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Comment by slooonz | Hacker News Reader

So, the flagship of the article is the wikipedia entry for "Clarice Phelps", notably for "her work on a team that discovered a new periodic-table element at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory". The article (heavily) implies that Clarice Phleps not having a wikipedia entry is her "not having her dues" because she’s a woman.

However, if we look at the authors of the original article, there is no mention of her : https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Synthesis-of-a-new-ele.... Of the 30 authors of the article, only two have a wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Oganessian and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_H._Hamilton).

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Then perhaps that’s a failing of the linked article to adequately convey her contribution, not an indication of anything else.

Same for the other authors without a Wikipedia entry. Their absences don’t indicate that Phelps too shouldn’t have an entry. Instead, for a significant discovery, it perhaps means that other people are similarly lacking in recognition.

Is your point that she shouldn’t have a Wikipedia entry, or that it’s absence was not necessarily related to her being a woman, or something else entirely?

The written goal of Wikipedia is to be a recording of what other sources in the world are stating, and explicitly not to be a primary source. Wikipedia is not a substitute when there is a lack of original sources reporting on a subject.

Because of this, there are a lot of experts and advocates that simultaneously dislike Wikipedia, want to fix it, and have a terrible experience while doing so. They want Wikipedia to represent the truth, and if there is a lack of original sources they want Wikipedia to fix that so people can access the truth. This in turn makes other people suspicious when advocates or experts edits Wikipedia, furthering the conflict.

None of this addresses the issues I raised with the GP comment, which did not cite a lack of original sources for Phelps or other scientists involved in related work as an explanation for the absence of Wikipedia articles on them. The GP also did not raise it as an issue at all that Phelps’ article might cross into the territory of sounding too much like a primary source.

Phelps is mentioned in many media sources so it would be difficult to claim she does not have enough original sources to support a wikipedia entry.

Here are some from prior to the creation of her Wikipedia page. The first 3 include the announcement of her winning an award, news coverage of the same, and a TED talk. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22clarice+phelps%22&rlz=1CD...

I must have misunderstood you. I read it as you arguing that some people are lacking in recognition despite significant discoveries.

This is why I highlighted the The written goal of Wikipedia. It is not peoples achievement or work that qualify them for articles. It is the secondary sources that write about people that qualify those people for articles, regardless if those people deserve it or not.

If there is a lot of secondary sources then there should very likely be an article. That is after all the purpose of Wikipedia.

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