It's a perfectly valid stance that some other editors will disagree with.
If an article about a professor is written and has virtually no references, then it's not the admin's job to do research to see if she is notable or not. It should be tagged as "needs references" and if they are not provided, eventually deleted.
In her particular case, the article didn't even exist - only a draft did - which was not approved because it had no references. The rejection notice specifically suggests resubmitting with references.
The story/study about bias is interesting, but they picked a poor example to showcase.
This is likely the source of most biases.
Again. Leaving an article and requesting additions from the public is drastically different to deleting it because it doesn't meet some arbitrary standard.
This case proves that something in that process is making Wikipedia all the poorer for this being the case.
Correct, but irrelevant. There was no article. Only a draft specifically created and submitted to be reviewed. It was reviewed and fair feedback was provided. This is different from the process where an article already exists and is marked for deletion.
Edit: See here for more details:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28237054
Edit 2: There apparently was another article in 2014 which was deleted. The information above is about the more recent AFC that was deleted.
> "But then [they] realized, 'Oh dear, it's even worse than we thought.' Because she did have a Wikipedia page. But it was nominated for deletion and then deleted."
If the article is misleading that's on them, not on us for believing the CBC did their homework.
> Because she did have a Wikipedia page. But it was nominated for deletion and then deleted."
The assumption people are making is that the Wikipedia page was appropriately written. If the page was just one line: "Blah blah is a tenured professor at a university", it changes the perspective completely.[2]
Additionally, as a reader, you should read a bit critically: Did you not think to ask yourself "Why was it deleted?" and then evaluate how well the article is written? Other commenters clearly did. As another commenter pointed out, they didn't interview any admins - all they did was get a statement from the Wikimedia foundation. It took less than an hour for me to find the article that was deleted, and trace through the Wikipedia process to see why it was deleted and what Wikipedia's policies are.[1] This is all absent from the article.
It's a pity, because the actual study probably is good and interesting, but that got buried because of shoddy journalism.
[1] In that the policy would recommend deletion even if this was a man.
[2] And oh boy I've found pages like that of professors I've known. And many of them really didn't do work warranting a Wikipedia entry.
But you are defending a Wikipedia editor for deleting a entry on a prominent scientist whose work eventually earns her a Nobel prize without any research at all...
I did not say that.
At all.
The onus is on you to understand what the article does and does not contain. The criticism of the article is about possibly vital pieces of information that are excluded. It's pretty obvious on a single read of the article that there is information missing.
The "extra work" is to uncover that missing piece, which is not your responsibility. However, being aware that then article is excluding relevant information is. You and only you are responsible for what you believe, and how you evaluate information coming to you.
Sorry, I do not want to engage with you if you don't read my comments properly.
> But you are defending a Wikipedia editor for deleting a entry on a prominent scientist whose work eventually earns her a Nobel prize without any research at all...
Yes, because that Wikipedia editor is not getting paid to do the research. Nor is it the editor's defined role. The journalist, however, is, and it is their role to do so.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...
Of course the point is that GP's whinging about headlines is silly. Her Nobel paper was published in 1985.
says that the 2014 version was deleted as "Unambiguous copyright infringement".
That will be why those revisions are no longer accessible.
Of course these questions are unanswerable due to the specific type of the deletion. Curious.
Good job on chasing this down!
> It found that women make up only 19 per cent of all profiles, but account for a quarter of page-deletion recommendations.
So, 19% of profiles, "25%" (no percentage given) of deletions - it's not insanely far off being the ratios I would expect. There are going to be some bias in there due to historic roles of men and women in society (a large number of historic politicians will be men for example).
> A well-known example is what happened to Canadian scientist Donna Strickland, who couldn't be found on Wikipedia immediately after she won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2018 (although she does have a Wikipedia page now.)
Tonnes of University Professors also don't have Wikipedia pages, despite being well published and contributing tonnes to their fields. At best they can hope to be a reference on a Wikipedia page. Some even prefer it like this.
