Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-05-08/Recent research
Gender, race and notability in deletion discussions
A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
"How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia" – or do they?
- Reviewed by XOR'easter
The March 2023 paper "'Too Soon' to count? How gender and race cloud notability considerations on Wikipedia", by Lemieux, Zhang, and Tripodi[1] claims to have unearthed quantitative evidence for gender and race biases in English Wikipedia's article deletion processes:
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.
Specifically, the authors
"[...] explored how metrics used to assess notability on Wikipedia (WP:Search Engine Test; “Too Soon”) are applied across biographies of academics. To do so, we first web-scraped biographies of academics nominated for deletion from 2017 to 2020 (n = 843). Next, we created a numerical proxy for each subject's online presence score. This value is meant to emulate Wikipedia's “Search Engine Test,” (WP:Search Engine Test) a convenient and common way editors can determine probable notability before nominating a biography for deletion. [...] We also conducted a qualitative analysis of the discussions surrounding deleted biographies labeled “Too Soon,” (WP:Too soon). Doing so allowed our research team to assess if gender and/or racial discrepancies existed in deciding whether a biography was considered notable enough for Wikipedia. We find that both metrics are implemented idiosyncratically."
However, this is making a manifestly and indefensibly incorrect claim about how Wikipedia editors judge topics for notability. Also, the paper attempts to back it up with misleading quotations and numbers that are dubious on multiple levels.
Background
On English Wikipedia, the status of being significant enough to warrant an article is, in the community lingo,
Notability is not based on counting raw search-engine results. As
- Although using a search engine like
ancient Estonian god.
Misrepresentation of Wikipedia policies, guidelines, and essays
The problems begin early in the paper. Referring to the article
Jealous bros should not cry each time a woman is part of an achievement) or in effect (
Shit like this is exactly why en.wp is such a sausage party).
In their literature review, Lemieux et al. state incorrectly that Of the more than 1.5 million biographies about notable writers, inventors, and academics on English-language Wikipedia, less than 20% are about women
. There are over 1.5 million biographies total; most of them are not about writers, inventors, or academics.[note 1] They provide two sources for this claim. The first, a primary source, states that the figure is for the total number. The second, a 2021 paper by Tripodi,[2] makes the incorrect claim in its abstract and provides no citation for it.[note 2]
Policies, guidelines, and essays are, in Wikipedia jargon, different types of behind-the-scenes documents. The terms denote a descending sequence:
- Policies have wide acceptance among editors and describe standards all users should normally follow. [...] Guidelines are sets of best practices supported by consensus. Editors should attempt to follow guidelines, though they are best treated with common sense, and occasional exceptions may apply. [...] Essays are the opinion or advice of an editor or group of editors for which widespread consensus has not been established. They do not speak for the entire community and may be created and written without approval.
Lemieux et al. describe both WP:Search engine test and WP:Too soon as metrics used to assess notability on Wikipedia
. Neither page is such a thing.
The "Search Engine Test"
Lemieux et al. write that the "Search Engine Test" (
As to its commonality, the numbers are stark enough to be indicative. The page
A central assertion of Lemieux et al. is that they quantified whether the "Search engine test" is being equitably utilized
using a metric they call the "Primer Index", after the software employed to calculate it. This metric is based upon the number of times that an individual is mentioned in a news article and in which context
, which evidently is at best an indirect perspective upon any of the WP:PROF criteria. 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.
At this juncture, see again the cautionary words of "Search engine test" itself, and the more popular link for making the same point, the
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. Because the "Primer Index" and "Google Index" are completely unmoored from Wikipedia practice, there is no reason to equate passing some threshold of them with meeting "Wikipedia's criteria".
The evident limitations of the "Google Index" are, in fact, an excellent indication of why a guideline like WP:PROF is necessary. Any search of the form "full name + occupation" will omit, or at best provide a paucity of hits from within books, the text of paywalled journal articles, and bibliographies including citations to the person in question. Furthermore, it will penalize those who are written about in languages other than English. The various criteria of WP:PROF, which start with citation databases but decidedly do not end there, provide a far less superficial understanding of article-worthiness. It is also the case that the consensus-building in AfD's reliant upon WP:PROF allows for greater discernment and flexibility where differences between specializations are concerned. (Lemieux et al. do not individuate between disciplines, despite the strong likelihood that some fields are more heavily advertised and more charismatic than others. Think of pop psychology versus pure mathematics, for example.)
