Talk:Gender, Place & Culture

Publishing hoax paper

https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studies-and-the-corruption-of-scholarship/ is receiving news coverage and should probable be included in the article. Update: with more appropriate secondary sources-Pengortm (talk) 21:07, 3 October 2018 (UTC)

References

Hoax

@Soledad425: Please do stop edit warring on this. It's not the article that "discredited" the journal, it's the journal that discredited itself by publishing extremely offensive article with great reviews and awarding it an excellence highlight. Cloud200 (talk) 20:19, 21 October 2018 (UTC)

I agree that this article merits covering the hoax affair in some way, and silencing coverage of it is not the right approach. For completeness of this discussion, I am pasting here the reasons given by user:Soledad425 to delete the "Controversies" section:

This hoax seeks to discredit a journal that has published much important work. It is out of proportion and has been widely criticized by scholars across the social sciences and humanities. These entries are driven by unscholarly and hate-filled motivations

In my mind this situation presents a very interesting quandary for the following reasons: first, given the requirement for reliable sources to support all content in wikipedia articles, and the fact that not much information is available on the journals themselves, most wiki articles on academic journals are quite brief. Then we have a notable event develop, in this case, hoax paper being being published and lauded by a journal, which garners press coverage.

In my view in this situation two sets of rules of wikipedia come into an apparent contradiction: On one hand reliable sources cover a topic making it notable (the hoax), and therefore worthy of inclusion in wikipedia, while the sparse content of the pre-existing article means that the principle of Neutral Point of VIew may be undermined, by giving disproportionate (WP:BALASP) weight to one isolated incident. Specifically, Neutral POV rules state:

should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject. For example, discussion of isolated events, criticisms, or news reports about a subject may be verifiable and impartial, but still disproportionate to their overall significance to the article topic. This is a concern especially in relation to recent events that may be in the news.

Thank you for detailed analysis. I believe the perception of disproportionality arises because the article itself has almost no content and the hoax (a single sentence really!) just stands out. It's not a problem with mentioning hoax though, I'd say it's more of a problem that the supporters of the journal were too busy to write anything positive about it :) Cloud200 (talk) 12:46, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

So we have to be very careful to be balanced about it. user:Soledad425 may be right that "It is out of proportion and has been widely criticized by scholars across the social sciences and humanities", but wrong in just removing all coverage of it in this article. Mind you, I am one of the main contributors to the main article Grievance studies affair (still a work in progress), so I am far from trying to silence the matter.

So I recommend taking some of the points of Soledad425 as valid ones. I am unsure yet how to implement these, but here a few options that come to mind:

A) A very brief mention that a hoax paper was published, linking to Grievance studies affair for further detail.

We have this already apart from the link Cloud200 (talk) 12:46, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

B) A more expanded paragraph noting the deceptions used by the perpetrators of the hoax, and the mix of praise and criticism garnered (that provides a more nuanced approach, but also creates again more extensive coverage, which may be tricky)

I don't think this article is the right place for that. After all, many journals published the hoax. Just linking the Grievance studies affair and saying something "in 2018 the journal was one of the journals targeted by the hoax" would be both impartial and proportionate Cloud200 (talk) 12:46, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

C) A or B, plus adding any reactions by the journal, as well as any announcements on how it will strengthen its peer and editorial review. I think they deserve a voice in this. This can be sourced from secondary sources if available, but also even we use a primary source (WP:PRIMARYNOTBAD) if need be (a press release by the journal, for example).

Fully agree but the reaction of the journal was essentially to delete the article and pretend nothing happened so it will again attract complaints about the article discrediting the journal by describing their true reaction (or lack of it :) Cloud200 (talk) 12:46, 24 October 2018 (UTC)

D) Also in addition to the prior options, try to find more sources that cover this journal, and expand the article, so that the weakness exposed in this hoax event is appropriately put in context of potentially other virtues and achievements the journal has. This requires more work, but it may be the most fair way to treating the journal as a whole in this article.

As a final thought, one wonders: if a journal fell prey to this hoax, and the wiki article should cover that fact, then, should the greater number of journals that actually rejected hoax submissions also have a mention of that in the corresponding wiki articles? This a different matter from the main point of discussion here, but I just wanted to bring the thought to bring more perspective and ponder better on how to be equitable in what information is presented in Wikipedia.

Thank you! (talk) user:Al83tito  1:25, 22 October 2018 (UTC)