> Another issue is that most of Wikipedia's editors are men.
Is there actually any evidence at all that gender is a notable factor? It just seems like speculation. From the original numbers, it seems like deletions are roughly equal to representation.
What this article really _fails_ at though is to actually review the Wikipedia edits [1]. In 2014 it was requested for deletion due to 'G12. Unambiguous copyright infringement' [2].
Ultimately though, if you don't like what Wikipedia are doing, stop giving them money and start your own - there is nothing stopping anybody. For example, RationalWiki was created after their articles were attacked on Conservapedia [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Donna_Strickland&...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:G12&red...
I've also seen studies (I can't find them but I recall them) where they looked at Open Source contributors and the authors defaulted to male if there was no gender information available.
The real problem with Wikipedia is that it (the volunteer community) is not able to enforce even the core policies... And the foundation that owns Wikipedia only hinders the efforts of the community. I hope the world gets a better structured encyclopedia project one day.
EDIT: perhaps the worst thing about Wikipedia is the anarchic decision-making procedures, the so called RfC. It's supposed to be a discussion that results in a "consensus" decision. Except that the Wikipedia term "consensus" isn't what one would usually think of as a consensus, and it's not well defined. Somebody who didn't participate in the RfC discussion usually makes the call on what the consensus is ("closes" the RfC). Except that they don't even need to examine the discussion very much, whoever does it can basically invent the consensus.
Many Wikipedians have seen the effects that paid advocates can have on an article. These paid editors tend to make obviously biased edits, be very persistent, and are easily identifiable. But some of them are much more sophisticated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
[0] https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4hl36/112-the-proph...
Actual crux of the issue. Stop trying to turn every fucking thing into a gender war.
If biases have been introduced in one way then there well could be additional biases which need to be checked for or which have come about through the first bias through correlation.
Whilst I don't agree with turning everything into a gender war I do feel Wikipedia as a "factual resource" is open for correct ridicule if it's not being fair and unbiased. Otherwise it's not truely factual.
If you see a pattern of people applying a standard disequitably, whether or not the standard is explicitly disequitable it’s worth discussing.
It’s like when I went to high school with a bunch of other 1% kids who believe their success is entirely about their hard work.
If I understand your claim correctly, it is just that simply there weren't any reliable sources to verify the information because there are not any articles about these women; however, the article further examines (or at least considers) that exact fact as being part of the issue - that these women are not being written about at the same rate as men.
> part of the issue - that these women are not being written about at the same rate as men.
The CBC article is plainly an (ignorant) attack on Wikipedia. You say yourself that the problem doesn't seem to lie at Wikipedia, so how is it acceptable to attack Wikipedia over it?
"Strickland's case wasn't an anomaly, said Tripodi. "What I discovered is even women who are meeting these notoriously difficult hurdles of notability are still twice as likely to be considered non-notable and nominated for deletion.""
"The Wikimedia Foundation, which funds Wikipedia, acknowledges that articles on the online encyclopedia are not representative of the impact that women have had throughout history, saying that mirrors the world's gender biases."
This fact is irrelevant (and misleadingly presented), it is about nominations, not deletions.
"Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it" (Saul Alinsky, "Rules for Radicals"). All manufactured social conflicts take something that can happen, exaggerate it, and harp on it.
Remember: we must extirpate every last vestige of "bias" from this earth so that the universe shall be made pure! We are just an inch away from utopia! All that stands in our way is that bias. If only it could be weeded out, exterminated from every dark crevice and corner of the land, from every brain cell of every man, woman, and child, all of our problems would be solved, for all would be clean and kosher. Until then, no stone shall remain unturned, no word of phrase left interrogated, until we are sure that every heart and every mind is one with the Party line.
She is notable now for having won a Nobel Prize. Good on the Nobel committee for ensuring she gets the recognition she deserves. It doesn't follow from that that she was notable before that happened. Wikipedia's notability standard is not "doing important work that will be recognized someday".
