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Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Single/2023-05-08

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The following is an automatically-generated compilation of all talk pages for the Signpost issue dated 2023-05-08. For general Signpost discussion, see Wikipedia talk:Signpost.

Arbitration report: "World War II and the history of Jews in Poland" approaches conclusion (2,371 bytes · 💬)

This is shockingly short. Frostly (talk) 04:45, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

It is. There shall no doubt be a lot more after the decision's published, since right now it'd have to be a carefully unbiasd summary of a lot of competing viewpoints. Considered whether this should be rolled into one of the other sections, didn't see an obvious target, and, well.... Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 8.3% of all FPs. Currently celebrating his 600th FP! 06:14, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

I think it was a very sensible editorial judgment to wait to cover the ArbCom decision until after it is issued, or at least is proposed. However, the references above to Wikipediocracy and BLPCRIME were probably not worth specific mention here; at least in my perception, these items are of very minor, if any, significance to the case as a whole. Newyorkbrad (talk) 16:17, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

They stood out to me, as the author of several Arbcom reports going back to the 2017 timeframe or thereabouts. It seemed unusual enough to mention. Rather the opposite; I would not have been surprised if off-wiki evidence, especially from that particular source, was subject to removal. ☆ Bri (talk) 18:21, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
what? they said they weren't getting into off-wiki behaviour, which is what the BLPCRIME stuff is all about. Elinruby (talk) 04:38, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
Unless I'm mistaken this discussion by one of the parties is an explicit discussion of points made on WO. Whether it's to rebut or to dismiss it from evidence, I don't know, and isn't especially relevant at this point. The point is, it's being discussed in an Arbcom case at all. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:28, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Featured content: I wrote a poem for each article, I found rhymes for all the lists;
My first featured picture of this year now finally exists! (303 bytes · 💬)

Gog the Mild (talk) 22:32, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

In the media: Vivek's smelly socks, online safety, and politics (4,212 bytes · 💬)

Presidential candidate / paid editing

Jhofferman has provided some interesting context on their user talk page:

I agreed to take the job because I had done a previous revision of the page in June 2022, and his assistant asked if I could make a few updates. I was hired and began the revision in January, before he declared his candidacy (which I found out about the same way as everyone else). It mostly involved adding information about his books and about Strive Asset Management, but there were also some excisions made, including details about Roivant subsidiaries and some other past activities that seemed to be cluttering the narrative without adding anything substantive. Apparently, some of the requested deletions may have been less innocent. While I frequently had to explain to him and his press secretary about Wikipedia's guidelines and why I couldn't do some of the things they wanted, I guess I wasn't as diligent as I should have been. I wasn't hired to delete material about the Soros Fellowship and his Covid-era role, but it's not inaccurate to say that he "paid to have it scrubbed." Needless to say, I regret my role in this.

Assuming this is a truthful summary, this may also serve as a cautionary tale for other editors who find themselves being asked to make supposedly "uncontroversial" or "straightforward" changes for pay.

Regards, HaeB (talk) 04:44, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

That's interesting context, and given that it's the sort of statement that could easily jeopardize future paid gigs, I can't help but respect it. The most interesting thing here is I frequently had to explain to him and his press secretary about Wikipedia's guidelines and why I couldn't do some of the things they wanted. - I imagine as the election cycle continues to pick up, this is only going to become more common. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 14:52, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
  • In case anyone was wondering the ANI thread on Jhofferman was archived, with no action taken. Firestar464 (talk) 22:37, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Online safety

  • It seems to me that most of these "online safety" efforts are at best poorly thought out and, at worst, actively malicious. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 14:54, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Open the Knowledge Journalism Awards

  • I think there's a large proviso if the Signpost is going to complain about the contest being English-language only. It's important that such contests offering money have good judging. One of the classic problems with WMF initiatives in the past has been unleashing contributors in some area but not closely monitoring the results, even when the initiative is in English. To be sure, if the WMF has some reserve of French/Arabic/Afrikaans/etc. speakers they trust to fairly read & judge such articles, then sure, allow submissions in languages with enough trusted judges too, but if they don't, it's better to do nothing than to pay people for "bad" content (whether worthless machine-translated churnalism, or even worse, yellow journalism / promotional pieces).
  • (As a side note, and this is not the main focus of my comment because obviously expanding to more languages would be great if possible, but I think the Francophonie map as well as mapping "by area" are a bit misleading as to the true prominence of French. File:Proportion of French speakers by country (1-50% gradation).svg is probably more helpful - it's mostly the Congos & Tunisia that have a high proportion of French speakers, but it really isn't that common in a lot of countries theoretically part of the Francophonie.). SnowFire (talk) 22:04, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