Even if we set aside the concerns about the basic premises, a problem with the analysis remains. Suppose, for the sake of the argument, that we grant that the "Primer Index" measures something of interest. Lemieux et al. write that white males whose biographies were kept rated significantly higher on the Primer Index than those whose biographies were deleted. They compare the median Primer Indices of these two groups using the
There was no statistically significant difference in the median Primer Index between kept and deleted pages for white women or for BIPOC academics, and thus that the Primer Index
is not an accurate predictor of Wikipedia persistence for female and BIPOC academics. But a large p-value on the Kruskal–Wallis test is not itself sufficient to conclude that the distributions being compared are the same. (The documentation for the software the authors use says as much.[supp 10]) Indeed, per their figure 2, the difference in sample medians between kept and deleted biographies for BIPOC women was even larger than that for white men. The apparent differences in the statistics across these groups may be due, in whole or in part, to the large variations in sample sizes: 419 white men, but only 185 white women, 171 BIPOC men, and 69 BIPOC women.[supp 11]
The Titular "Too Soon"
The page Wikipedia:Too soon is an essay, not a guideline and certainly not a policy. It is largely a collection of pointers to other documentation pages with some commentary. The gist is given in the first section: Sometimes, a topic may appear obviously notable to you, but there may not be enough independent coverage of it to confirm that. In such cases, it may simply be too soon to create the article.
Lemieux et al. emphasize this page from their title onward, but most of what they have to say about it is misguided.
“Too Soon” is a technical label developed by Wikipedians indicating that a subject lacks sufficient coverage in independent, high-quality news sources to have a page.
It is hardly "technical": the meaning is an example of the everyday sense of the phrase. Moreover, the language of the essay is not news sources
, but independent secondary reliable sources
, with a clarifying link to the
The initialism "AfD" is short for "
They go on: Despite the academic being an assistant professor, the moderator [sic] 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.
The essay
Lemieux et al. state that they collected the career stages of each individual designated WP:Too soon
, using a pair of research assistants to identify these stages manually. 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
, with assistant professors being scored as 1, associate professors with 2, and so on. This methodology is flawed from the outset. It confuses correlation with contingency: one cannot neglect citation metrics and the other success indicators described in
The claim that Wikipedia does not count trainees, research scientists, and/or government workers as “academics”
is flatly untrue. Plenty of
average career stage [...] by calculating the sum of the career stage scores and dividing this by the total number of entries. Career stage is a qualitative or categorical variable, so taking the numerical mean is not likely to be indicative. What job is 0.76 of the way between assistant and associate professor?[supp 16]
David Eppstein, a computer-science professor, is a longtime participant in academic-bio AfD's and a member of the Women in Red project which aims to improve Wikipedia's biographical coverage of women. He writes,
- [S]ince 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.[supp 17]
In fairness, this was written in response to Lemieux et al., but it is also a natural implication of the everyday meaning of the phrase "too soon": not now, but maybe later. For an example of this involving David Eppstein and others, see Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Charles Steinhardt.
Quote mining
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
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.) 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.[note 6]
Misrepresentation of career status and other AfD aspects
The sentence immediately after the blockquote that includes snippets from the K. Killick AfD 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, according to Web of Science). At the times of their respective AfD's, Killick had possessed a PhD for roughly six years, and DeYoung had possessed his for roughly thirteen. Without making any suppositions about the worth of their research on some notional absolute scale of intellectual achievement, it is safe to say that these AfD's were not for individuals at "similar" stages of their careers.
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.
