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XYZ Drafts (WiR 271)

I've started a few drafts of XYZ women that may be of interest. Please see: User:Cl3phact0/Articles/01#In progress. The most advanced are Draft:Najla El Zein, Draft:Ikko Yokoyama, and Draft:Giorgia Zanellato (of which the latter two may be nearly acceptable as stubs as is). Re: the others, Draft:Nika Zupanc is mostly just a collection of references for now, as is Draft:Azusa Murakami (who, having only a little "z" in her translated name, strictly speaking, may not qualify as a "Z" at all – though she is an interesting artist and it seems a good WiR candidate). Any and all help getting these over the line before the calendar runs out on the month of June would be most welcome. Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 08:53, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Cl3phact0, thank you for your great work. Draft:Giorgia Zanellato seems to be suitable for mainspace now, I think. If there are no objections, I'm happy to move it over.
There is perhaps a question regarding whether notability rests with Ms Zanellato or the Zanellato/Bortotto partnership, but the article can always be moved in future if needed. Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 22:14, 26 June 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, and yes, please do! No need to ask – I am grateful for any help and would be delighted if any of the above drafts make it into mainspace before the end of June. Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 05:28, 27 June 2023 (UTC)
Excellent, I will move Draft:Giorgia Zanellato to mainspace shortly. Thank you for your efforts writing this article :) Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 22:24, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello. Could someone please have a look at Draft:Ikko Yokoyama and see whether it currently meets WP:NBIO? Or... better yet, find some more sources so that it is beyond doubt?! Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 07:43, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, MrsSnoozyTurtle. I've also cleaned-up the Najla El Zein draft a bit. This may be nearly ready too (as a stub, naturally). -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 08:11, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
I've added a bit more to Draft:Ikko Yokoyama and it may now be nearly ready too (the additions should resolve the WP:NBIO question). -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 09:47, 29 June 2023 (UTC)
And now I've added a few more sources to Draft:Ikko Yokoyama as well. Could someone with fresh eyes please take a look and see if it is suitable for publication? Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 09:54, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Both Najla El Zein and Giorgia Zanellato have been moved to mainspace. Please verify that all's well. (Draft:Ikko Yokoyama is also very nearly ready.) Thank you, Cl3phact0 (talk) 20:00, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Ikko Yokoyama moved to mainspace. Please verify, thank you. -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 16:55, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Hello Cl3phact0. All three look good to me. Thanks for your efforts writing these articles. Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 00:05, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

Article needed for Zeita Merchant

I wish I had the time to write an article about Zeita Merchant, first African American woman to ever hold that post of Coast Guard commander of the Port of New York. I did have the time to make her Wikidata: Zeita Merchant (Q119442109).

Providing sources here hoping someone might have the time to do the article justice:

- Fuzheado | Talk 13:34, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

I have added ethnic group = African Americans on Wikidata, which should add her to the African American women red list. TSventon (talk) 14:33, 13 June 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, TSventon, for taking interest in the ethnic group. Unfortunately this does not show up in the "gadget" for Person under Wikidata Edit but it is not too difficult to add a new statement within Wikidata itself. We really need to address this more widely, for example for the Sámis, Romas, Innuits, Mauris, etc., etc.--Ipigott (talk) 13:02, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, Ipigott, please could you tell me how to find the "gadget for Person under Wikidata Edit", I have not heard of it and probably should try using it. TSventon (talk) 14:51, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
OK, TSventon. If you turn up Isabella Weber which has been discussed above, you'll see in the LH margin there is a list under Wikidata edit. The item we are interested in is "WEF: Person" which links to an easy-to-edit Wikidata gadget which is widely used by Women in Red. Thanks to the Russian creator, it provides a simple way of adding basic biographical information. You should certainly try it out.--Ipigott (talk) 15:45, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
Ipigott, thank you again. I had to install a script from ru:Википедия:WE-Framework#How to enable it for yourself on every wiki and then clear my cache and I can now access the Wikidata Edit menu. Ethnic group is on the second tab, birth and death. Is it possible to use the tool if there is no Wikipedia article? TSventon (talk) 17:10, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
TSventon: Apologies for the confusion but glad to see you managed to sort this out. I had completely forgotten I had downloaded a script for this years ago. Happy to see that ethnic group is also included. There are probably lots more features like this one which I have added over the years. I'll have to be more careful about how I explain things in future.--Ipigott (talk) 19:08, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
Ipigott, I wouldn't worry, you gave me enough information to work it out. TSventon (talk) 19:31, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello. I've put together a stub article for her: Zeita Merchant. Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 09:50, 26 June 2023 (UTC)

Thanks so much for working on this stub. Is anyone else working to expand it? I'd be down to help if some other folks might also be interested. I'm totally trying to learn more about women's history, and she seems pretty cool. Pumpkinspyce (talk) 20:37, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Great article! On a related note, I started one on Janeen L. Birckhead, the new Adjutant General of Maryland and the only Black woman in charge of a state military.TJMSmith (talk) 02:53, 2 July 2023 (UTC)

No metrics since 7 June

Our metrics for June page has not been updated since 7 June. Tagishsimon who usually deals with these problems has not been active since the end of May. Can anyone else help?--Ipigott (talk) 12:42, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

I have tried to find out how to get this fixed. User:Reports bot was created by Harej but he no longer seems to be interested and I cannot see who is now responsible for maintaining the bot. Perhaps Headbomb can help or at least alert someone who can solve the problem.--Ipigott (talk) 10:57, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
@Ipigott: If there's a dead bot, your best bet is to make a WP:BOTREQ can be made for someone to take over the task or code a new bot from scratch. Hopefully @Harej: can make the code available. If it's based on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests_for_approval/Reports_bot_3, the code is already public, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find a maintainer. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 11:02, 1 July 2023 (UTC)
Headbomb: I looked at this and related pages but it's all too technical for me. Perhaps you could make a request on our behalf? I contacted you as I saw you had intervened in 2018 on Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Reports bot 3. I see Magioladitis has also been involved. Perhaps he can help?--Ipigott (talk) 11:35, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

Requesting inputs

Requesting inputs @ Draft talk:Women's Participation in Peacekeeping#Title - Bookku (talk) 05:32, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Draft article for Cheryl McKissack Daniel

Hi, I'm looking for feedback again on my draft for Cheryl McKissack Daniel, who heads the construction company McKissack & McKissack (the oldest minority and woman-owned construction company in the US) and is known for her leadership in the construction industry. I posted a while back looking for feedback following the decline of the draft. Since then I have edited the draft based on the notes I got from an editor and they felt that it was improved enough for me to resubmit. While I'm waiting for an AfC reviewer to re-review, I wanted to see if any editors here had any further feedback or tips for me to improve the draft.

