I know a lot about Wikipedia and wiki editing processes in general, so I feel slightly qualified to talk about this. I'm very sympathetic toward Phelps here, and really anyone in her...
Exemplary
I know a lot about Wikipedia and wiki editing processes in general, so I feel slightly qualified to talk about this.
I'm very sympathetic toward Phelps here, and really anyone in her position—academia is a stingy enough place without having to deal with being snubbed because of your ethnicity. Wikipedia definitely is a very typical "straight, white, male, Western" website (not that this is an unusual quality for the internet, unfortunately). And, as @Yugioh_Mishima points out, its editors tend to be "overly hostile and poorly socialized," or at least the more vocal ones are. (I have to deal with the latter issue a lot on the wiki that I run. I think it's more of an internet poweruser thing in general.) These qualities can be really problematic in talk page discussions.
But I begin to question the author's knowledge of Wikipedia's editing systems when they go on to suggest such solutions as:
Wikipedia could start by allowing more flexibility in its citation and sourcing criteria for notable figures from underrepresented groups. At the very least, it could protect those pages from anonymous flags—as it does for other potentially controversial pages—and grant the entries a grace period to address issues raised by a flag before being marked for deletion. It could also remove user anonymity to help stem the impersonal nastiness seen in page debates and deletion wars—nastiness that likely discourages underrepresented groups from sticking around in the Wikipedia community.
I'm sorry, but if there aren't a decent number of trustworthy sources about a given figure, it doesn't make sense to allow lower-quality ones to bridge this gap (nor to rely on fewer sources, thereby decreasing the overall balance of an article) for the sake of representation. These goals are admirable, but encouraging poor citation practices in one sphere of Wikipedia devalues the accuracy of the site as a whole. Citations aren't valuable if the site's underlying citation policies are weak.
More specifically, perhaps the editors in this situation were acting under racist/sexist inclinations and Phelps should really have an article. This is likely true, but there is also a case to be made for the deletion reason: "Being a technician on a project being led by others is not grounds for a wikipedia page." James Andrew Harris, another African-American scientist involved in the discovery of elements whom the article refers to, was the head of his research group. That distinction is probably what allows his article to remain up despite requiring more citations. But this isn't a hill I'm going to die on.
The author's next suggestion is also a little strange. Protect all pages about people in underrepresented groups from editing by unregistered users? This only makes sense if you think that the only thing editors on Wikipedia can do is tag articles for deletion... but they can also edit articles, and expand upon them. Considering Wikipedia's lack of diversity among registered users, barring people who are not part of the "in-group" (i.e. barring a greater number of people from minority groups) will just make the matter worse. To remove anonymous editing altogether is just as ridiculous; most people start off editing without an account! It's that rush of satisfaction you get from contributing to something greater than yourself that encourages you to actually join the community. Yes, the option of anonymity can cause issues in talk page debates, but it's also the lifeblood of the site and the way it continues to get editors.
I personally think that Phelps' involvement here is notable and wouldn't have deleted the page, but I would be hesitant to boil it all down to discrimination. It's also just bureaucracy. When you edit wikis enough, you stop assigning your personal values to articles tagged for deletion and the like, especially as an administrator; there are just too many to consider subjectively. Hence the strict adherence to the letter of the law; that's not necessarily in the spirit of the encyclopedia, but it's the reality of running a site this large.
Seem justified to me, her only cited scientific contribution is to be involved in the discovery of Tennessine, but she's not even in the list of authors of the original article (some of them don't...
Seem justified to me, her only cited scientific contribution is to be involved in the discovery of Tennessine, but she's not even in the list of authors of the original article (some of them don't have a wikipedia page either):
Wikipedia is probably not discriminating in this case. I have had pages I wrote about tech subjects deleted because I couldn't find enough references for them. This is just the way wikipedia is....
Wikipedia is probably not discriminating in this case. I have had pages I wrote about tech subjects deleted because I couldn't find enough references for them. This is just the way wikipedia is. Wikipedia is not the only website in the world though. We are all free to write our own pages to share the things we know and if wikipedia doesn't have an article for it then it should show pretty high on google search.
honestly i think the problem ultimately falls with having such rigid standards to begin with. on some level it makes sense to want to be rigid with sourcing requirements--but if you want to...