It is worth mentioning that the article
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
Lemieux et al. mention the drama surrounding the article about nuclear chemist Clarice Phelps. They state that her biography was deleted three times in the span of one week
. While its existence was indeed contentious, that specific claim is not in the cited source,[supp 23] or in the source upon which that website relied.[supp 24] Examining the deletion log for the article[supp 25] and the "article milestones" list at Talk:Clarice Phelps indicates that there is no one-week span that could match. Instead, it was deleted once in February 2019 and twice in April, before being incubated as a draft page and then restored for good in February 2020.[supp 26][supp 27][supp 28] The cause of diversity on Wikipedia is a marathon, not a sprint; the inaccurate timeline and the omission of the eventual success make for a misleading portrayal of the challenge that is of no help in resolving it.
Conclusion
Whatever revolutionary claims have been made on its behalf, Wikipedia has a fundamentally institutionalist character. It layers on top of existing academic and journalistic systems of legitimacy. The same rhetorical fences that keep Wikipedia from being a toxic waste dump of advertising and conspiracy theories also mean that it is a bad place for social change to begin. The encyclopedia can only be as non-sexist as the least sexist institution. The question of which articles should exist and what they should say is a question of content moderation at scale, a task that is "impossible to do well".[supp 29] The failure modes of Wikipedia's written rules and subcultural practices deserve study. But ill-conceived studies can lead to ill-conceived advocacy that makes real problems no easier to solve.
Lemieux et al. misrepresent Wikipedia policies, guidelines, and essays; the content of deletion debates; news reporting; and the prior academic literature. How these errors could have transpired is, in a word, baffling. How they passed through peer review is likewise a puzzle (and a discouraging sign), but pass through they did.[note 7] The 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.
Briefly
- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
- Registrations are open for Wiki Workshop 2023 on May 11th, 2023. The virtual event is the tenth in this annual series (formerly part of The Web Conference), and is organized by members of the Wikimedia Foundation's research team with other collaborators including academics Francesca Tripodi (University of North Carolina) and Robert West (EPFL). Registration is free and subject to a WMF privacy statement.
- "Infolettre wikil@b" is a newly launched French-language newsletter by Wikimedians-in-residence at French universities, covering research alongside open science and the use of Wikimedia projects in education.
Other recent publications
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
- Compiled by Tilman Bayer
"Towards a Digital Reflexive Sociology: Using Wikipedia's Biographical Repository as a Reflexive Tool"
From the abstract:[3]
"[...] we employ Wikipedia as a ‘reflexive tool’, i.e., an external artefact of self-observation that can help sociologists to notice conventions, biases, and blind spots within their discipline. We analyse the collective patterns of the 500 most notable sociologists on Wikipedia, performing structural, network, and text analyses of their biographies. Our exploration reveals patterns in their historical frequency, gender composition, geographical concentration, birth-death mobility, centrality degree, biographical clustering, and proximity between countries, also stressing institutions, events, places, and relevant dates from a biographical point of view. Linking these patterns in a diachronic way, we distinguish five generations of sociologists recorded on Wikipedia and emphasise the high historical concentration of the discipline in geographical areas, gender, and schools of thought."
"How can the social sciences benefit from knowledge graphs? A case study on using Wikidata and Wikipedia to examine the world’s billionaires"
From the abstract:[4]
"This study examines the potentials of Wikidata and Wikipedia as knowledge graphs for the social sciences. The study demonstrates how social science research may benefit from these knowledge bases by examining what we can learn from Wikidata and Wikipedia about global billionaires (2010-2022). [...] We show that the English Wikipedia and, to a lesser extent, Wikidata exhibit gender and nationality biased in the coverage and information about global billionaires. Using the genealogical information that Wikidata provides, we examine the family webs of billionaires and show that at least 15% of all billionaires have a family member also being a billionaire."
"Can you trust Wikidata?"
From the abstract:[5]
"The present work aims to assess how well Wikidata (WD) supports the trust decision process implied when using its data. WD provides several mechanisms that can support this trust decision, and our KG [Knowledge Graph] Profiling, based on WD claims and schema, elaborates an analysis of how multiple points of view, controversies, and potentially incomplete or incongruent content are presented and represented."