I'm an employee at McKissack & McKissack and have a conflict of interest, so I want to make sure I'm doing all I can to keep the draft neutral and encyclopedic. Thanks. Karen at McKissack (talk) 20:32, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Hello Karen at McKissack, your note (and the Draft, of course) motivated me to join Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Participants. As this is a new lane for me, it may take me a bit of time to fully understand the rules of the road. Once I do, turning Cheryl McKissack Daniel (WiR) blue will be my first priority (unless someone gets there before I do – which would of course be welcome). Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 13:31, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
I've reviewed and published the article. If someone with AfC experience could have a glance to make sure all's well, it would be appreciated.
@Karen at McKissack: I made a number of edits to the article in the process, so please do verify that nothing is amiss. Stylistically, the term CEO feels a bit overused. I also believe that the article could be enriched by adding more about the fascinating multi-generational history of her company (in fact, someone ought to write a book about the family). -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 11:23, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

“Too Soon” to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia

New paper, “Too Soon” to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia , Mackenzie Lemieux et al. Jimmy Wales seems to wish to discuss it; User talk:Jimbo Wales#Getting NPOV right

Abstract: While research has explored the extent of gender bias and the barriers to women's inclusion on English-language Wikipedia, very little research has focused on the problem of racial bias within the encyclopedia. Despite advocacy groups' efforts to incrementally improve representation on Wikipedia, much is unknown regarding how biographies are assessed after creation. Applying a combination of web-scraping, deep learning, natural language processing, and qualitative analysis to pages of academics nominated for deletion on Wikipedia, we demonstrate how Wikipedia's notability guidelines are unequally applied across race and gender. We find that online presence predicts whether a Wikipedia page is kept or deleted for white male academics but that this metric is idiosyncratically applied for female and BIPOC academics. Further, women's pages, regardless of race, were more likely to be deemed “too soon” for Wikipedia. A deeper analysis of the deletion archives reveals that when the tag is used on a woman's biography it is done so outside of the community guidelines, referring to one's career stage rather than media/online coverage. We argue that awareness of hidden biases on Wikipedia is critical to the objective and equitable application of the notability criteria across race and gender both on the encyclopedia and beyond.

--Tagishsimon (talk) 16:01, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, Tagishsimon, for bringing this to our attention. I have read the article with interest. If their conclusions are correct then there seems to be a solid case for being more careful not to delete so many women's biographies on the basis of "Too soon". I think the article would have been more convincing if more graphics had been provided on the results of the analyses made and the time periods covered. The one graphic presented unfortunately fails to provide any numerical data. Given your own interest in statistics, you could provide you own views on the reliability of their results. It was interesting to see that in their conclusions, they suggest that acceptance of a Wikipedia biography could also consider coverage on "other online platforms such as Reddit, Facebook/Instagram, or Twitter" (which have constantly be deemed unreliable). --Ipigott (talk) 07:24, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I find Mackenzie Lemieux et al's focus on WP:Too soon and WP:Search engine test odd. "Too soon" is a summary of notability policies so the result is the same whether "Too soon" or WP:Notability is quoted. The "Search engine test" page says "Hit-count numbers alone can only rarely "prove" anything about notability".
Referencing a 2021 paper by Tripodi, Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia, the article says "recent work has uncovered that women who meet Wikipedia's criteria for inclusion are more likely to be nominated for deletion than men". That seems to mean that articles on women are more likely to survive a deletion discussion than articles on men, which isn't necessarily a problem. TSventon (talk) 13:02, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
That seems to mean that articles on women are more likely to survive a deletion discussion than articles on men, which isn't necessarily a problem. Really? It shines a light on a huge set of problems. Wikipedia is a mirror of society as we rely on media generated by society to determine notability. The article says "Female academics are less likely to be recognized on Wikipedia than their male counterparts across all fields of study", which is a clear example as women academics in the real world are less likely to be hired, promoted, funded, etc. than equally qualified male colleagues.[1],[2],[3] Then there is the issue that the media covers women/BIPOC in more trivial and negative ways.[4],[5],[6],[7],[8],[9] As a society, we haven't banished our biases of thinking women/BIPOC are "less than". How can that not be a problem or at least a barrier to making a more balanced encyclopedia?
Add to that the fact that our guidelines skew notability toward subjects based on coverage in mainstream sources with high circulation, rather than the highest quality sources mostly likely to cover un- and under-represented subjects. It is virtually impossible to change our "rules", because one will be accused of attempting to "right great wrongs" or set up different criteria for "special groups". How can that not be a problem? How can the time sink of deletion and policy discussions not be a problem? Failing to acknowledge the multitude of problems is just another way of ignoring them. The truth is, we as a society and as Wikipedia editors do not have the will, desire, or ability to fix the problems. We throw our hands up because it is too big to fix. But the problems are there. The easiest solution is to write more quality articles with a strong statement of why they are notable and use our network to help each other do that, so that we avoid deletion discussions completely. And on that note, I am going to go write an article. SusunW (talk) 15:28, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Very interesting article. I am wrestling with this issue in trying to create a page for Inna Jane Ray (1949-2020), a female artist and writer who worked in theology, painting, photography, and poetry. Like so many woman artists and writers she was not widely reviewed during her life. Her books were mostly self published, so they do not pass the current "notability" test. Since her passing, her work is being collected by very notable public institutions and libraries. Her Master's thesis, a Feminist analysis of atonement theory was published as an issue of the Journal of Women and Religion at the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union. I believe that her work is very notable. Is there a path forward for her article based on the Theological writings and her representation in major collections? Betarhobeta (talk) 20:30, 22 May 2023 (UTC)
Well, at least no-one is going to say its TOOSOON! You need to push what was published and other published references to her. Johnbod (talk) 01:40, 23 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, Tagishsimon, for sharing the article and noting Jimbo's discussion request on his talkpage.
The article states: The need to create safe spaces also deters women editors from participating in Wikipedia discussions when articles are nominated for deletion because it requires a “taxing level of emotional labor”. Generally, I avoid "participating in Wikipedia discussions" when they require a "taxing level of emotional labor", be it at AfD or elsewhere, so that sentence certainly resonates with me. --Rosiestep (talk) 13:53, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, TSventon, I'm not following? How does being more likely to be AfD'd mean more likely to survive it? Valereee (talk) 14:36, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
That’s what tripodi’s study found (from the 2023 paper ‘Consistent with Tripodi's (2021) earlier work, we found that the pages of female academics, regardless of race, are more likely to be kept after nomination for deletion compared to pages for male academics’) Eddie891 Talk Work 14:53, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Ah! Thanks for the clarification! Valereee (talk) 14:54, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Doesn't this imply that articles about notable female academics are nominated for deletion more frequently than articles about notable male academics? It's good that many of them survive, but others must be slipping through the cracks. pburka (talk) 15:02, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
pburka Tripodi’s study says "My data indicate that women’s biographies are more frequently miscategorized as non-notable than men’s (see Figure 2). On average, 19% of all biographies nominated for deletion are kept from January 2017 to February 2020, but roughly 25% of women’s biographies are miscategorized, whereas only 17% of men are miscategorized." That equates being nominated for deletion and kept with being miscategorized as non-notable. The discrepancy could be partly explained by unjustified nominations of women's biographies, but also by more work being done to prove that women's biographies are notable. TSventon (talk) 15:39, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
After reading the study, and with the caveat that I’m not qualified in data science, I think they make a number of correct points (including there is a gender gap, AFDs are often unpleasant, there are discrepancies in how people of different gender and race are treated at afd), but reading it from the POV of a Wikipedan, it suffers from a number of misunderstandings of the site, including the misinterpretation of the search engine test and what a snow keep is, and seemingly using 2022 search results to assess afds from years ago. Yet I think there is still a relevant point to be made here. Eddie891 Talk Work 15:07, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
@Eddie891, it appears that their conclusions are based on their belief that number of GHits is the standard Wikipedia-approved way to determine notability, and that AfDs on women academics suffer significantly more from participants using biased arguments that are not in accordance with the Wikipedia guidelines of the tag WP:Too soon, such as that "the subject doesn't have the citations or academic coverage of their work expected for academic notability", rather than the correct Wikipedia notability metric for academics (amount of media coverage). Facepalm Facepalm JoelleJay (talk) 01:58, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
Its good to have some data to back up what I think we all already felt in our gut, I've known for a long time that when creating a new biographical article if the subject is a woman it needs to be at least twice as long in order to avoid someone attempting to smother it in its crib. I forgot that recently and made nearly identical pages for Libby Locke and Tom Clare (lawyer)... They are of equal notability and most of the sources were used on both pages... @Dan arndt: tried to WP:PROD Locke for no reason I can see other than her gender but nothing has happened to Clare. I would suggest the creation of a bias noticeboard to address this sort of behavior. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:54, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
  • As it's a typical dense read, I'll highlight some points that struck me reading through:
    • Para 2 of intro: "Eventually, her page received a “snow keep” decision, indicating that her notability might be questionable but that deleting her page would be too much of an uphill battle to pursue (WP:SNOW)". Unfortunate to have such a howling misunderstanding so early.
    • "Of the more than 1.5 million biographies about notable writers, inventors, and academics on English-language Wikipedia..." As wikidata analysis shows, a wierd mischaracterization of the wp bio population - I think sports people outnumber all these combined... No mention of historical factors - are they aware of them? They write as though we only cover living people.
    • Many of the citations were published over a decade ago, so probably researched over 12 ya.
    • "For academic biographies on Wikipedia, notability is achieved through the significant impact of one's scholarly work on society, the winning of prestigious academic awards, or the holding of important leadership positions at an academic institution or academic journal board" - not really, unless citation counts = "impact of one's scholarly work on society".
    • "Since Wikipedia does not count trainees, research scientists, and/or government workers as “academics” - where does "Wikipedia" say this? In practice, I think this is often true, but often not (especially for the last 2 groups).
    • Generally the paper seems to deal with an all-American world, while taking global statistics. There is no mention of using other languages in the many web searches, nor of allowing for differences in the way academia works in different countries, an issue fairly commonly raised in academic Afds. One Australian example gets mention, but I think that's it.
    • The "too soon" findings are interesting, but they assume (despite invoking Jess Wade right at the start) that male and female bios are created with the same process and motivations, which is clearly not always the case. Indeed this project exists to ensure that it is not the case, and the paper gives a lot of space to efforts to boost womens' representation, without any consideration as to how this might affect the data they analyse. Johnbod (talk) 16:16, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
Citation metrics are only part of the standard "claims of impact must be substantiated by independent statements, reviews, citation metrics, or library holdings, and so on."Wikipedia:Notability (academics) Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:57, 2 April 2023 (UTC)
I think the motivation for creating biographies is a huge deal that the authors, who clearly didn't do any research into how wikipedia P&Gs actually work, failed to account for. There have been many initiatives (including a number of WikiEd classes) to increase representation of women/BIPOC in academia that engage well-meaning but inexperienced editors, and predictably they produce a lot of biographies on non-notable subjects (e.g. current PhD students, administrative staff, etc. with zero scholarship). BLPs from novice users are given more scrutiny, and so these NN bios are generally noticed more quickly by patrollers and brought to AfD, where they are indeed often identified as being premature. Additionally, there are a few phenomena I've noticed happening much more at Afds on women academics than those on men that would influence their data. One is that they tend to get a lot more "saving" attention (as might be expected given the DELSORT and multiple woman-focused projects), which will sometimes uncover academic notability-demonstrating sourcing(*) that would not have even been looked for with a male subject. However, this attention can also bring in editors who are not familiar with academia/NPROF and attempt to demonstrate notability using lay media coverage (which is usually more targeted than the crude "search engine test" that the authors inexplicably chose as a metric for gauging notability), when NPROF was created precisely because this parameter is so useless for academics. In fact, it appears that all of their examples of AfD'd female academics whom they deem "notable" were either kept based on meeting GNG (sometimes via news articles on the AfD itself), not NPROF, or deleted based on not meeting NPROF and media coverage being too trivial/non-independent/BLP1E for NBIO (even if there were technically a lot of google hits).
(*)This outcome is more common in the humanities, where the existence of book reviews offers a pass through NAUTHOR for subjects who wouldn't otherwise pass NPROF criteria. JoelleJay (talk) 12:48, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