That's not right. The Nobel Prize didn't bequeath notability to her, it recognized the notability she already earned for herself.
From wikipedia[1]: >People are presumed notable if they have received significant coverage in multiple published secondary sources that are reliable, intellectually independent of each other, and independent of the subject.
From this definition, it seems you can't 'earn yourself notibility' directly, except as to earn it indirectly by having independent reliable sources publish about you.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability_(people)#...
It's also demoralizing for women/minorities.
When you lower the bar for achievements for some groups it paints them as less capable than others.
I like comparing Wikipedia to graffiti as it's heading in this direction at times but I'd think of it more like a notice board outside a town hall covered in signs for the next witch burning rather than a bathroom stall.
Edit: looks like there is IPFS version https://blog.ipfs.io/24-uncensorable-wikipedia/
Wikipedia has the same problem every major "community-driven" site does, those with the most time dictate the culture. And since there is no real compensation for that time, no one whose time is worth anything is going to be a major factor.
the distribution would be via something like a search portal with ranking similar to Pagerank, or create an explicit mechanism of social voting on articles similar to Reddit.
yes, it might also be biased but at least there will be no single source of "truth" and people can make their own mind which version to believe, and be able to do something like "sort by controversial" as they do on Reddit so see different opinions
Or historical facts which should be presented as being unbiased and isn't something which is now changing (unless we find an ancient dvd player in the pyramids).
If this existed and Wikipedia worked with this "factopedia" to pull from it I'd very happily contribute.
Potentially a wiki with some basic checks for having at least an undergraduate in the field of question?
It has been wittled down numerous times over the years but the skeleton of the man's life remains.
Wrote up a long description about how the equipment I used for my master's worked (fleshing out a stub article). Only to have some moderator (being extremely polite here) revert the whole thing because it was "uncited". When challenged I ended up getting temp banned for telling them "I know how it works I just built one". Haven't trusted or contributed since it's moving closer to a collective "what we want to know" information service which makes me want to invest more in an actual encyclopedia.
If I'm being voted down what is so great about the ignorance of the masses here?
Wikipedia has some serious (and in come cases concerningly anti-science) biases. Which is honestly love for them to address at a community level.
Now I remember why I liked encyclopedia encarta
I say this as someone who spent weeks writing up a new Wikipedia article with 50 citations and then had it graded a C because I used too many primary sources instead of secondary sources. I empathize with you, but I also empathize with the editors.
I'd argue having an unpolished article in need of work is better than a stub as it encourages interaction.
Not to mention being told to stop using a paywall for citing a journal (which is now out of print) as a source.
I'd say it is moving towards a "what we want you to think" corpus, with politically motivated activists taking over from objective editors. Those activists will use the language of editors, calling upon the myriad of policies put in place when Wikipedia was growing, while bending and changing that language towards their own goals.
Again I provided diagrams explaining how a piece of scientific equipment work in detail and this was disregarded because I didn't attach a link from some news outlet.
This is just brain damagingly stupid.
[citation needed]
I've seen plenty of references to "out of print inaccessible paper journals" in Wikipedia articles. They haven't been deleted.
One can disagree with their goal, but their goal is not to be a repository for all the worlds knowledge, but to be a summary of attributable, notable knowledge.
The problem is not citing out of print inaccessible paper journals, but about only citing that, and not citing secondary sources that helps establish notability. If nobody has talked about the primary source elsewhere, that means it likely does not belong in Wikipedia. Your out-of-print paper journal cite is useful to allow people to (with some effort, to be sure) verify the facts of the article, though.
One of the downsides, I feel, about the prominence of Wikipedia is indeed that people fight over inclusion in Wikipedia rather than accept that many things belong in other datasets instead. E.g. descriptions of possibly important overlooked research would be valuable. I have my own little collection of papers that have had little direct impact that I personally believe should have, for example, and I wish I had time to write about them.