News and notes: New legal "deVLOPments" in the EU (12,579 bytes · 💬)

VLOP status in the EU

When it says "Wikipedia" has been assigned a VLOP status, does that mean Wikipedia in all languages, or specifically the English one?  — Amakuru (talk) 06:30, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Difficult to know. In France we have a similar law and I asked if regional languages were also concerned. We didn't receive an answer. For me, every main languages speak in EU are concerned by DSA (if it's not a tiny wiki). It's clear that EU autorities will try to know the number of moderators per country or language for Twitter, Facebook, etc. Pyb en résidence (talk) 09:51, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
I had the same confusion - especially since combining the Wikipedias as a VLOP is a really bizarre action. It's quite rare for us to do anything at that level. I would have expected them to join us at the "everything" or the "individual lingual project" levels. Nosebagbear (talk) 12:50, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
We wondered the same thing; see note "d" on the data we were required to publish: https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Legal:EU_DSA_Userbase_Statistics . Perhaps some enterprising academics will think about it; it's one of a few questions that the DSA raises. PBradley-WMF (talk) 15:35, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
English is an EU language despite the fact that there are no English-speaking countries in the EU. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:48, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
Ireland and Malta. Blythwood (talk) 05:01, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I'm wondering if this status is awarded per second-level domain since corporations/organizations usually organize their website that way -- e.g. all of Google is under google.com. If so -- it's rigid enough of a definition that would satisfy your average lawyer -- then that include all of the Wikipedias, no matter how small, while simultaneously exclude the other projects, such as Commons, Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc. -- llywrch (talk) 21:04, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

"It also preserves, at its core, the all-important notice-and-takedown paradigm for intermediary liability, rather than forcing the platform operator to systematically scan and block user-generated content that may be illegal in particular jurisdictions." (Diff blog post) So what happens when someone in an EU jurisdiction sends a takedown notice for forbidden content which is WP:NOTCENSORED in the US? Sandizer (talk) 15:43, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

There would probably be some drama between the EU and the WMF, which would likely result in either no action taken or WP getting blocked. History points to the first possibility being the most likely. Firestar464 (talk) 22:18, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
That would be a fairly accurate summary. The US continues to generate the most take-down requests, but even DMCA requests are not actioned these days. For all the details, read the Transparency report here Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:48, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
The DSA doesn't necessarily change much in this space; WMF can, and does, already receive takedowns in respect of content that's lawful in the US. As for "DMCA requests are not actioned these days", note that this is usually because either (i) the community takes action on content before WMF needs to Office Action it, or (ii) it's a bogus request. Stats, as always, can be misleading! PBradley-WMF (talk) 15:35, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
The link doesn't work. Apokrif (talk) 18:33, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Bravo for this incredible headline. Truly an all-timer. :) Joe Sutherland (WMF) (talk) 07:09, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

  Andreas JN466 12:38, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
I concur, a work of genius. Zarasophos (talk) 15:48, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

As the WMF has said, I think we already do a good job at a lot of this - it's pretty easy to report illegal or dubious content the the community generally acts very swiftly and effectively to tackle such issues, whether that's via the admin messageboards, ArbCom or other avenues. One thing we have deliberately avoided, and resisted, doing though is censorship of any form, and I'm wondering what the impact of the "protection of minors" section will be on that. If for example we need readers to verify their age before they can access some content, that's going to be an interesting challenge to implement. As well as the technical challenges there's the whole can of worms around deciding which content is restricted. As a whole, though, we're in a good place. Whereas Elon Musk seems to have reduced Twitter's moderation team to almost zero, we have many active and diligent people armed with mops and prepared to use them. WaggersTALK 10:38, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