How did this get published?? This paper purports to investigate bias towards deletion of female academics' biographies, which it alleges is through (intentionally?) idiosyncratic application of Wikipedia P&Gs, and then uses, as the core metrics for independently validating the conclusions of academic AfDs, two deeply, fundamentally inappropriate essays: the "WP:Search Engine Test", which is explicitly discouraged by notability guidelines, and "WP:Too soon", which is a purely informal post hoc reason offered for why the subject's coverage isn't at the level expected for notability (which is very different from the mechanism used to actually determine they didn't meet a notability guideline). And not only did the authors also totally misinterpret what those essays are about, the metrics they derived from them are so totally inapplicable to academic notability in particular that they're precisely why academic-specific notability criteria were developed! They literally are basing a large chunk of their analysis on whether the WP:Search Engine Test is being equitably utilized for academics taken to AfD between 2017 and 2020 ("equitability" being evaluated using the GHits from a webcrawler run in 2022). They then scraped the AfDs of deleted pages (n=377) for the shortcut "WP:Too soon" (n=61), which, again, they thought was being used as the metric for notability, and categorized those instances as either complying with the WP definition of TOOSOON (i.e., in the context of lack of sources and citations) (??) or outside of the community established definition (i.e., in the context of career stage). It's also worth keeping in mind the fact that these analyses did not control for field of specialization (how could they, that would give them an even worse sample size), which will obviously impact how big a "web presence" an individual has and is obviously not homogeneous between men and women.

So this means the authors' conclusions on how biased AfD participants are against women/BIPOC academics were determined based on a) the finding that crude search engine hits for AfD'd white male academics (n=419) were significantly higher for "kept" subjects than "deleted" subjects, but no such significant relationship could be found for white women (n=185), BIPOC men (n=171), or BIPOC women (n=69); and b) the finding that editors used the "Wikipedia definition" (news coverage) of TOOSOON (n=61 total) more often for women/BIPOC than for men.

As a final example of the embarrassingly bad quality of this paper, I'll just paste the authors' commentary on their TOOSOON results:

First, let us illustrate the usage of WP:Too soon per Wikipedia guidelines. The following excerpt is from the AfD for the biography of a white, male, assistant professor who was nominated for deletion under the tag WP:Too soon: “Most of the newspaper articles cited in the main article are not directly related to the subject, and apart from this brief article in the Dainik Jagran that borders on being a hagiography of the subject, there's no real coverage for WP:GNG. WP:Too soon perhaps.”
As this moderator noted, the subject had inappropriate articles cited and inadequate coverage to support notability, even after a thorough online search. Despite the academic being an assistant professor, the moderator focused on media coverage, not the career stage, of the subject which is in accordance with the Wikipedia guidelines of the tag WP:Too soon.
However, we noticed that women's pages more frequently had a WP:Too soon label and that the use of the designation was often in reference to their career status, a rationale outside Wikipedia's guidelines for the tag WP:Too soon. These pages were subsequently deleted because the individual was too early in her career to be featured on Wikipedia. These examples from AfD discussions all failed to mention the presence or depth of media coverage.