On the other hand, it is a shame that people like Clarice Phelps aren't considered notable and that no good sources about her are available. But I don't know what to do about it: I don't think it'd be right to lower Wikipedia's standards.
honestly i think the problem ultimately falls with having such rigid standards to begin with. on some level it makes sense to want to be rigid with sourcing requirements--but if you want to genuinely reflect all the important people that have existed like wikipedia kinda does, you kinda can't have a single set? holding say, biographies of slaves to the same standards as major physicists in history for example will ultimately systematically disadvantage all slaves even if they played an important role in history because there simply won't be the sort of paper trail with even the most well attested slaves that might exist with someone like isaac newton. there are lots of groups of people who might as well be memory-holed, either because their history was never well attested or because it was simply lost to time or whatever else, and unless your sourcing standard are contextual to reflect things like that, there's simply no way that you can avoid completely under-representing certain groups of people who just happened to be on the shitty end of document preservation.
(in other words like the article says, this really all comes down to a judgement call of whether or not sourcing standards should be flexible or rigid based on the context)
I'd strongly disagree, and I'd argue that the author of this piece, while well-intentioned, completely misses the goal of Wikipedia and the motivations behind the requirements there: that they...
I'd strongly disagree, and I'd argue that the author of this piece, while well-intentioned, completely misses the goal of Wikipedia and the motivations behind the requirements there: that they continually refer to notability (a guideline) rather than verifiability (the underlying policy) is an indication of this. The standards need to be rigid because the authorship and editing framework of Wikipedia allows for nothing else without disaster, something that has been repeatedly demonstrated in battles there.
Wikipedia is not the place for publication of research, and strongly points this out, with its no original research policy. This doesn't mean that biographies of people without extensive (or indeed any) paper trails aren't allowed, it means that the research can't be presented in Wikipedia as the first publication venue. Do research and publish articles, do oral histories, reconstruct the lives and actions of people who would otherwise be lost to time, and publish that in places where it can be appropriately vetted. Then people can take that research, and use it to construct Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia does not have requirements on the types of primary sources that exist for a topic; instead, its policies often discourage use of primary sources because that tends to involve research.
The fundamental structure of Wikipedia relies on the articles being written without too much decision-making, original research, or, arguably, thought. There is no real way for claims to be vetted or stances to be taken beyond pointing to independent sources, and, when those sources disagree, retreating to simply stating that each source claimed whatever it claimed. There is no control or vetting of authorship, beyond banning repeated vandals, trolls, and other bad actors. There is no checking of sources, beyond checking to see that the sources say what the article claims they say. There are enormous weaknesses to this model, but it is inextricably at the heart of Wikipedia.
If the same policies that prevent an article (at the moment) from being created for a person like Phelps are changed in a consistent manner, then the repercussions are very problematic. In my youth, I used to edit Wikipedia articles on modern pseudoscience and quackery, and these policies were continually part of the disputes there. There was a group, for example, that argued they could diagnose many diseases by pulling on patients' fingers (BDORT: no, this is not a joke). They would argue that it was unfair Wikipedia demanded independent sources: their websites had many testimonials to the effectiveness of the method, while the only major independent source, legal tribunal reports from New Zealand, described the deaths of misdiagnosed patients. Mainstream medicine wouldn't allow their research to be published elsewhere, so why wouldn't we allow their websites? Transcendental Meditationalists argued that their websites' descriptions of yogic flying should be included as fact in articles about flight and human abilities, because again, it was simply not something that was sufficiently published in independent sources.
And of course, the larger, more important battles, which I never became involved in, were in issues of corporate and political PR campaigns.
In all these cases, Wikipedia has nothing to fall back on but a reliance on repeating what independent sources say, because it has no real way of making editorial decisions. It can do nothing else: it needs research to be done elsewhere, and vetted by others.
So, the real question here is why there is a lack of sources on Phelps. Why aren't people writing articles? Wikipedia is not the space for that: it is the space for referencing the articles published elsewhere.
the answer is the same thing that causes this problem that i just described: there generally aren't records that also meet the criteria wikipedia would accept as valid sourcing available for...