There are challenges ahead, I suspect, and our movement is going to be quite heavily dependent on creativity and good judgement arising from within the community itself (though if, heaven forbid, WMF were to suggest something, hopefully we wouldn't have our heads bitten off). In an ideal world, if there's a problem and it needs a solution, the solution we come up with would *increase* the societal value of our projects. Like, ideally, if there are legitimate concerns about Commons content, it would be good to come up with solutions that don't require abandoning COM:NOTCENSORED, or require hard age gating, but might somehow still result in certain content being less likely to surprise a teacher in front of their classroom of 11 year olds (and by "surprise", I mean "result in parents calling for the teacher to be fired and never work with kids again"). Something like that could hypothetically allow Commons to become easier to use in a wider range of educational settings. PBradley-WMF (talk) 15:35, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
@PBradley-WMF: can you give some ideas of how this could be done and what it would entail? For example, suppose Commons had tags for NSFW and Nazi imagery, for children and German users to use to filter respectively. In such case would volunteers or the Foundation, or both, be responsible for adding those tags? It seems like it could be an expensive undertaking, but not insurmountable. How would such filters be activated? What happens when a filtered image is used in an article? Sandizer (talk) 15:35, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
Hi Sandizer - I don't have authority to speak for the entire Foundation on this, but in the scenario you're describing I personally think it's best if the Foundation wouldn't be in charge of the tagging. PBradley-WMF (talk) 16:12, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
Commons does already have have this [1] CandyScythe (talk) 20:23, 10 May 2023 (UTC)
@PBradley-WMF: another huge question is, once we take a step down that path, what's to prevent litigious jurisdictions from demanding things such as [2]? Sandizer (talk) 16:03, 11 May 2023 (UTC)
@Sandizer: note that a big part of my job, as you can imagine, is fighting takedowns. I'm not here to advocate for them! My earlier comment was mostly aimed at finding solutions that increase the value (e.g. broad-spectrum usability) of our projects, and my hope that ideas in that area (if any are needed) would come from within the community if possible. We shouldn't see the world only in terms of slippery slopes and zero-sum games! I think in theory it's possible to make Commons (more) capable of schoolroom use, for example, without giving into Putin's demands re. how to portray the "special military operation" in Ukraine, or the PRC's expectations re. Taiwan. PBradley-WMF (talk) 08:11, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
Some historical context (which I suspect @PBradley-WMF may already be aware of, but then again he seems to have joined the Foundation fairly recently and the organization has not always had perfect institutional memory). A similar-sounding solution was debated very extensively in the Wikimedia movement around 2010-2012, see e.g. this past Signpost coverage:
Now as Heraclitus knew already, nobody ever steps in the same community discussion twice. But I wouldn't bet on a total absence of concerns about slippery slopes.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 02:02, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

@PBradley-WMF: Do you need help to translate your original article in other languages? I can cover for the Italian version, if needed! Oltrepier (talk) 19:17, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Hello @Oltrepier! Sorry for the slow reply. It's always a kind gesture when someone volunteers to translate an article. Folks can translate a published post by logging in to Diff with their Wikimedia account via the "Login with MediaWiki" link. Then, visit the article they want to translate and click the "Translate This Post" under the byline. They'll be prompted to select the language to translate to and a copy will be made in the WordPress editor to translate. More details here: https://diff.wikimedia.org/translation/ PBradley-WMF (talk) 14:55, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Mastodon accreditation

As another intermediate update on this, per meta:Talk:@Wikipedia#Hi!_Available_to_chat?, there was a meeting last week between the two community maintainers of the Mastodon Wikipedia (Legoktm and Annierau) and the WMF Communications department, where the latter appears to have made "the proposal to change the name of the account to 'Wikipedia movement,' 'Wikipedia volunteers,' 'Wikipedia worldwide, or something similar." Regards, HaeB (talk) 02:13, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

News from the WMF: Planning together with the Wikimedia Foundation (776 bytes · 💬)

The Wikimedia Foundation has been engaging in layoffs; disappointed that this has not been acknowledged. Harej (talk) 17:39, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi Harej, we had coverage of this a couple of weeks ago, in our previous issue. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-04-26/News_from_the_WMF and Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-04-26/News_and_notes. Andreas JN466 17:58, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Recent research: Gender, race and notability in deletion discussions (19,612 bytes · 💬)