Delete per WP:PROF and WP:Too soon. She has respectable citation counts for a postdoc, but postdocs (and assistant professors and the UK/Irish equivalents) are usually too early in their career to have attracted enough attention to their works for academic notability, and [X] does not appear to be an exception to this general rule.
Delete as far WP:Too soon. Assistant professors are usually not notable and this is no exception.
I agree it looks to be WP:Too soon. If there are articles on male scientists of a similar early career stage, they should be nominated for deletion. The creating editor seems to misunderstand the level of notability required for academics.

Our dataset revealed that men at similar early career stages were present on Wikipedia. For example, Colin G. DeYoung, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota had his page kept after a nomination for deletion. There was no mention of WP:Too soon in the AfD discussion and it only contained three responses, all of which voted “Keep” on the basis of citation count.

JoelleJay (talk) 01:44, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, it's not a good paper. The fixation upon the so-called "Search Engine Test" is frankly bizarre. Did they read the page before deciding to invoke it repeatedly? XOR'easter (talk) 13:03, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
It would seem that they did not... Eddie891 Talk Work 13:05, 10 April 2023 (UTC)
What's even more puzzling is that they actually correctly summarize NPROF...and then go on to criticize !votes that use its criteria as "outside the community norms". The other wikipedia papers by some of these authors (especially Tripodi) are also quite poor methodologically and make me seriously question the peer review process of their journals. JoelleJay (talk) 00:45, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
One would imagine it might be worth... I don't know... consulting someone with knowledge of Wikipedia functions before publishing a paper on them. Eddie891 Talk Work 02:03, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
The issue with that then becomes who the researcher chooses to consult with, as can be seen with the paper that ignited the current ArbCom case. I feel like a lot of academic researchers who write about Wikipedia (besides those either affiliated with the project in some way, or in a field like library science or similar) just have a fundamental misunderstanding of how Wikipedia operates, imagining us as a sort of constant monolith and thus justifying the use of 12 year old data. Curbon7 (talk) 02:09, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Strangely, academics writing big data papers on wp very rarely do, and the omission is usually clear in their papers. It's also pretty clear that the peer review process doesn't involve anyone with significant knowledge of the subject. Johnbod (talk) 02:11, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
The peer review probably is the authors of those other big data WP papers, who by this point likely consider themselves Wikipedia experts. JoelleJay (talk) 02:17, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
This paper is irksome enough that I'd write a formal response, but I value my pseudonymity, and on top of that, I'm not eager to deal with a journal whose review process was so lacking in the first place. XOR'easter (talk) 14:46, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
Does the WMF or anyone maintain a list of Wikipedian academics who might be willing to do peer reviews? Someone should. Johnbod (talk) 15:13, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
I think a formal response would be a good idea. The editors might be willing to consider publishing something by a collective of Wikipedia editors, perhaps pseudonymously - it's got to be worth asking. If the review process was lacking, I feel that's a broader problem with understanding of how Wikipedia works that's likely to shape future research and peer review, so a reply pointing out some of these problems could perform a useful service beyond correcting any mistakes with this particular paper. Cordless Larry (talk) 15:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
This journal somehow has an impact factor of 8.7! JoelleJay (talk) 23:12, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
"To determine accuracy in our comparisons, we also collected the career stages of each individual designated WP:Too soon. Wikidata does not include the career stage, so we assigned two research assistants to find and document the career stage of each individual labeled WP:Too soon between the years of 2017 and 2020. Since academic's jobs and career levels fluctuate often, the career stage was determined based on the creation date of the AfD page. Since perceived notability among academics is highly contingent on their rank (Adams et al., 2019; WP:Notability (academics)), academic careers were scored based on stage (e.g., assistant = 1; associate = 2; etc.)." Argh! You can't just neglect citation metrics when talking about how academic bio AfD's evaluate career status! The only time that "career stage" as they think of it factors into a WP:PROF judgment is if the subject has attained the named chair/Distinguished Professor level. Other than that, mentioning the subject's "career stage" is just part of an explanation of why the actual standards haven't been met. They are confusing both the status of WP:PROF versus WP:TOOSOON (guideline versus essay) and the logical roles those pages play in the very !votes they quote. As noted above, a purely informal post hoc reason offered for why the subject's coverage isn't at the level expected for notability [...] is very different from the mechanism used to actually determine they didn't meet a notability guideline.
The claim that Wikipedia does not count trainees, research scientists, and/or government workers as “academics” is flat-out untrue. Plenty of IEEE Fellows work in industry and are notable per WP:PROF#C3, for example. And when articles on students show up (e.g., here), we file them with the other academics-and-educators AfD's. They're academics who just probably haven't done anything of note yet! XOR'easter (talk) 19:44, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
The quotes given after These examples from AfD discussions all failed to mention the presence or depth of media coverage are misleadingly presented. Two of the three are from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kate Killick. One of the !votes quoted actually began, Sadly, fails WP:NPROF. I'd call that a significant omission! Moreover, that AfD did discuss the presence or depth of media coverage, insofar as editors noted that there wasn't any. (The Irish Times reference is an opinion piece of which Killick's name is only mentioned once among many, many other names. I cannot locate any significant coverage from reliable sources that indicate notability.) In addition, the sentence immediately after the blockquote is Our dataset revealed that men at similar early career stages were present on Wikipedia. Their example is Colin G. DeYoung, who at the time of his AfD had an h-index of 44. That is not "similar" to a postdoc who coauthored a respectable but unremarkable number of papers (no more than 10). The third quote is also truncated; the original is from here and concluded Tiny citations on GS do not pass WP:Prof and lack of independent in-depth sources fails WP:GNG. XOR'easter (talk) 20:30, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
WOW I didn't even think to check whether those AfD quotes were faithfully reproduced -- that looks very much like academic fraud there (imagine if a hard science paper selectively excluded portions of their data that literally reversed the experimental conclusion)! JoelleJay (talk) 21:33, 11 April 2023 (UTC)
To confirm the validity of the “Primer Index,” we also created a “Google Index” to approximate the total number of hits that appear when an academic's full name and occupation are searched on Google. Using a custom Google Sheets code, we extracted an academic's full name and occupation from Wikidata and automatically searched Google for every instance of “full name + occupation” for each academic in our dataset on the same day. WP:GOOGLEHITS. Good grief. WP:GOOGLEHITS. They "validated" their "Primer Index" based on an argument that is literally one of the arguments we tell everyone to avoid. And then they turn around and say our data indicate that BIPOC biographies who meet Wikipedia's criteria (i.e., above the White Male Keep median Primer Index of 12.00) were among those deleted. There is no reason to equate passing some threshold of the "Primer Index" with meeting "Wikipedia's criteria". No bloody reason at all.