So, the real question here is why there is a lack of sources on Phelps. Why aren't people writing articles? Wikipedia is not the space for that: it is the space for referencing the articles published elsewhere.
the answer is the same thing that causes this problem that i just described: there generally aren't records that also meet the criteria wikipedia would accept as valid sourcing available for people to write about in the first place, much less then cite on wikipedia for people like phelps. it's all a systemic problem, which is my point. it's not like people can synthesize articles on record keeping that never took place to begin with, after all.
Wikipedia's source requirements are not recursive. There is no requirement that the sources used as references for Wikipedia themselves reference only sources that Wikipedia would approve of, and...
Wikipedia's source requirements are not recursive. There is no requirement that the sources used as references for Wikipedia themselves reference only sources that Wikipedia would approve of, and such a requirement would make it impossible for any articles to be written there.
Yes, there is a wider systemic issue with sources for research amongst groups that were marginalized in records, and that presents a challenge for research. But that's not an issue for Wikipedia, which, as I point out, is singularly unsuited as a place to present research because it has no real mechanisms for any authorial or editorial decision-making, much less actual review. Instead, it's a challenge for the researchers who must find innovative ways around it (my partner recently commented to me about a conference talk she heard discussing network analyses of population data and records to look at the lives of women in the Ottoman Empire, for example).
Wikipedia has articles on these topics, because researchers do synthesize, to the best of their ability, articles on groups which were excluded from written records, and then the Wikipedia editors---who, regardless of whether they edit anonymously, never have any authorial ownership of articles---reference those sources. Whether the sources are even true or not is not important for Wikipedia: write enough sources about Uqbar and Wikipedia will point out that source X said Y about mirrors and copulation being abominable.
Of course, what's particularly ridiculous about this example is that the person in question is not only alive, but is currently working at ORNL. It would have been easy for someone wanting to write an article about her somewhere other than Wikipedia to have interviewed her, or just emailed her. Such an article, in, for example, some science news publication, could have then been used as a source for Wikipedia. So why weren't such articles written?
that would probably constitute a self published or primary source, neither of which wikipedia allows. it's not that easy, lol.
Of course, what's particularly ridiculous about this example is that the person in question is not only alive, but is currently working at ORNL. It would have been easy for someone wanting to write an article about her somewhere other than Wikipedia to have interviewed her, or just emailed her. Such an article, in, for example, some science news publication, could have then been used as a source for Wikipedia. So why weren't such articles written?
that would probably constitute a self published or primary source, neither of which wikipedia allows. it's not that easy, lol.
It would count as a primary but non–self-published source if released by a third party. Wikipedia does allow the use of primary sources, so long as editors are not analyzing or synthesizing any of...
It would count as a primary but non–self-published source if released by a third party. Wikipedia does allow the use of primary sources, so long as editors are not analyzing or synthesizing any of the material in that source, only reiterating it. Editors are cautious about using such sources, but they aren't overarchingly disallowed. Depending on the perceived reliability of the publisher, this source may be accepted by Wikipedia or ignored. This additional step does present a challenge as far as fighting the good fight is concerned, but it also makes it a little more difficult to insert potentially misleading information onto the site in general.
I know a lot about Wikipedia and wiki editing processes in general, so I feel slightly qualified to talk about this.
I'm very sympathetic toward Phelps here, and really anyone in her position—academia is a stingy enough place without having to deal with being snubbed because of your ethnicity. Wikipedia definitely is a very typical "straight, white, male, Western" website (not that this is an unusual quality for the internet, unfortunately). And, as @Yugioh_Mishima points out, its editors tend to be "overly hostile and poorly socialized," or at least the more vocal ones are. (I have to deal with the latter issue a lot on the wiki that I run. I think it's more of an internet poweruser thing in general.) These qualities can be really problematic in talk page discussions.
But I begin to question the author's knowledge of Wikipedia's editing systems when they go on to suggest such solutions as:
I'm sorry, but if there aren't a decent number of trustworthy sources about a given figure, it doesn't make sense to allow lower-quality ones to bridge this gap (nor to rely on fewer sources, thereby decreasing the overall balance of an article) for the sake of representation. These goals are admirable, but encouraging poor citation practices in one sphere of Wikipedia devalues the accuracy of the site as a whole. Citations aren't valuable if the site's underlying citation policies are weak.
