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If Wikipedia is supposed to be the accumulation of the world’s knowledge in one place; it poses several questions which I would like answered.
1. Has there been any effort to close articles so that once a significant number of experts on the subject agree that all that can be said about the subject has been listed in the article that it is then closed for editing as the article is complete? Is there such a movement? I believe this would be useful for the following…
2. The electronic format is particularly fickle in my opinion and the internet etc will probably not last 10,000 years. Is there any movement to have the accumulated knowledge, and/or closed articles to be enshrined in a more durable format such as being chiselled into marble? What would the problem be with such an idea? Is this already underway? It would appear to me that Wikipedia is a prime opportunity to preserve such knowledge, a one-off chance for humanity, and a window which is quickly closing. I would appreciate any commentary on the subject. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.40.58 ( talk) 09:44, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
having used the random article button recently it occurs to me that a vast number of articles are sports related. How many articles does wikipedia have and how many of these are sports related? Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.40.58 ( talk) 10:08, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Indeed with no disrespect intended to DePalma, that above source itself says
Without his Ph.D., DePalma remains mostly invisible, awaiting the stamp of approval that signals the beginning of a serious research career. Several paleontologists I talked to had not heard of him.
It continues to give a quote from someone else I'm not including here for BLP reasons. While it's possible DePalma is notable, suffice to say "one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century" seems to be in strong dispute at the moment.
The media is of course prone to hype up stuff all the time. E.g. I'm sure some of us remember this [1], and we even had an article on that person at one time. Sometimes of course the people, the families or the institutions they work for contribute to this hype since it's seen in advantageous in numerous ways, but it can happen without that.
Ultimately for a lot of science matters, you need sufficient time to determine the significance of discoveries or research, one of the reasons most science related Nobel Prizes are only awarded many years after the whatever it is. I'd note even if this does turn out to be super significant, at a minimum the source supports the view it's not completely unexpected we didn't have an article since they were of relatively low notability (if notable) until recently.
Perhaps we should have an article sooner, but frankly our handling of late breaking news tends to be poor, and it generally gets worse when it's something easy to get wrong like science so it's probably a good thing we don't. The fact we do it with other stuff when we shouldn't isn't good, but the solution is to do it less not more.
I do think our rules on notability for some sports areas are too lax. I'm especially concerned about the modern way that some subject specific guidelines including sports ones are taken as sufficient rather than simply a rebuttable presumption of notability which was IMO the former and correct norm. (Rebuttal requiring of course sufficient effort is made to find sources, based on where the coverage is expected. So for an obscure historic Congolese person would require a lot of effort in non online foreign language sources. And even for some modern sports people, possibly foreign language source searches including sometimes non online.)
But that's different from whether your original example is a good illustration for which I'm not convinced. While I can't and won't say much for BLP reasons, my read from the source you provided is that at least as of a few months ago, if you were able to convince experts in the field (by which I don't just mean paleontologists but those with sufficient specialist knowledge to be able to make a reasonable judgment) to come up with a list of the top 300 active paleontologists in the US, very few would have included the person you cited and it would have been the same anytime you did it at least prior to a few months ago.
The comparison with footballers is complicated but in reality in many countries anyone who plays professionally is often in the top 300 or at least top 1000 while they are playing. One key difference is that even the best footballers tend to have short careers, and others very short, hence someone may only play 1 or 2 games and only be reasonably in such a list for a very short time.
So such lists fluctuate a lot compared to paleontologists. This is one of the reasons why it's complicated for us to handle. An additional complication was mentioned above by someone else. Even if we go back to our GNG requirements, in reality we're going to have a lot more footballers than paleontologists since that's just what the world is like.
The dinosaur guy's paper is encountering some skepticism from specialists who have seen it ahead of release (it is circulating under embargo). See the tweet streams linked from the bottom of this. The paper will be published on Monday and the guy is taking some heat for splashing all over the press before the paper is out. 67.164.113.165 ( talk) 09:49, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
Ah that's an interesting thing. When I skimmed through the source the other IP linked, I expected to be a fair amount of pushback to the claims in the scientific press in blogs and stuff. I didn't find it probably in part because I was looking in the wrong place (I don't know much about the field). Maybe also I was looking too soon.
But I also didn't realise that the paper supporting the claims being made hadn't been published yet which of course makes it a lot more difficult to critique. To be fair, the source the OP linked is actually for the April 8th edition of New Yorker so maybe the paper would have been published by then, but that doesn't really work in the modern world.
I should also clarify that I know very little about paleontology, so I'm not sure the size of the research field. I probably shouldn't have put numbers to my earlier comment. My main point was that my read of even the New Yorker source is that prior to this blowing up (and I assume it was known about at least a few weeks before the New Yorker article) I find it hard to say for sure that they were ever definitely widely seen as currently significant to the field of paleontology, as a professional footballer is to their field for the time they are a professional footballer. This doesn't in any way preclude this from happening, or having happened now.
So if you want an example of the problem of WP:systemic bias on Wikipedia, which definitely exists, it just doesn't seem the best example since the are surely better ones out there. I mean why not choose Donna Strickland? Yes it probably highlights a bias against female subjects in science (as with many areas) as well as a bias against science related subjects, but it still seems a better example.
