misleading title, the scientist Donna Strickland had had her page deleted before she won the Nobel prize and therefore did not have a page at the time she won the prize.
[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!
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.
I wish news outlets would stick to reporting the news.
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.
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.
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.
Anyway, as an admitted pedant, even I didn't make a big deal of the title.