by Xcia0069 (talk · contribs)

Some reflections on the short summaries of notable scientists by Quicksilver

• It's very useful to have this list as a starting point
• Some of the links to possible sources are dead links
• Many of the sources are cheap news sites that aren't the most reliable interpretations of the research undertaken
• A surprisingly high majority of the sampled of 100 scientists are from the USA - Xcia0069 (talk) 13:43, 10 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

by Coffeeandcrumbs (talk · contribs)

• This list of names is very nice to have. In almost every case the subject is clearly notable.
• However, I am finding the content and sources generated by Quicksilver of little to no use
• The sources are either dead, weak in reliability, or just passing mentions. See case study at [1] --- Coffeeandcrumbs 13:55, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

by XOR'easter (talk)

• It almost looks like the Primer team didn't pay attention to the academic notability guidelines, relying instead on Big Data to figure out what "notability" means in practice. This is an intriguing idea from one perspective, but it might be suboptimal for actually finding new subjects for articles. Why not just make a list of every woman who holds a named chair, is or has been editor-in-chief of a journal, or has an h-index over 20? Articles created from that list would stand a much better chance of surviving the process here than those from a list made by sifting random news sources. XOR'easter (talk) 17:24, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

• Argh. This continues to get under my skin — irritating me more today, perhaps, than when I first remarked upon it. Why trust your own ability to Big Data the answer, instead of just reading what the community has already codified as important? Even if your goal is to say that Wikipedia in practice falls short of that standard, or to argue that the standard needs revision, you need to pay more attention to it than they, by all appearances, did. XOR'easter (talk) 15:49, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

(Cue: off topic rant) I completely agree, XOR'easter. For example, there are a large number of scientists who are already listed on Wikipedia as recipients of an international prize but do not have a bio on the English Wikipedia. A fairly high proportion of these scientists already have bios on the German language Wikipedia that could easily be translated. Would it be of interest to create some kind of draft or page with this kind of information? It could be the result of an automated trawl. Something along the lines of User:Rentier/FRS. T0mpr1c3 (talk) 16:04, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think an AI can understand a document like the academic notability guidelines. It needs more quantitative criterion than qualitative. I still believe the issue is that source pool is tainted. Number of mentions is a pretty good start for defining what WP:GNG means. But it needs to be refined.

1. WP:GNG is concerned with the inclusion of the subject in WP:RS. So if Quicksilver's source pool is tainted with many non-RS then the list it generates will also be tainted. It may even find promotional quacks.
2. Another thing the AI does not seem to consider is the concept of "passing mention". WP:SIGCOV is paramount. If a subject is only mentioned a single time in an article then that article is useless in establishing the subjects notability. Quicksilver should only be conserned with sources that mention the subject more than 4-5 times.--- Coffeeandcrumbs 18:12, 15 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

by Coffeeandcrumbs (talk)

• Develop a extensive list of reliable sources and focus crawl on those higher quality scientific news sources.
• Make use of archive.org, archive.is and the archive-url= parameter in ((Cite web)) to fix dead links.--- Coffeeandcrumbs 03:19, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Ignore all press releases!
• Incorporate scholar.google.com --- Coffeeandcrumbs 14:00, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • A lot of the material on phys.org is re-churned press releases. I'd strike them from the list. Quanta magazine would be a good addition. XOR'easter (talk) 17:24, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    •  Done Please feel free to edit the list yourself next time. We should relax talk page rules slightly on this page. --- Coffeeandcrumbs 19:10, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]
• Not directly related, perhaps, but is it possible to come up with something similar to this for other disciplines? There seem to be a lot of writers whose work I see reviewed in major papers who don't have articles, and I often think I should make note of the ones I come across, but I'm never by a computer when I have the opportunity. --Ser Amantio di Nicolao^{Che dicono a Signa?}_{Lo dicono a Signa.} 21:35, 30 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Editors may be wondering why this list is a draft? My only answer is that the Wikipedia namespace does not allow the use of the Visual Editor. I would like to encourage as many new users to participate here. Allowing VE is the only consideration, so feel free to move it to a more appropriate namespace as long as it allows VE.--- Coffeeandcrumbs 19:19, 11 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I found this via the "Press coverage 2018" page:

• Benjakob, Omer (August 9, 2018). "The Real Reason Sheldon Adelson's Wife Deserves a Wikipedia Page". Haaretz. Retrieved August 10, 2018. A new AI program claims it can fix Wikipedia's gender bias by identifying – and writing articles about – deserving female scientists. But does data contain its own bias? ((cite news)): Cite has empty unknown parameter: |deadurl= (help)

It irritated me by consistently referring to the specialized notability guidelines, like WP:PROF, as "GNG"s. For example,

Actors, artists, writers, CEOs, there are “GNG”s for almost every field and profession, and all have to meet Wikipedia’s “central notability criterion,” which was put in place to prevent the encyclopedia that can be written by anyone from turning into a platform for self-promotion.

And does anyone actually say "central notability criterion"? That turn of phrase sounds very odd to me, and I hang out at AfD a lot. A quick check finds only a failed proposal and an old discussion using that phrase (which was removed from Wikipedia:Notability (people) in 2007). The author of that Haaretz piece has written about Wikipedia before, and with some strange moments of carelessness then, too. XOR'easter (talk) 16:07, 14 August 2018 (UTC)[reply]