It's always interesting to read about Wikipedia policies. I myself was unfamiliar with TOOSOON, but it made me chuckle. Just to check, I ran a Wikidata query for the human genders male and female with sitelinks on English Wikipedia who were born after 01-01-2000. Of a total of 9049 humans, women represent 30%. Either it's been too soon for their articles to get Wikidata items that include their gender, or it's too soon for them to have an article, but women up to age 23 are still underrepresented on English Wikipedia by a large margin. Jane (talk) 05:43, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

From what I recall from research I did on this few years back, the more recent the time range considered, the less women are underprepresented. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 08:27, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Jane023, I am surprised that women represented 30% of your sample; I would have expected it to be lower, given the undue weight that Wikipedia authors and the results of our notability guidelines give to sports figures, who are predominantly male. I would be interested to see the same percentage breakdown for news coverage or other significant coverage in independent, reliable, secondary sources. In a world dominated by patriarchy, would you expect 51% of coverage to be about women? I would not; our societies have more progress to make in ensuring that the potential contributions of all people are valued and available. – Jonesey95 (talk) 17:38, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
That's funnny! I myself was surprised it was as high as 30% and can only conclude this is thanks to the w:WikiProject Women in Red. Don't forget there are several big issues with women that men don't have that makes data collection (and thus findability for Wikipedians wishing to create articles) very complex and difficult. Obviously the biggest issue is systemic bias by language (no info in English? article ain't happening). Women tend to travel less than men, due to family issues, making their chances of crossing language lines in news articles much less on the whole as a group. Secondly, women get married and change their name, clouding findability by genealogy methods. Thirdly, women hide their birth dates due to ageism in various fields, which again clouds findability for potential Wikipedians. The main issue that could contribute to a higher degree of article deletions for women and minorities is thus a lack of sources, but this does not address "ghost edits" or articles that were started but never happened. Collecting data on articles by Wikipedia project is definitely useful, but it gets interesting only when you drill down into things like occupation, notable works, and birth country, among other datapoints. Jane (talk) 07:04, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I revisited that query I ran because I doubted the 30% and indeed the number is less than 30%. It occurred to me that my earlier query ran rather quickly and this was because I queried those born on 2000-01-01 and not after 2000-01-01. When I correct it I get timeouts, but this query (toggle manually for gender) for births between 2000 and 2010 will return 9705 females and 26672 males so 9705/(9705+26672)=27%, not 30%. This query runs towards the time limit for each gender, which is about right for English Wikipedia. Jane (talk) 09:43, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks for contributing some data! This paper did something very similar, just without the restriction to Wikipedia sitelinks (i.e. examined gender gaps on Wikidata instead of Wikipedia). They observed that the proportion of Wikidata items about women ranges between 0.2 and 0.25 for birth years 1950 to 1990 and has increased steadily since then, reaching 0.4178 for the 2000 birth year. (Also, they found that Wikidata editors are likely to over sample male-dominated professions such as American football and baseball, thus contributing to the general predominance of items representing men over items representing women. Our analysis that focused on a set of academic professions show that the gender distribution of Wikidata is no more biased than real world notability judgments in either coverage or quality. Obviously that doesn't speak directly to possible gender biases on Wikipedia instead of Wikidata, but it is still interesting e.g. because of similarities in the editor populations that people often like to draw quick conclusions from.)
Regards, HaeB (talk) 17:44, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Without going into a whole list of pet peeves I have with the gender data on Wikidata, I will say it would be useful to query for the age of the subject at the time of item creation with the same moment recorded for each specific Wikipedia project with an actual article (minus any redirects) about the subject. If you could query that data and cross-reference it per Wikipedia language you could get some more specific information about gender bias on Wikipedia. My gut feeling for women in sports is that we have a large quantity of women thanks only to the wp:WikiProject Olympics in some Wikipedia languages. Currently I have no way to measure that. On the whole, I don't think studying AfD data is very useful for gender issues, but possibly it is for occupational issues (controversial (garage bands), new (vloggers) or individual-based (artists) and so forth). Jane (talk) 07:54, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks to XOR'easter, with editorial guidance from Tilman Bayer, for exposing the shortcomings of the abysmally bad paper by Mackenzie Lemieux, Rebecca Zhang and Francesca Tripodi about Wikipedia procedures for assessing the notability of scholars and researchers that was recently published in the journal Big data and society. I hope that we shall see a response by Lemieux, Zhang and Tripodi to the many allegations of inaccuracy and misrepresentation that exist in the paper. The editor of the journal Matthew Zook is invited to explain how this egregiously erroneous paper got through the journal’s peer review process. Xxanthippe (talk) 08:52, 8 May 2023 (UTC).