"A Study of Concept Similarity in Wikidata"
From the abstract:[6]:
"In light of the adoption of Wikidata for increasingly complex tasks that rely on similarity, and its unique size, breadth, and crowdsourcing nature, we propose that conceptual similarity should be revisited for the case of Wikidata. In this paper, we study a wide range of representative similarity methods for Wikidata, organized into three categories, and leverage background information for knowledge injection via retrofitting. We measure the impact of retrofitting with different weighted subsets from Wikidata and ProBase. Experiments on three benchmarks show that the best performance is achieved by pairing language models with rich information, whereas the impact of injecting knowledge is most positive on methods that originally do not consider comprehensive information. The performance of retrofitting is conditioned on the selection of high-quality similarity knowledge. A key limitation of this study, similar to prior work lies in the limited size and scope of the similarity benchmarks. While Wikidata provides an unprecedented possibility for a representative evaluation of concept similarity, effectively doing so remains a key challenge."
Matching non-notable Wikidata "orphans" to Wikipedia sections
From the abstract and paper:[7]
"We present a transformer-based model, ParaGraph, which, given a Wikidata entity as input, retrieves its corresponding Wikipedia section. To perform this task, ParaGraph first generates an entity summary and compares it to sections to select an initial set of candidates. The candidates are then ranked using additional information from the entity’s textual description and contextual information. Our experimental results show that ParaGraph achieves 87% Hits@10 when ranking Wikipedia sections given a Wikidata entity as input. [...]
This mapping between Wikipedia and Wikidata is beneficial for both projects. On the one hand, it facilitates information extraction and standardization of Wikipedia articles across languages, which can benefit from the standard structure and values of their Wikidata counterpart, e.g., for populating infoboxes. On the other hand, Wikipedia articles are routinely updated, which in turn keeps Wikidata fresh and useful for online applications. However, the Wikipedia editorial guidelines require that an entity be notable or worthy of notice to be added to the encyclopedia, which does not hold for all Wikidata entities. [...] We refer to the remaining entities, which do not have an article in [any language] Wikipedia, as orphans. In the absence of a textual counterpart, orphans often suffer from incompleteness and lack of maintenance. Our present effort stems from the observation that a substantial number of orphan entities are indeed represented in Wikipedia, but not at the page level; orphan entities are often described within existing Wikipedia articles in the form of sections, subsections, and paragraphs of a more generic concept or fact. For example, the English Wikipedia does not have a dedicated page about “Tennis racket”, it is instead embedded in the “Racket” page as a section, whereas it can be found as a standalone (orphan) entity on Wikidata (“Q153362”)."
References
- S2CID 257861139.
- ^ S2CID 237883867.
- ISSN 0304-422X.(author's link
- ^ Daria Tisch, Franziska Pradel: How can the social sciences benefit from knowledge graphs? A case study on using Wikidata and Wikipedia to examine the world’s billionaires (submission to Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability , under review)
- ^ Veronica Santos, Daniel Schwabe and Sérgio Lifschitz Can you trust Wikidata? (submission to Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability , under review)
- ^ Filip Ilievski, Kartik Shenoy, Hans Chalupsky, Nicholas Klein and Pedro Szekely: A Study of Concept Similarity in Wikidata (submission to Semantic Web – Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, under review), Code
- ^ Natalia Ostapuk, Djellel Difallah, and Philippe Cudré-Mauroux. “ParaGraph: Mapping Wikidata Tail Entities to Wikipedia Paragraphs.” In: 2022 IEEE International Conference on Big Data, BigData, 2022. slides, Dataset: Ostapuk, Natalia; Difallah, Djellel; Cudré-Mauroux, Philippe (2022-11-25), Wikidata dump extension (enwiki section links), Zenodo
Supplementary references
- S2CID 27479715.
- S2CID 149229953.
- .
- ^ "Lois K. Alexander Lane, version of 19 March 2016".
- ^ "Wikipedia:Search engine test". pageviews.wmcloud.org. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Notability". pageviews.wmcloud.org. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Notability (academics)". pageviews.wmcloud.org. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Notability (academics)". xtools.wmflabs.org. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Search engine test". xtools.wmflabs.org. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- GraphPad Prism. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
- ^ "Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red, version of 7 May 2023".