More specifically, perhaps the editors in this situation were acting under racist/sexist inclinations and Phelps should really have an article. This is likely true, but there is also a case to be made for the deletion reason: "Being a technician on a project being led by others is not grounds for a wikipedia page." James Andrew Harris, another African-American scientist involved in the discovery of elements whom the article refers to, was the head of his research group. That distinction is probably what allows his article to remain up despite requiring more citations. But this isn't a hill I'm going to die on.
The author's next suggestion is also a little strange. Protect all pages about people in underrepresented groups from editing by unregistered users? This only makes sense if you think that the only thing editors on Wikipedia can do is tag articles for deletion... but they can also edit articles, and expand upon them. Considering Wikipedia's lack of diversity among registered users, barring people who are not part of the "in-group" (i.e. barring a greater number of people from minority groups) will just make the matter worse. To remove anonymous editing altogether is just as ridiculous; most people start off editing without an account! It's that rush of satisfaction you get from contributing to something greater than yourself that encourages you to actually join the community. Yes, the option of anonymity can cause issues in talk page debates, but it's also the lifeblood of the site and the way it continues to get editors.
I personally think that Phelps' involvement here is notable and wouldn't have deleted the page, but I would be hesitant to boil it all down to discrimination. It's also just bureaucracy. When you edit wikis enough, you stop assigning your personal values to articles tagged for deletion and the like, especially as an administrator; there are just too many to consider subjectively. Hence the strict adherence to the letter of the law; that's not necessarily in the spirit of the encyclopedia, but it's the reality of running a site this large.
Seem justified to me, her only cited scientific contribution is to be involved in the discovery of Tennessine, but she's not even in the list of authors of the original article (some of them don't have a wikipedia page either):
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.142502
Plus looks like she's got only four publications, none of which she's the first author.
https://www.osti.gov/search/author:"Phelps,%20Clarice%20E."
Wikipedia is probably not discriminating in this case. I have had pages I wrote about tech subjects deleted because I couldn't find enough references for them. This is just the way wikipedia is. Wikipedia is not the only website in the world though. We are all free to write our own pages to share the things we know and if wikipedia doesn't have an article for it then it should show pretty high on google search.
honestly i think the problem ultimately falls with having such rigid standards to begin with. on some level it makes sense to want to be rigid with sourcing requirements--but if you want to genuinely reflect all the important people that have existed like wikipedia kinda does, you kinda can't have a single set? holding say, biographies of slaves to the same standards as major physicists in history for example will ultimately systematically disadvantage all slaves even if they played an important role in history because there simply won't be the sort of paper trail with even the most well attested slaves that might exist with someone like isaac newton. there are lots of groups of people who might as well be memory-holed, either because their history was never well attested or because it was simply lost to time or whatever else, and unless your sourcing standard are contextual to reflect things like that, there's simply no way that you can avoid completely under-representing certain groups of people who just happened to be on the shitty end of document preservation.
(in other words like the article says, this really all comes down to a judgement call of whether or not sourcing standards should be flexible or rigid based on the context)
I'd strongly disagree, and I'd argue that the author of this piece, while well-intentioned, completely misses the goal of Wikipedia and the motivations behind the requirements there: that they continually refer to notability (a guideline) rather than verifiability (the underlying policy) is an indication of this. The standards need to be rigid because the authorship and editing framework of Wikipedia allows for nothing else without disaster, something that has been repeatedly demonstrated in battles there.
Wikipedia is not the place for publication of research, and strongly points this out, with its no original research policy. This doesn't mean that biographies of people without extensive (or indeed any) paper trails aren't allowed, it means that the research can't be presented in Wikipedia as the first publication venue. Do research and publish articles, do oral histories, reconstruct the lives and actions of people who would otherwise be lost to time, and publish that in places where it can be appropriately vetted. Then people can take that research, and use it to construct Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia does not have requirements on the types of primary sources that exist for a topic; instead, its policies often discourage use of primary sources because that tends to involve research.
