Talk:Amanda Weltman

Deletions

Hi BU Rob13, I wanted to touch base about some recent deletions. Removing names of low-profile individuals I of course agree with. But I'm not sure why info--esp sourced to as major an outlet as Nature--about the gender equity affecting her scholarly horizons is less encyclopedic than, say, her childhood gymnastics? (I mean I guess if she'd grown up to be a professional gymnast, then I could see it, but since she grew up to become a professional academic, it seems germane!) Additionally, while I'm certain your instinct came from a good place, viewing childcare is too trifling a topic for the encyclopedia is...let's say, something four+ decades of labor and women's historians would take issue with.
To me the DUE problem with this entry is that it needs considerably more description on her apparently historic physics work, but I'm totally unqualified to add that; my suggestion would be we tag the section for expansion and expert attention. I personally also tend to split early and personal life sections and move the latter down; that would mean the part about marriage and children will show up subsequent to the main "career" section (also roughly more chronologically accurate, per the Nature piece). Perhaps that would help in the short term to keep the entry from feeling overly focused on domestic topics.
What do you think? Innisfree987 (talk) 01:10, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

@Innisfree987: Personally, I think the article was originally written with some (unintended!) biases. Please don't take this as any sort of attack on any of the editors who've previously worked on this article – these are hard things to avoid – but I'm going to pose a few questions. Would you write in a male scientist's article about how his gender helped him in the field? Would you write in a male scientist's article about how he cared for his children? These things are both interesting and important, but it seems to me they're also undue. They come from a place of being heavily interested in expanding the coverage of specifically female scientists on Wikipedia. This is a very noble and important cause, but it's important not to let that impact the article itself. If a female scientist regularly talked about gender inequality in the field, I would certainly think inclusion would be appropriate, but a one-off comment in an interview doesn't suggest it's a major aspect of this scientist's outlook on their position. Discussing child care arrangements of specific living individuals is a rather huge invasion of privacy, and not at all connected with their notability. It's akin to discussing what grocery store they shop at, in my opinion. (As an aside, I certainly do understand the importance of child care in aggregate; I am friends and/or colleagues with some of the researchers whose names appear in those searches!) ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 02:56, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

BU Rob13 I'm surprised you consider those as questions? I find it more or less self-evident that certainly, when we can get reliable sources discussing the influence of gender on male scientists' careers, that should be included (and those sources are more and more available as movements grow like refusals to participate on all-male panels, e.g., and secondary source coverage thereof); and yes I also think that when we have reliable sources on how people arrange work-life balance to make their careers possible, that's relevant biographical information that should be included as well, across genders. Child care isn't just important in aggregate; it's often integral to making individual notable careers possible. I also strain a bit to see the invasion of privacy in information drawn from an interview the subject gave to one of the leading science journals on the planet; this wasn't excavated from some obscure, questionably-reliable blog.

I also disagree with your guess about how articles like this take shape. And I say this without any personal stake in defending any given WP editors; I actually don't even really know who works on the women-in-science entries, as most often the science is too far out of my depth for me to be usefully involved. But my strong suspicion is that there are far more people like me who are only equipped to write up the non-science bits, and VERY few who can, e.g., write competently about dark energy for a popular audience (truly a specialized skill!), and so you wind up with entries more heavily drawn from articles like the Nature piece simply because of competence than because of a sense these are "women questions". Yes of course it's a problem that, even if things may be changing, to date there are still fewer sources asking male scientists questions about something other than the lab bench. But I don't think our having more such material for women makes it necessarily less biographically significant... that'd be troubling, no? It almost seems to risk a reading that it's not important because it's associated with women. Innisfree987 (talk) 04:11, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

tl;dr: I actually think the absence of this sort of material from male scientists' bios is something we should consider a deficiency in those entries, rather than its presence being a deficiency in this one. Innisfree987 (talk) 04:18, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps an RfC is a good idea. I really struggle to say we should be reporting on aspects of the day-to-day lives of article subjects, such as child care, etc. That sounds more like a tabloid than an encyclopedia to me. ~ Rob₁₃^Talk 06:55, 23 July 2017 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: Thing is we agree that high-quality sources--scholarly and popular--regard these topics as worthy of serious attention for the way they shape professional lives across genders, so excluding the material because it still feels tabloidy to a given WP editor seems like an NOR problem at least, no? An RfC is your call of course, I don't at all want to step on your prerogative there, so only for my two cents, it seems like it would reflect pretty negatively on the project to carry out an official debate as to whether to overrule scholarly consensus and declare topics like gender equity in upbringing and childcare as beneath serious intellectual consideration of the encyclopedia... I don't know. In all seriousness, maybe worth discussing with some of your friends who work on these topics? I think you'd find something close to unanimity that far from tabloid material, excluding these factors--when (and only when!) we have reliable sources from which to write about them--detracts from and even distorts our understanding of a given biography.

For what it's worth I want to emphasize I'm only pressing this point because I care about WP providing the best, most substantive biographies possible; I took a day to think about my reply because I really don't want to be unduly intransigent. And nor do I think any and all material should be included, or have a lack of concern for privacy (I certainly wouldn't support including any of it if not solidly sourced; most of what I do with my watchlist is deal with unsourced material added to BLPs...) It's just that my best understanding of the literature is that these topics bear on biography in serious ways. All the best-- Innisfree987 (talk) 22:49, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

@BU Rob13: FWIW I wrote this article, about a year back. Including the children's names was not proper, and I'm glad you removed them. The rest, though, I think warrants inclusion, including the husband's name. He's got an h-index of 16, suggesting he is notable in his own right; it's just that nobody has written an article about him yet. As to the rest; physics was, and is, a male-dominated profession. Weltman is notable not just for making it big, but for making it big as a woman in a male-dominated profession; which was the reason behind those nature profiles in the first place. Under the circumstances, I think it's perfectly justified to mention how she was able to overcome whatever barriers may have stood in her way (or, in this case, didn't have to, because her family was progressive); and how she is handling those issues with respect to her family/children. Vanamonde (talk) 09:59, 23 July 2017 (UTC)