For example, Tonya Foster, a professor of creative writing and Black feminist scholar at San Francisco State University had a high Primer Index of 41 yet her Wikipedia page was deleted. Hey, that's weird: Tonya Foster exists. Surely it would be worth mentioning that a page was recreated after being deleted? At the time of the AfD in 2017, the consensus was that WP:AUTHOR was not met. According to here, she didn't join San Francisco State University until 2020, at which point she was named one of the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chairs, so the argument for her passing WP:PROF got significantly stronger.
Another example is the late Sudha Shenoy, an economist and professor of economic history at the University of Newcastle, Australia, who had a high Primer Index of 198 yet her page was also deleted. According to her profile at the Mises Institute, she was a "lecturer" at Newcastle. (This blog post suggests that it might have been a spousal-hire situation.) A "lecturer" in Australia is a lower academic rank than a professor. In any case, that AfD looked at WP:PROF and WP:GNG and found that neither was met; citation counts were low, no other academic notability criteria could be argued for, and the sources about her were unreliably published.
Another !vote they quote also began with a rationale they chopped off: The only form of notability claimed in the article is academic, but our standards for academic notability explicitly exclude student awards. Merely having written a few review papers is inadequate for notability; the papers need to be heavily cited, and here they appear not to be. XOR'easter (talk) 01:42, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
It almost looks like the Primer team didn't pay attention to the academic notability guidelines, relying instead on Big Data to figure out what "notability" means in practice. [...] Why trust your own ability to Big Data the answer, instead of just reading what the community has already codified as important? Even if your goal is to say that Wikipedia in practice falls short of that standard, or to argue that the standard needs revision, you need to pay more attention to it than they, by all appearances, did. —XOR'easter, August 2018. XOR'easter (talk) 03:28, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
In case they are not yet aware of this discussion, pinging David Eppstein, several of whose !votes are quoted in the paper. Curbon7 (talk) 01:51, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
I had seen the discussion here, and beyond sharing the general horror at the misrepresentation of what we've been doing had not commented because I thought I had nothing new to add. I hadn't read the paper and hadn't realized that I was quoted so prominently in it. I'm not sure whether I should be pleased or whether it adds to the academic misconduct (why not both?) that they're taking a direct quote by an identifiable person and deliberately stripping it of its attribution. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:22, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
They have made a manifestly and indefensibly incorrect claim about how Wikipedia editors judge topics for notability and backed it up with deceptive quotations and meaningless numbers. I'd go with "both". XOR'easter (talk) 14:50, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
OK, I have started drafting a commentary. There just keeps being more to write about! I'm still trying to evaluate what they wrote about the Clarice Phelps case; they say her bio was deleted three times in the span of one week. I remember that whole situation being a mess, but that specific claim is not in the cited source, and there's no one-week span in the article milestones at Talk:Clarice Phelps that could match. XOR'easter (talk) 20:25, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
I think the commentary is excellent. A more direct "metric" you might want to add re: relative use of the "search engine test" etc. is how often WP:NPROF and WP:GNG are invoked in scholar AfDs. It might also be helpful to explain why we prefer NPROF for these subjects; for example, their "full name AND occupation" search won't return any reference sections of academic papers citing the subject's research, nor will it return mentions in books or in the body of many paywalled journal articles, nor will it return anything in non-English (there's no indication they limited their sample to people working in Anglophone countries). Their approach also does not control for academic specialty: surely a postdoc in, idk, marketing will have a much higher "primer index" than a professor of Hodge theory? Not to mention the fact that gender distribution among specialties is highly uneven. Additionally, what their search will return are mentions in unreliable sources, which never count towards notability and would be rejected outright at AfD, and that's not even touching on all the non-independent hits (every biology paper my PhD adviser publishes with a student gets a promotional blurb from the department, also she has like 5 departmental profiles somehow). JoelleJay (talk) 23:46, 12 April 2023 (UTC)
Good ideas. I'll experiment a bit with search queries to see if I can get decent figures for how often different guidelines are invoked. I added a paragraph about why NPROF is necessary. XOR'easter (talk) 02:00, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
One suggestion: since the article quotes me as invoking TOOSOON, perhaps I should explain what I generally mean by it. It is never the actual reason for a delete opinion, at least from me. In the cases under discussion, my choices are always grounded in notability guidelines and policies, not essays. When I use TOOSOON, it is not intended to strengthen the case for deletion. Maybe it is the opposite: it is a ray of hope in an otherwise negative opinion. If I think someone is not likely to ever be notable, I am probably just going to say delete, and explain why. If I think an academic does not currently meet our notability standards, but is on a trajectory on which they might well eventually do so, years later, I will say TOOSOON. We often see re-creations of the same articles, years apart, and including this in an opinion is a suggestion that if we discuss the same case again sometime we should check their accomplishments again more carefully instead of relying on past opinions. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:03, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
OK, I've quoted your comment. XOR'easter (talk) 16:45, 13 April 2023 (UTC)
I have now reached a breathing point, I think, and I will sleep on it before I try to plan what to do next. XOR'easter (talk) 06:43, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
On the basis of these rankings, it is hardly surprising we have no article. We do however have a page on SAGE Publishing. I gave SAGE journals as the publisher when I listed the article on our research page.--Ipigott (talk) 10:24, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
Some of its problems, like the misrepresentation of WP:Search engine test, also occur in the 2021 paper. XOR'easter (talk) 17:51, 14 April 2023 (UTC)
It is noted that authors are required to pay a fee of USD1850 to publish in this journal.[10] It has been suggested above that a Wikipedia response should be submitted to the journal to rebut the errors in the paper. This might involve finding $1850 for the submission. I would be reluctant for Wikipedia to fund a journal of such a standard (and who is to pay?). A better plan might be to submit the response to WP:Signpost, which is always eager for quality material. The response would get a wider audience, and it has the audience that is needed to be influenced. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:59, 15 April 2023 (UTC).
This isn't a research paper, so the journal shouldn't charge that much (if anything) for submission. It might have to be handled as a private communication to the publisher with publication of the concerns at the discretion of the journal. And do people outside of Wikipedia read the Signpost? Retraction Watch would be more likely get the type of response to and coverage of the issues that we're seeking. JoelleJay (talk) 05:53, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, so it would be worth consulting this guidance on post-publication critiques. They also have a blog, so other output options are available to them, but I think the COPE guidelines compel them to at least consider publishing critiques and I don't think they can use a publisher's article processing charge as a barrier to that. Cordless Larry (talk) 09:19, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
Thanks all for the suggestions and links. I've written plenty of peer reviews over my career, and I've suggested revision or rejection a fair number of times, but calling for a published paper to be retracted is quite unusual for me. I'm still uncertain as to the best course of action from here. This ended up being a much longer commentary than I had originally anticipated. I had thought I'd produce a fairly brief note that others might want to join in the writing of, or at least co-sign, but it now seems unfair to ask anyone else to agree with all the choices I made in trying to organize my remarks. Asking to run it as a Signpost column sounds like a good idea, but something else needs to be done, too. XOR'easter (talk) 15:40, 15 April 2023 (UTC)