Great read. One minor thing I think might discourage people from sharing it outside Wikipedia is the use of the jargon "!voter" and "!vote". They're probably better replaced with "participant" and "comment" or the like. Nardog (talk) 09:13, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

  • Really good read by @XOR'easter and HaeB: - an excellent rebuttal of a terrible piece of academic writing. Hopefully Lemieux et al will read it and respond to just how so many flaws made it through. Though if I had to guess, they'll find a single line they can take out of context and use that to suggest the entire thing is clearly flawed. But we will see, and it doesn't undermine the quality of this piece. With thanks, Nosebagbear (talk) 09:51, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Thanks! Just to clarify though, the text is all XOR'easter's (apart from the explanatory intro that quotes from the paper). On the other hand, it seems that some credit for identifying issues in the paper should also go to other participants in the discussion at the Women in Red talk page that had been started there at the beginning of April. (I myself only read the paper this past weekend, in the context of reviewing XOR'easter's Signpost submission, and subsequently contributed these observations about the authors' misinterpretation of p-values in one of their central quantitative conclusions.) Regards, HaeB (talk) 18:01, 8 May 2023 (UTC) (Tilman)
Thanks for the feedback! In the original version, I explained about deletion debates not being votes and what "!vote" means, but that got cut when bringing the column over to the Signpost. The original was even longer than this version and included more background for people coming to the topic without experience in Wikipedia behind-the-scenes stuff. XOR'easter (talk) 12:19, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Excellent work. I would encourage you to submit the longer version for publication in a scholarly journal (perhaps in Big Data & Society itself). —Compassionate727 (T·C) 16:11, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
Over at the Women in Red project discussion page, we've been contemplating what to do next (and also going further into the statistics, which are ... puzzling: just how many biographies did they look at?). It's the end of the semester for me, so what with the usual obligations I haven't much spare time or energy. And writing about this isn't simple, on account of the tough balancing act: the problem of systemic bias is obviously important, but a specific paper about it can still be methodologically flawed beyond repair. Wikipedia's coverage of minority populations evidently isn't where it should be if we are to live up to our ideals, but a paper with that premise can still go so far astray from how things actually happen here that it enters the empyrean level of confident wrongness more typically associated with ChatGPT and men at cocktail parties. XOR'easter (talk) 16:32, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

I find it weird for a publication to present views of some importance when they can be manipulated. The Google search is more of a litmus test and never was a set guideline. The publication finding out should have been mentioned as a positive because we don't look at the info that SEO could easily sway. We look at more specific guidelines from GNG for people in their fields because it should make sense. – The Grid (talk) 13:22, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

This blithe and dismissive take on a well-established and important issue is unfortunate. It may be fair to criticise some of the methodology of their study, but the arguments in response to their criticisms presented above are specious. It would be far better to acknowledge that Wikipedia has well-established systemic biases and then we can figure out why that is the case. To refer to policy obfuscates from how that policy plays out in practice; and I think that most honest editors would willingly acknowledge that Wikipedia suffers from severe bias problems. Jack4576 (talk) 15:10, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