- ^ "Wikipedia:Too soon". pageviews.wmcloud.org. Retrieved 2023-04-13.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Notability". xtools.wmflabs.org. Retrieved 2023-04-13.
- ^ "Wikipedia:Too soon". xtools.wmflabs.org. Retrieved 2023-04-13.
- S2CID 149857577.
- JSTOR 3005735.
- ^ "Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Women in Red, version of 13 April 2023".
- S2CID 221178536.)
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link - doi:10.1093/jsh/shz115.)
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link - S2CID 214003587.)
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link - ^ "Creative Writing Department announces new George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chairs". SF State News. 2020-04-10. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ "Sudha R. Shenoy". Mises Institute. 20 June 2014. Retrieved 2023-04-11.
- ^ Sadeque, Samira (2019-04-29). "Wikipedia just won't let this Black female scientist's page stay". The Daily Dot.
- ^ Jarvis, Claire L. (2019-04-26). "Wikipedia's Refusal to Profile a Black Female Scientist Shows Its Diversity Problem". Slate.
- ^ "All public logs: Clarice Phelps". Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ "Clarice Phelps: version of 7 February 2020".
- ^ Page, Sidney (2022-10-17). "She's made 1,750 Wikipedia bios for women scientists who haven't gotten their due". The Washington Post. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ Khan, Arman (2022-11-18). "I've Made More Than 1,700 Wikipedia Entries on Women Scientists and I'm Not Yet Done: British scientist Jessica Wade has made one Wikipedia entry every day since 2017". Vice. Retrieved 2023-04-12.
- ^ Masnick, Mike (2019-11-20). "Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well". Techdirt. Retrieved 2023-04-15.
Notes
- WP:PROF.
- WP:PROF#C7. These are each evaluated in different ways, as the guideline details. Of the sources cited for this point, Matei and Dobrescu[supp 1] do not discuss any notability guideline at all. Gauthier and Sawchuk[supp 2] and Luo et al.[supp 3] discuss the page WP:Notabilitybut do not mention the existence of a guideline specialized to scholars and academics, despite its relevance to their subject matter.
- draft article not yet in the main space.[supp 4] This draft did not contain, as Tripodi writes,has, contrary to Tripodi's statement, never been nominated for deletion.
links to seven credible sources independent of the subject, including The Washington Post and the Smithsonian
. It contained two sources, one a Washington Post item and the other a webpage at the Smithsonian, and it linked to those two sources a total of seven times. The article Lois K. Alexander Lane - ^ To the point about importance, note that WP:Too soon received a median of 106 views per month over the year prior to this writing,[supp 12] versus 11,924 for WP:Notability. 1,664,013 pages link to the latter, and 1,393 link to the former.[supp 13][supp 14]
- ^ The Adams et al. paper[supp 15] only studies sociologists, and so whether its conclusions generalize further across academia is an open question. They report (Table 3) a correlation between career stage and the probability of having a Wikipedia page, but they do not disentangle career stage from citation metrics or other indicators. Emeritus professors are likely to have done more than assistant professors. Adams et al.'s data is from October 2016 and may be outdated in various aspects, which it is beyond the scope of this comment to determine. Perhaps worth noting in this context, however, is their tentative conclusion that "pages about women were not more likely to be deleted than pages about men" and "the main story is that women are less likely to appear in the first place".
- ^ In the time since that AfD, the book mentioned in it has accumulated additional reviews.[supp 18][supp 19][supp 20] In the present circumstances, the biography of the author might be refactored into a page about the book, rather than deleted. Compare, e.g., Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Daisy Deomampo, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Aaron Fox (musicologist), and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alam Saleh.
- ^ For related commentary, see Tilman Bayer's 25 July 2021 "Recent research" column in the Wikipedia Signpost. The concerns about confounding factors raised there are echoed here. For example, newly-created articles might be scrutinized more closely; articles begun by well-meaning novices might be more likely to be nominated for deletion in good faith, even if they turn out salvageable.
Discuss this story
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)[reply]
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).[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
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)[reply]
Great review article, kudos to the contributors CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 01:02, 18 May 2023 (UTC)[reply]