Thank you for the stalwart work you have done on this technically dense subject. The article analysed seems to be the second attempt to dumb down or negate WP:Prof, the policy guideline for scholars and researchers that has been developed through consensus over the years. In your analysis, I wonder if the adage GIGO could be invoked somewhere? I think that a good place to make the analysis public would be to publish it in Signpost. That would put it before a large audience of people well-informed about Wikipedia’s practices. Many more interested people will see it there than if it were published in in an obscure journal. The authors of the paper, of course, have the chance to respond on Signpost, if they so wish. Depending on their response or others, the matter could be taken elsewhere subsequently, as suggested above on the thread. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:51, 16 April 2023 (UTC).
Thanks indeed XOR'easter! The Signpost audience isn't that large (midway between issues, the main page has had 6,000 views in 20 days). One might also try the WMF blog, most of who's entries seem to be about "gaps", but it is heavier than the style they seem to like. Johnbod (talk) 03:21, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
What we want is for the deficiencies in the paper to be made clear to people who are completely outside of the Wikipedia community, since those are the people who are writing and reviewing these papers. JoelleJay (talk) 03:29, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
The other danger is that items from this paper will be quoted in future publications, just as this paper relies on questionable assertions from earlier research. Unfortunately, I don't think there's too much we can do about it.--Ipigott (talk) 06:08, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
Yes. I'm not sure how to do that, other than trying to get the paper retracted, and to get a website like Retraction Watch to pick up the story. XOR'easter (talk) 13:14, 16 April 2023 (UTC)
OK, I've listed it with the Signpost submissions. Still trying to figure out what other steps to take. XOR'easter (talk) 17:37, 17 April 2023 (UTC)
Would you still consider sending it to the journal editors? Cordless Larry (talk) 06:51, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
I'm considering it; the question on my mind is how to raise a fuss while preserving my pseudonymity. XOR'easter (talk) 21:08, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
Yes that is a tricky one. Maybe submit it as Wikipedia editor XOR'easter? In a way it seems appropriate for a Wiki editor to reply. Like Cordless Larry I do think it's worth sending to the journal - as others have said the Signpost wouldn't get read outside Wikipedia and on top of that there is a developing sector of academics publishing bad work about Wikipedia which needs to be called out. Cheers, Mujinga (talk) 22:15, 19 April 2023 (UTC)
Maybe it would help to have the commentary endorsed by other editors, some of whom are not pseudonymous? JoelleJay (talk) 01:59, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
I could also prepare a summary or abstract (maybe a paragraph or two) that could be co-signed. XOR'easter (talk) 16:12, 20 April 2023 (UTC)
Are there any updates on this, XOR'easter? Cordless Larry (talk) 08:59, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
No word from anyone involved in the Signpost. As for preparing a short summary, how about this:
In their March 2023 paper "'Too Soon' to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia", Lemieux, Zhang, and Tripodi make a series of factually incorrect claims. Among other things, they selectively quote the comments of Wikipedia editors in ways that change meaning, and they misrepresent both the content and the use of Wikipedia documentation pages. Due to these and other errors that even a casual review should have uncovered, the statistics presented in this paper are fundamentally meaningless. This paper's problems are too pervasive to be addressed by an erratum or an expression of concern. The literature on the important subject of systemic bias in Wikipedia would be best served by a retraction and a careful re-examination of the editorial process. XOR'easter (talk) 16:17, 26 April 2023 (UTC)
That looks great, let me know when/if you want non-pseudonymous endorsement. JoelleJay (talk) 01:17, 27 April 2023 (UTC)
Thanks. It's been a busy week, but once I get a few other items off my plate, I'll be able to think about this one again. XOR'easter (talk) 13:03, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
I've cleared a little time today to try figuring out where to send this summary (and to think of a snappier title for the long version). From here, it looks like an email should go to bdseditors@gmail.com and maybe also publication_ethics@sagepub.com. XOR'easter (talk) 13:48, 30 April 2023 (UTC)
I think you could email the full version to anyone here interested in co-signing who has email activated (just to keep our identities somewhat private on WP). That should get at least a few non-anonymous endorsements. JoelleJay (talk) 04:25, 3 May 2023 (UTC)
OK, there's been zero interest or reaction from anyone at the Signpost, so I suppose that's a dead end. XOR'easter (talk) 12:23, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
I wouldn't entirely bet on that. They've just got an issue out & I think the process can be erratic. Johnbod (talk) 14:24, 2 May 2023 (UTC)
Ah, it's been noticed now, at least. XOR'easter (talk) 19:59, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
Well that's good they want to publish at least some sort of version, but I still think it's worth contacting the journal or publishing it elsewhere to reach a non-wikipedia audience. Just my two cents. Mujinga (talk) 20:19, 5 May 2023 (UTC)
I agree. My time and energy have been drained by typical end-of-semester stuff, so everything is slow... It looks like it will appear in the Signpost (edited somewhat, which is fine with me); this has the advantage that a shorter note that we send to the journal, publisher, Retraction Watch, etc., can point to an official record of sorts. XOR'easter (talk) 18:55, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
Please do send this along to the journal as well though. The paper needs to be retracted. JoelleJay (talk) 17:51, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Well, it's live now. XOR'easter (talk) 16:39, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
OK, I'm about ready to pester the journal about this (sending them the short summary above and a link to the full version). If anyone would like to join in, please let me know today if possible. I'm accessible via the "Email this user" feature, so if you like, you can send me a name/pseudonym and an address to CC when I write to them. XOR'easter (talk) 17:23, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
Yesterday and today turned out to be really busy with work stuff, so I haven't written yet and will most likely be sending the note tomorrow. XOR'easter (talk) 21:51, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
Finally sent! XOR'easter (talk) 14:12, 15 May 2023 (UTC)
Has there been any response or acknowledgement from the editors that you're able to tell us about, XOR'easter? Cordless Larry (talk) 06:33, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
No response at all, in fact. XOR'easter (talk) 13:42, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
Maybe send it to Retraction Watch? They are very comfortable with pseudonyms. JoelleJay (talk) 17:47, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
I would have thought that the COPE guidelines oblige them to at least acknowledge receipt of credible critiques, so I'm surprised that there's been no response at all. Cordless Larry (talk) 20:32, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
Two weeks perhaps isn't that long on Planet Journal, and they must want to get the authors to comment, but you should get a holding reply by now or soon. Johnbod (talk) 23:23, 1 June 2023 (UTC)
If the journal fails to respond to the criticism then users may wish to consider if the journal can be regarded as a WP:Reliable source for Wikipedia. Xxanthippe (talk) 01:18, 2 June 2023 (UTC).
I may try contacting the journal again (and if anyone would like to be CC'ed on that email, please do get in touch). Retraction Watch is another possibility, as is finding compliance officials at the authors' institutions (WUSM, Weill Cornell Medicine, and UNC Chapel Hill). XOR'easter (talk) 01:32, 7 June 2023 (UTC)