That's a lot to assume. People will quote essays, policies, and guidelines in AfD discussions to get the ball rolling on discussion. Note that essays and guidelines are not policies. Sometimes people point to WP:AFDOUTCOMES but always note citing any of the above with no explanation can be weighed lower than explanations made. The study seems to really not go into the meat of AfD discussions where discussion is always considered more important than people simply stating essays, policies, or guidelines. There's a tally but it's always been a very rough estimate. The criticism is valid. – The Grid (talk) 16:46, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
@Jack4576: this reasoning would seem to indicate that no paper should receive detailed criticism for its failings so long as it raises an overall issue of importance. Do you believe that specific criticisms raised in this article are incorrect? How does their being raised undermine the overall desire to combat bias? I also would like you to expand upon your indication of XOR's response being blithe, which means "lacking due thought or consideration". I can't see how this stands up, so seems to me more of an unsupported attack on the quality of their work. "Wikipedia suffers from severe bias problems" is certainly possible, but I would firmly dispute that AfD isn't policy driven. AfD is one of the most policy-backed fora on the entire site. While I'd appreciate a response now, I'd also be interested to see if your views remain unchanged after you've expanded your AfD experience set further, as you appear to be just starting into. Nosebagbear (talk) 16:58, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
In many cases, ostensibly policy driven. Which I believe is the whole point of this piece. It’s unsurprising that editors are keen to dismiss these critiques of hand. Jack4576 (talk) 23:19, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
it’s not a very strong critique to point to ostensible policies to dismiss an empirical study about the outcomes of said policy. No one claims Wikipedia’s policies are on their face biased; the core of the piece is what happens in practice with the implementation of said policies. Jack4576 (talk) 23:22, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
@Jack4576 But the core of the piece isn't about the actual practice. Otherwise it wouldn't spend large periods of time talking about non-policies/guidelines, it wouldn't need to engage in quote mining (the full quotes would give everything they needed), they wouldn't need to raise the idea that AfDs are biased for occurring and leave out they were closed for sexism in less than a couple of hours, and in particular they wouldn't need to make their own flagrantly incorrect statements of what various PAGs mean.
You could absolutely have a really good piece of research talking about whether the !votes people make execute the letter & spirit of the notability policies - but where the paper makes comparisons they do so to clearly incorrect statements of wikipedia policy, rendering them meaningless. I would also like your evidence of the scale of incorrect !votes due to biased interpretations that you say are occurring. Nosebagbear (talk) 12:05, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
This discussion is unproductive at this point. Obviously I don't have empirical evidence and am running off anecdotal experience like everyone else here. The article's conclusions ring true to me. Selective enforcement of policy can create bias, even if the policy itself is unbiased. This is obviously true and those who dispute that as occurring on Wikipedia just aren't paying close enough attention IMO. I suppose you need to wait for an empirical study to be convinced. You may be waiting a while. Jack4576 (talk) 12:41, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I have looked at some of your AfD comments and you don't even provide Wikipedia policy for your reasons. It's really a blunder what you're going on about. – The Grid (talk) 12:55, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
I thought we were discussing this article. Feel free to chime in over on AfD if you have constructive feedback. Jack4576 (talk) 13:57, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
There's plenty of sources that discuss the problem of systemic bias on Wikipedia. But, this paper is worthless for determining its extent, nature, and causes, because its methodology is wrong. Most people would agree that there are issues of bias in, say, the criminal justice system, but an analysis paper on such bias that was based around, say, the magazines left in the police station waiting room rather than the briefings & trainings the police chief gave to the officers would be too nonsensical to be useful. SnowFire (talk) 19:51, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
worthless is overstating the case. Jack4576 (talk) 23:20, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
It really isn't. The errors described are catastrophic, along with a touch of nonsensical fake-math from people who don't know statistics. Your user page says you're interested in Australian law - imagine reading a paper with a conclusion you agree with, but the argument cites the 19th century Code Napoleon as if it were Australian law, and thinks that Ned Kelly was Prime Minister of Australia. Maybe the conclusion is correct, but the paper is still worthless. The authors clearly never ran their draft past an experienced Wikipedian. SnowFire (talk) 12:50, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
Personally, I would be shocked if there wasn't some degree of systemic bias in our handling of notability. I think there is absolutely a conversation to be had there. But we cannot reasonably have that conversation when the facts have been so badly muddied that essays are being described as guidelines and the search engine test is being held up as an example of How Notability Works. If your factual information is that poor, then just about the only thing you've told us is that there is systemic bias, somewhere, maybe, which I imagine most of us probably already knew. --NYKevin 04:05, 9 May 2023 (UTC)
And if we didn't know, we sure aren't going to be convinced by reading that. —Compassionate727 (T·C) 08:38, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

The selective quoting in the paper is so precisely selective in every single instance in order to omit actual statements of substance about notability from those being quoted that I can't help but think it was entirely purposeful by Lemieux et al. in order to farm quotes that present a viewpoint that supports the claims of the paper itself. Pretty disgraceful, if you ask me. SilverserenC 16:46, 8 May 2023 (UTC)

Great review article, kudos to the contributors CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 01:02, 18 May 2023 (UTC)

Special report: There Shall Be Seasons Refreshing – Stories from WikiConference India 2023 (0 bytes · 💬)

Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-05-08/Special report


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