The fundamental structure of Wikipedia relies on the articles being written without too much decision-making, original research, or, arguably, thought. There is no real way for claims to be vetted or stances to be taken beyond pointing to independent sources, and, when those sources disagree, retreating to simply stating that each source claimed whatever it claimed. There is no control or vetting of authorship, beyond banning repeated vandals, trolls, and other bad actors. There is no checking of sources, beyond checking to see that the sources say what the article claims they say. There are enormous weaknesses to this model, but it is inextricably at the heart of Wikipedia.
If the same policies that prevent an article (at the moment) from being created for a person like Phelps are changed in a consistent manner, then the repercussions are very problematic. In my youth, I used to edit Wikipedia articles on modern pseudoscience and quackery, and these policies were continually part of the disputes there. There was a group, for example, that argued they could diagnose many diseases by pulling on patients' fingers (BDORT: no, this is not a joke). They would argue that it was unfair Wikipedia demanded independent sources: their websites had many testimonials to the effectiveness of the method, while the only major independent source, legal tribunal reports from New Zealand, described the deaths of misdiagnosed patients. Mainstream medicine wouldn't allow their research to be published elsewhere, so why wouldn't we allow their websites? Transcendental Meditationalists argued that their websites' descriptions of yogic flying should be included as fact in articles about flight and human abilities, because again, it was simply not something that was sufficiently published in independent sources.
And of course, the larger, more important battles, which I never became involved in, were in issues of corporate and political PR campaigns.
In all these cases, Wikipedia has nothing to fall back on but a reliance on repeating what independent sources say, because it has no real way of making editorial decisions. It can do nothing else: it needs research to be done elsewhere, and vetted by others.
So, the real question here is why there is a lack of sources on Phelps. Why aren't people writing articles? Wikipedia is not the space for that: it is the space for referencing the articles published elsewhere.
the answer is the same thing that causes this problem that i just described: there generally aren't records that also meet the criteria wikipedia would accept as valid sourcing available for people to write about in the first place, much less then cite on wikipedia for people like phelps. it's all a systemic problem, which is my point. it's not like people can synthesize articles on record keeping that never took place to begin with, after all.
Wikipedia's source requirements are not recursive. There is no requirement that the sources used as references for Wikipedia themselves reference only sources that Wikipedia would approve of, and such a requirement would make it impossible for any articles to be written there.
Yes, there is a wider systemic issue with sources for research amongst groups that were marginalized in records, and that presents a challenge for research. But that's not an issue for Wikipedia, which, as I point out, is singularly unsuited as a place to present research because it has no real mechanisms for any authorial or editorial decision-making, much less actual review. Instead, it's a challenge for the researchers who must find innovative ways around it (my partner recently commented to me about a conference talk she heard discussing network analyses of population data and records to look at the lives of women in the Ottoman Empire, for example).
Wikipedia has articles on these topics, because researchers do synthesize, to the best of their ability, articles on groups which were excluded from written records, and then the Wikipedia editors---who, regardless of whether they edit anonymously, never have any authorial ownership of articles---reference those sources. Whether the sources are even true or not is not important for Wikipedia: write enough sources about Uqbar and Wikipedia will point out that source X said Y about mirrors and copulation being abominable.
Of course, what's particularly ridiculous about this example is that the person in question is not only alive, but is currently working at ORNL. It would have been easy for someone wanting to write an article about her somewhere other than Wikipedia to have interviewed her, or just emailed her. Such an article, in, for example, some science news publication, could have then been used as a source for Wikipedia. So why weren't such articles written?
that would probably constitute a self published or primary source, neither of which wikipedia allows. it's not that easy, lol.
It would count as a primary but non–self-published source if released by a third party. Wikipedia does allow the use of primary sources, so long as editors are not analyzing or synthesizing any of the material in that source, only reiterating it. Editors are cautious about using such sources, but they aren't overarchingly disallowed. Depending on the perceived reliability of the publisher, this source may be accepted by Wikipedia or ignored. This additional step does present a challenge as far as fighting the good fight is concerned, but it also makes it a little more difficult to insert potentially misleading information onto the site in general.