I've un-archived this thread, pending an update from XOR'easter. Cordless Larry (talk) 19:33, 4 July 2023 (UTC)

Misinterpretation of p-values in the "Primer index" comparisons

(Late to the discussion here, but I only just read the paper, in the context of reviewing XOR'easter's Signpost submission.)

It seems to me that there is another serious problem with the Lemieux et al. paper that hasn't been discussed yet, concerning its statistical methods. To recap, as part of their "demonstrat[ing] how Wikipedia’s notability guidelines are unequally applied across race and gender", the authors write:

If WP:Search Engine Test is being equitably applied, academics with “kept” articles should have a larger online presence score than academics with “deleted” articles, regardless of gender or race.

Let's accept this claim for the moment, i.e. take the authors's assumption for granted that their "Primer index" (their "online presence score") somehow corresponds to the only factor determining AfD outcomes. (In other words, let's leave aside for now all the serious concerns others have expressed above about construct validity, possible confounders, etc.) The authors describe their core statistical result about it as follows:

We found that white men whose pages were “kept” had a significantly higher median Primer Index (Median = 12.00) than white men whose pages were deleted (Median = 8.00, p = .0093 using Kruskal-Wallis test with post-hoc Dunn’s multiple comparisons) (Figure 2). However, this observation did not hold true for white women or for BIPOC academics on Wikipedia. There was no statistically significant difference in the median Primer Index between kept and deleted pages for white women or for BIPOC academics (Figure 2). This finding indicates that there is a meaningful difference in WP:Search Engine Test outcomes for kept versus deleted white males but that the WP:Search Engine Test is not an accurate predictor of Wikipedia persistence for female and BIPOC academics.

But the problem here is that this discrepancy - finding a significant difference for white men but not for the other groups - could also be, at least in part, due to differing sample sizes for these groups. As the documentation page for this test (Kruskal-Wallis test with Dunn's multiple comparisons test applied post-hoc) in GraphPad Prism - the stats software used by the authors - cautions (my bolding):

If the P value is small, you can reject the idea that the difference is due to random sampling, and you can conclude instead that the populations have different distributions.
If the P value is large, the data do not give you any reason to conclude that the distributions differ. This is not the same as saying that the distributions are the same. Kruskal-Wallis test has little power.

And according to the author's figures 1 and 2, the test was indeed applied to groups with vastly differing sample sizes. And what's more, for one of them (BIPOC females) the difference in medians was actually larger than for white males:

Demographic group median Primer index
for "keep" outcomes		 median Primer index
for "delete" outcomes		 group size
(from figure 1)		 p-value (from figure 2)
White male 12.00 8.00 419 p = 0.0093
White female ... ... 185 ...
BIPOC male ... ... 171 ...
BIPOC female ca. 14 ca. 5.5 69 p > 0.999

To be clear, the Kruska-Wallis test examines the entire sample (not just the sample medians), so it's theoretically possible for sample medians to differ more between groups A1 and A2 than between B1 and B2 while the test still finds a significant difference only for B1 vs B2 but not for A1 vs. A2. Either way though, I can't see how the conclusion that the authors draw from these p-values (This finding indicates ...) can be statistically justified.

(Note about the table above: Since the paper's text only provide the median values for white males unless I overlooked something, the BIPOC female median values were glanced from figure 2. I may try to use WebPlotDigizer later to extract more precise values from that image, also for the other two groups. I'll also double-check whether the paper states the size of the kept/delete subgroups anywhere, since it appears that it's these 8 sample groups that the authors actually applied the Kruska-Wallis test to; which would exacerbate the sample size issues. - Unfortunately the authors have not published the code and data underlying their analysis, only vaguely offering that "Our code is available on GitHub upon reasonable request. We will also consider sharing data with other scholars looking at racial or gender inequality online." Also, all this is leaving aside questions about whether this was really the best statistical test to use in this situation.)

Regards, HaeB (talk) 19:27, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Instead of comparing the p-values of tests applied to two sample distributions, a meaningless exercise, one should use a test directly comparing the two distributions. Some examples of tests that compare distributions are Fisher's exact test, the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test, the Kruskal–Wallis test and the Scheirer–Ray–Hare test. There are many more. I have not looked at which test is best used here, which depends on the available data.  --Lambiam 12:25, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
The sum of the numbers in figure 1 is 419 + 185 + 171 + 69 = 844, but the caption and the article text say 843. XOR'easter (talk) 13:01, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
And a couple places say N = 845 instead. XOR'easter (talk) 23:31, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
HaeB, have you looked any more at the statistics? XOR'easter (talk) 14:28, 11 June 2023 (UTC)

April Kingsley

I just moved the draft for April Kingsley. She recently died. Appears more than enough to demonstrate notability. Sad that this was a draft for several years while she was alive. Thriley (talk) 15:15, 3 July 2023 (UTC)

Added to Kingsley (surname). PamD 15:24, 3 July 2023 (UTC)
Thank you Infopetal and Thriley, for respectively improving and publishing the draft. Regards, MrsSnoozyTurtle 02:00, 4 July 2023 (UTC)
Thank you, @Thriley! --Infopetal (talk) 14:39, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

Interesting use of WP:ILL

WP:ILL is used to link Wikidata items relevant to missing redlinked articles in an interesting way in the Cheryl McKissack Daniel article (recently mentioned above). This may be of interest. (Also see Talk.) -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 17:24, 5 July 2023 (UTC)

I use ill for wikidata quite a bit. There are gnomes (and a bot, I think) that will convert ills to blue links when an article is created, so it helps integrate articles if you can input the links. SusunW (talk) 18:38, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
I don't generally include wikidata ill links in article text (although I will use ill for links to actual encyclopedia articles in other languages) but I find it useful to use ill + the wikidata link for all the WIR redlink lists. Example, from Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Fellowships: {{ill|Sandy Irani|d|Q102305722}} links as Sandy Irani [d]. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:08, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
Interesting David Eppstein. I have had links to wikidata removed from main space article. It happened to me two years ago when I was working on Onze Kunst van Heden. The edit is here with a note about the violation of manual of style. I haven't included a link to Wikidata since. I don't think I linked things in the format you used. Have you received any negative feedback for this? WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 20:35, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
For Wikidata links? No, but I've only used these in WIR Wikipedia space, where MOS does not apply. I don't think there is a MOS problem with ill links to other-language encyclopedia articles like Annette Vogt [de] and I don't recall ever getting pushback for those. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:44, 5 July 2023 (UTC)
Thanks David Eppstein. I've never had problems with the ill for other languages. It was wikidata. I will keep in mind the way you link to wikidata. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 01:03, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
The use of a small "d" to indicate the Wikidata item seems less distracting to an ordinary user. I've amended the initially cited article using this method, and will use your method in future when citing Wikidata. Thank you, Cl3phact0 (talk) 07:21, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
Reading this, I learned something new today. I hadn't noticed ILL redlinks to Wikidata items before, nor the use of a little d as a redlinking method. I've only used ILL to redlink to articles in other language Wikipedias. Glad the subject was brought up, Cl3phact0. Maybe, at some point, we can incorporate this as a learning item in our monthly invite. --Rosiestep (talk) 07:59, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
I use ILL quite frequently when I am writing biographies of women from Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe. While SusunW is an expert in adding pertinent details, I usually just avoid them when the ILL link to a person in another language identifies a person of the same name in English (thus providing a blue link) rather than pointing to the person intended. It seems to me a clearer set of guidelines would be useful. I notice biographies in languages other than English frequently use links to Wikidata to identify well sourced dates of birth, etc., but I don't know if this is permissible on the EN wiki.--Ipigott (talk) 08:56, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
In my view, the advantage of using the ill with a redlink (rather than blue) is that it identifies the existence of an article that may be suitable for translation on en:wp. When I've added these, I've tried to make sure to add an edit summary note that says something which indicates this (and also serves as an aide-memoire to myself), usually something like: "+ sv:wl (+ WiR redlink)" (see example). -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 09:29, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Please be informed that using ill to link to Wikidata in articles is not allowed per this RfC: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Archive 204#New RFC on linking to Wikidata: in the summary you can see that linking to Wikidata is disallowed in article text, and that there is no consensus to grant an exception for doing this through ill. If you want to do this anyway, you'll need to start a new RfC (at the MOS or at VPP). Of course, outside of the mainspace (e.g. in WIR lists) this use is perfectly allowable. Fram (talk) 09:22, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, Fram. I am confused by how one should interpret this statement from the above: That being said, I do not see any consensus as to the proposed exception of linking to WD, by something similar to inline inter-language link(s)which may be executed using the same template. Further clarification would be helpful. -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 09:42, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
In general, linking to Wikidata in article text is not allowed. People asked for an exception to use "ill" or something similar in the way you do, but there was no consensus for such an exception, so the general prohibition applies to the use of "ill" as well. Basically, what David Eppstein said above, use it in project space, talk pages, ... but not in the mainspace (cf. the experience by User:WomenArtistUpdates related above, with a different template but the same principle). Fram (talk) 09:47, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, good to know. SusunW (talk) 14:13, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
Fram: I'm sorry to see this is the case as many of my new articles have been based on ILL redlinks from mainspace articles. How about wikilinks in the traditional way. In Anna Kriebel Vanzo, would it be permissible to link Vittorio Maria Vanzo to [11]. This form of linking is widely used for Italians on the EN wiki. Is there a clear set of rules on these matters which we can use when reviewing new articles?--Ipigott (talk) 15:45, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
@Ipigott: My understanding of the above is that it only applies to direct wikidata linking. -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 15:50, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
(ec) ILL links to other language articles are allowed (I'm personally not a fan of them, as they are not useful for most of our readers, not a reliable source, and may have e.g. different notability standards as well), so linking to e.g. it:Vittorio Mario Vanzo is allowed in the text. Links to Wikidata though are not allowed, per the above RfC (also referenced near the bottom of WP:Wikidata). Fram (talk) 15:52, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
@Fram: I wonder if it would be acceptable to include the wikidata item link in a referenced footnote. Something like this: {{efn|group=|Designed by {{ill|Max Braun (engineer)|lt=Max Braun|it|Max Braun (ingegnere)}}|name=en1}} (where the ill would link to wikidata per the example at the beginning of this thread). [NB: This example comes from the Gallery section of the Braun article.] -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 16:01, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
PS: Another perhaps slightly better example of this idea can be seen here. -- Cl3phact0 (talk) 16:12, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
Dubious. Certainly not allowable in a reference, as a Wikidata item (nor another Wikipedia) can never be a reliable source. Putting it in a note seems too much like a method to avoid the ban on such links though. Fram (talk) 16:15, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
Ok, let me study this in more depth. I certainly did not mean to suggest using Wikidata as a reference, but only the latter "note" usage you mention above. I thought of it as a workaround more than an attempt to circumvent any rules. I may try do this with the Cheryl McKissack Daniel article to see if the result is acceptable. Who would one ask? (Also, note that I have never used this in past and first came across it just prior to starting this thread.) Cheers, Cl3phact0 (talk) 17:39, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Howey Ou

