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Comment by youeseh | Hacker News Reader

Easy enough to fix: "Nobel scientist's deletion from Wikipedia before rise to prominence points to wider bias"

I wish news outlets would stick to reporting the news.

You are missing the point of the article. This woman WAS prominent AND doing notable work AND was still deleted. The Nobel Prize, for the most part, recognizes notable work by prominent scientists.

Prominent to optics experts before the award [EDIT: or perhaps not? See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236537 ], clearly, not to Wikipedia editors. It's easy to tell who's prominent in distant past (it's the people in history textbooks), but if your guide to recent prominence is things like lists of awards or frequent mentions in the media, you may be getting some corner cases from time to time.

Well, when you're wrong, and especially when you're exceptionally wrong as in this "corner case", it makes a lot of sense to try to understand what kind of process failure and institutional biases may have played a part in the bad decision. That's what the article's about.

One of the problems with binary classifiers is that you can't simultaneously make low errors in both directions. That's not "an institutional failure", that's practically a law of nature. You have to live with the fact that sometimes you're wrong. What errors to make is the core of the feud between deletionists and inclusionists.

>You have to live with the fact that sometimes you're wrong.

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.

The problem is that those numbers apply to articles that have already been written. Such small discrepancy could easily be explained by other things, such as editors writing new articles with their own bias. If you then apply even objective criteria to those articles and end up with deleting a larger portion of some group, I don't see how you can claim that the deleting classifier is biased without knowing what was deleted.

"Such small discrepancy"? Women's articles are 30% more likely to be nominated than by random chance. That's actually quite a large discrepancy to be explained away by handwaving about how editors might be biased in including too many non-notable women. The journal article even claims it's exactly the opposite:

"Studies show that women’s biographies are slightly more notable than men’s (Wagner et al., 2016)"

To me, 30% does absolutely not seem like a large discrepancy if there's push for inclusion of more women in Wikipedia and if these efforts are trying to compensate a 4:1 discrepancy in current articles. At that point you'd need several times more women's articles than you currently have so the idea that slightly more poor quality articles may be being deleted is definitely one of the obvious options.

Wikipedia editors need to fix that. The notability criteria are skewed, tending to think that every minor person in the pop culture is notable, but regularly dumping scientists and local elected officials (the latter is a problem when they run for higher office and people can't find information about them).

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.

> The notability criteria are skewed, tending to think that every minor person in the pop culture is notable

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.

Not only people in pop culture, but fictional people in pop culture!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daenerys_Targaryen

Repeating myself from upthread here, but it doesn't look like this person was deleted from Wikipedia at all. A newcomer asked if there should be a Strickland article, and a volunteer on the project said "based on the article you came up with, it doesn't look like there should be". The newcomer didn't have to ask; they could have (and probably should have) just posted the article directly, which is the ordinary process.

Right, the Nobel Prize didn't make her notable, it recognized her existing notability. What made her notable was the work she did before she got the prize. Wikipedian editors incorrectly failed to recognize her notability, because their byzantine bureaucracy is riddled with blind-spots.

Before rise to prominence? Presumably she did not publish the work that won her the Nobel and win it on the same day.

Surely publishing Nobel-level work in your field means you have already "risen to prominence."

How do you tell before such an award is granted whether someone's work is Nobel-worthy or not? There's plenty of already-published works right now that will earn dozens of Nobels to some people in the next decade -- care to tell us which works we should be looking for?

Luckily for me I'm not an admin on wikipedia, so I don't have to decide whose work is notable enough to justify a page. That's their problem.

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.

Modern research doesn't consist of magical researchers discovering new things in isolation.

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.

Or better yet: "You'll read this if we say 'Nobel scientist' instead of just 'Academic', right?"

Anyway, as an admitted pedant, even I didn't make a big deal of the title.

"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.""

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