Miscellaneous desk | ||
---|---|---|
< March 26 | << Feb | March | Apr >> | March 28 > |
Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives |
---|
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages. |
If Wikipedia is supposed to be the accumulation of the world’s knowledge in one place; it poses several questions which I would like answered.
1. Has there been any effort to close articles so that once a significant number of experts on the subject agree that all that can be said about the subject has been listed in the article that it is then closed for editing as the article is complete? Is there such a movement? I believe this would be useful for the following…
2. The electronic format is particularly fickle in my opinion and the internet etc will probably not last 10,000 years. Is there any movement to have the accumulated knowledge, and/or closed articles to be enshrined in a more durable format such as being chiselled into marble? What would the problem be with such an idea? Is this already underway? It would appear to me that Wikipedia is a prime opportunity to preserve such knowledge, a one-off chance for humanity, and a window which is quickly closing. I would appreciate any commentary on the subject. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.40.58 ( talk) 09:44, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
having used the random article button recently it occurs to me that a vast number of articles are sports related. How many articles does wikipedia have and how many of these are sports related? Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.131.40.58 ( talk) 10:08, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
Indeed with no disrespect intended to DePalma, that above source itself says
Without his Ph.D., DePalma remains mostly invisible, awaiting the stamp of approval that signals the beginning of a serious research career. Several paleontologists I talked to had not heard of him.
It continues to give a quote from someone else I'm not including here for BLP reasons. While it's possible DePalma is notable, suffice to say "one of the most important discoveries of the 21st century" seems to be in strong dispute at the moment.
The media is of course prone to hype up stuff all the time. E.g. I'm sure some of us remember this [1], and we even had an article on that person at one time. Sometimes of course the people, the families or the institutions they work for contribute to this hype since it's seen in advantageous in numerous ways, but it can happen without that.
Ultimately for a lot of science matters, you need sufficient time to determine the significance of discoveries or research, one of the reasons most science related Nobel Prizes are only awarded many years after the whatever it is. I'd note even if this does turn out to be super significant, at a minimum the source supports the view it's not completely unexpected we didn't have an article since they were of relatively low notability (if notable) until recently.
Perhaps we should have an article sooner, but frankly our handling of late breaking news tends to be poor, and it generally gets worse when it's something easy to get wrong like science so it's probably a good thing we don't. The fact we do it with other stuff when we shouldn't isn't good, but the solution is to do it less not more.
I do think our rules on notability for some sports areas are too lax. I'm especially concerned about the modern way that some subject specific guidelines including sports ones are taken as sufficient rather than simply a rebuttable presumption of notability which was IMO the former and correct norm. (Rebuttal requiring of course sufficient effort is made to find sources, based on where the coverage is expected. So for an obscure historic Congolese person would require a lot of effort in non online foreign language sources. And even for some modern sports people, possibly foreign language source searches including sometimes non online.)
But that's different from whether your original example is a good illustration for which I'm not convinced. While I can't and won't say much for BLP reasons, my read from the source you provided is that at least as of a few months ago, if you were able to convince experts in the field (by which I don't just mean paleontologists but those with sufficient specialist knowledge to be able to make a reasonable judgment) to come up with a list of the top 300 active paleontologists in the US, very few would have included the person you cited and it would have been the same anytime you did it at least prior to a few months ago.
The comparison with footballers is complicated but in reality in many countries anyone who plays professionally is often in the top 300 or at least top 1000 while they are playing. One key difference is that even the best footballers tend to have short careers, and others very short, hence someone may only play 1 or 2 games and only be reasonably in such a list for a very short time.
So such lists fluctuate a lot compared to paleontologists. This is one of the reasons why it's complicated for us to handle. An additional complication was mentioned above by someone else. Even if we go back to our GNG requirements, in reality we're going to have a lot more footballers than paleontologists since that's just what the world is like.
The dinosaur guy's paper is encountering some skepticism from specialists who have seen it ahead of release (it is circulating under embargo). See the tweet streams linked from the bottom of this. The paper will be published on Monday and the guy is taking some heat for splashing all over the press before the paper is out. 67.164.113.165 ( talk) 09:49, 31 March 2019 (UTC)
Ah that's an interesting thing. When I skimmed through the source the other IP linked, I expected to be a fair amount of pushback to the claims in the scientific press in blogs and stuff. I didn't find it probably in part because I was looking in the wrong place (I don't know much about the field). Maybe also I was looking too soon.
But I also didn't realise that the paper supporting the claims being made hadn't been published yet which of course makes it a lot more difficult to critique. To be fair, the source the OP linked is actually for the April 8th edition of New Yorker so maybe the paper would have been published by then, but that doesn't really work in the modern world.
I should also clarify that I know very little about paleontology, so I'm not sure the size of the research field. I probably shouldn't have put numbers to my earlier comment. My main point was that my read of even the New Yorker source is that prior to this blowing up (and I assume it was known about at least a few weeks before the New Yorker article) I find it hard to say for sure that they were ever definitely widely seen as currently significant to the field of paleontology, as a professional footballer is to their field for the time they are a professional footballer. This doesn't in any way preclude this from happening, or having happened now.
So if you want an example of the problem of WP:systemic bias on Wikipedia, which definitely exists, it just doesn't seem the best example since the are surely better ones out there. I mean why not choose Donna Strickland? Yes it probably highlights a bias against female subjects in science (as with many areas) as well as a bias against science related subjects, but it still seems a better example.