So Wikipedia is built primarily around not even primary sources but secondary sources for a good reason.
Yes it may lose out in some valuable knowledge such as yours in the process -- but it achieves a greater good of minimizing Wikipedia being flooded by incorrect or even harmful information.
In the absence of an omniscient impartial arbitrer, requiring citations of secondary sources is a pretty good rule.
Got a citation for that supposed common knowledge? I couldn't resist myself, but seriously, wikipedia purports to be built on citations but how often have you tried checking citations to see if they contain the information a wikipedia article claims? Many times I have found that information in a wikipedia article is nowhere to be found in the citations given.
People often claim as I just have, criticizing wikipedia without providing specific examples, which wikipedia apologists seize on to dunk on the criticism. I don't think this is fair, keeping logs of wikipedia errors is a tedious hobby that most people aren't going to bother with for a number of reasons (because correcting wikipedia means wading into the bureaucracy which produced/permitted the errors in the first place, because 'everybody knows' that wikipedia is riddled with bullshit and pointing it out is thankless, etc) Nevertheless, I do have a specific example off the top of my head, which I found a few days ago:
> Brilliant Pebbles was a non-nuclear system of satellite-based interceptors designed to use high-velocity, watermelon-sized, teardrop-shaped projectiles made of tungsten as kinetic warheads.[64][65]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#B...
This sentence has two citations, and has the smell of truthiness. Tungsten kinetic impactors in space? I've heard that before somewhere, it sure sounds true! Besides, pebbles are like rocks, and a big ball of tungsten is like a rock. It all seems to jive and the claim has survived on this page for almost a decade.
The problem? It's bullshit and neither of those citations back it up. Follow either citation and look for any claim of the PB interceptors being made out of tungsten; neither citation claims it. And if you read what they actually say about the interceptors, you'll see that tungsten interceptors don't even make sense in the first place. The Brilliant Pebbles system was meant to put thousands of tiny "hit to kill" (kinetic) interceptors into orbit, which would detect and intercept ballistic missile launches during the boost phase. To do that, they would need to be nimble, and to be nimble they would need to not be a watermelon sized chunk of tungsten. You can't move that much tungsten around quick on very short notice without large rocket motors, but those citations describe tiny interceptors. Furthermore, launching thousands of chunks of tungsten like that into orbit would scarcely be practical, even by SDI standards of practicality. And why would tungsten even be needed? They're meant to intercept ballistic missiles during the boost phase; just about anything more substantial than a sea gull should get the job done.
If you want to get this fixed, be warned that this bullshit has been copied from wikipedia into 'reputable' publications like Popular Mechanics. So have fun explaining XKCD #978 to a wikipedian editor. I'll leave it for you to fix, if you care.
Had a professor at UG who showed a similar mistake. His solution. Only buy and trust books from reputable authors.
Not a great fix, but he wasn't wrong.
As for fixing errors on wikipedia myself? I gave up on that years ago when I tried to fix a few mispellings and had my changes reverted by bots within a minute.
[1] https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/nrcs142p2_0...
[2] https://www.gov.mb.ca/agriculture/environment/nutrient-manag...
This annoys people like you, who know stuff that isn't in Wikipedia, because it raises the effort required to get it in.
But at the same time it stops Wikipedia being swamped with fabricated stuff.
And provided a tractable problem whenever a dispute arises. Not "is this true" but "has this been cited in a trusted set of well known sources".
In this particular case, this possibly has the unfortunate side effect of reflecting the biases of the well known sources, which is a shame.
This isn't about a celebrities haircut.
This is an admin who doesn't understand a topic sitting as gatekeeper on said topic. It doesn't scale and causes problems.
Reducing the barrier to entry is better to encourage engagement. Higher barriers of entry should be needed for evolving topics as is appropriate but the fact Wikipedia has gone this way from my last attempt at a contribution (2004) is sad.