Hi all

I recently found any article for Howey Ou, quite a prominent climate activist in China. I'd really appreciate some help improving it, especially if anyone has experience writing about Chinese people on Wikipedia (dealing with multiple names, non English sources etc).

Thanks

John Cummings (talk) 17:57, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Karoline Mehalchick bio nominated for deletion

A bio about Karoline Mehalchick that was posted on June 28 was nominated for deletion the next day with the rationale that the subject "does not meet notability under WP:NPOL and is WP:TOOSOON since nominee has not been confirmed as a federal district court judge." As the chief magistrate judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, she seems notable enough to warrant her own bio for that reason alone, and also seems deserving because she will likely be receiving more news coverage as she works her way through the judicial confirmation process for the position of United States district judge. (She was just nominated for the position by the U.S. President.) There appears to be some support for keeping the article, but it might help if experienced Women in Red members could contribute to the deletion discussion. - 47thPennVols (talk) 05:19, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Update: The result of the AfD nomination was "Keep." - 47thPennVols (talk) 18:42, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

"Orphan Articles: The Dark Matter of Wikipedia"

Cross-posting as I don't know many of you are members of the "Wikiwomen" Telegram channel: "Interesting study regarding orphan articles and their visibility: one outcome is that there is more women among the orphan biographies (that are less visible) than among all the biographies." "Orphan Articles: The Dark Matter of Wikipedia", by Akhil Arora, Robert West, Martin Gerlach. For sure, let's include this (remember not to orphan a woman's biography) as a learning item in one of our monthly invites. For those who want to take action on this, check out the "women" categories ("Women artists", "Women scientists", "Women writers", and "Women's History") here Wikipedia:Orphaned articles by WikiProject#W for lists of orphaned women's biographies. --Rosiestep (talk) 09:53, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the link Rosiestep! This looks like a fun and important area to work on. Do you think it rises to the level of an editathon - "Finding homes for articles, a de-orphaning meet up"? While it wouldn't add to the overall numbers of articles (in fact might result in some AfDs), it would be a good way for newcomers to exercise editing skills. Also I am reminded again of Megalibrarygirl's wonderful essay Writing women into the encyclopedia, filled with tips on how to integrate article into Wikipedia. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 15:58, 6 July 2023 (UTC)
WomenArtistUpdates - Indeed; seems like it could be a fun editathon. Would you like to propose it on the Ideas page? --Rosiestep (talk) 03:55, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
Rather than an editathon, I think it would be useful to include a tip of the month on the need to avoid orphans.--Ipigott (talk) 06:54, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
I de-orphaned a few biographies yesterday. After de-orphaning, I also removed the {{orphan}} template from the top of the woman's biography article. Does that step need to be done, or does that template auto-disappear (e.g., {{ill}} template auto-disappears after article creation) within a day or so? --Rosiestep (talk) 14:47, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
(edit clash) Rosiestep, thank you for the link. For background, reports like Wikipedia:Orphaned articles by WikiProject pick up articles tagged with Template:Orphan, which was formerly added to articles with less than three incoming links, so some articles listed are not actually orphans. I have looked at some of the articles listed and it is often not easy to add appropriate incoming links without doing research outside Wikipedia. Also many of them would benefit from further development. TSventon (talk) 15:03, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
{{orphan}} has to be removed manually, there is more information at WP:Orphan. TSventon (talk) 15:08, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
You can also use WP:AWB to remove it if you have a bunch of articles to cover. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:14, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
Another question: How many incoming wikilinks are sufficient to de-orphan... 1? 3? [foo]? --Rosiestep (talk) 16:40, 7 July 2023 (UTC)
WP:Orphan says A single, relevant incoming link is sufficient to remove the tag. Three or more incoming links will help ensure the article is reachable by readers.[1] Editors may also remove the tag from any article if they believe that de-orphaning is unlikely to be successful, or if they have attempted to provide incoming links. TSventon (talk) 16:50, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Note: Past discussion resulted in the change from three incoming links to one due to issues with increasing backlogs.
TSventon, thank you! --Rosiestep (talk) 17:30, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

I frequently use appropriate lists to overcome the orphan problem. I also check to see whether links from other articles have been made since the tag was added. They often have. On the other hand, there are a considerable number of orphans which have never been tagged.--Ipigott (talk) 19:51, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Maybe time for this WikiProject to address this

Hello. There is a good discussion occurring at Talk:Witchcraft#Ridiculous! which focuses on women who identify as a witch and their relationships to the term witchcraft and its practices (both historically and present day, see the short descriptor for a start, ""Practice of malevolent magic"). Randy Kryn (talk) 13:46, 8 July 2023 (UTC)

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