Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-10-28/Op-ed

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"from which we can only conclude that they simply don't know what an edit war is"

Or, perhaps, the author doesn't know what sarcasm is. Maury Markowitz (talk) 19:20, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

  • User:GreenMeansGo makes a great point with the alternative timeline. Regardless of your thoughts before the prize being awarded, Wikimedians did what they do and reacted superbly quickly. That is indeed something to be proud of. ~ Amory (u • t • c) 19:22, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • "No one 'has an article on Wikipedia.'" Yes they do; in the same way that "Winston Churchill has a statue in Parliament Square", "Queen Victoria has a portrait in Buckingham Palace" and "Douglass Adams has a biography available in all good libraries". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 20:22, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree that no blame can be attached to Bradv for declining the Afc - the backlog is a long one, we're all volunteers, and time is limited. However, Chris's claim that it was the right decision is going too far. Her fellowship at the optical society is a prestigious academic position of the sort making academic notability automatically met. The article, which was short and uncontroversial, should have been moved to main space. Bradv acknowledges as much in his opinion piece, that with hindsight he wishes he'd spent a bit more time checking the details out. We should concentrate on any measures we can take to give us a better shot at getting this right in the future.  — Amakuru (talk) 21:03, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The line "why didn't Wikipedia have an article about Whatever" does show that there is a complete misunderstanding about how articles are created on Wikipedia. I think there is a presumption on an editorial board who weigh up the merits of all the topics in the universe and put out a list saying "OK, these topics are worthy" and then articles are assigned to people to write them. (And of course some encyclopedia-like publications do work that way, so it's not unreasonable). I note, from doing outreach, there is a common public misconception that donations to Wikipedia go to paying for the bulk of the content to be written and, that while most people know "anyone can contribute", they seem to perceive the contributions of volunteers as additional to work of these paid writers. Of course, anyone reading this probably realises that you need 3 things for a Wikipedia article to exist, a notable topic and an editor that feels like starting it and an editor that possessed the ability to demonstrate notability. Strickland had the first two, but not alas the 3rd. Kerry (talk) 21:08, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • While some might say that the Strickland incident was a failure by AfC, I would say both No and Yes. No, because I think anyone who does AfC reviewing (and if you haven't, you should not comment!) will know it is very soul-destroying, and clicking "Decline - notability not established" becomes the almost-automatic response. Yes, because there is a structural failure with AfC which could be fixed. At the moment, AfC reviewers are working in a "pool of all articles" sorted by time waiting for a review. Unless you are familiar with a topic space, you may be unfamiliar with the special notability rules in that topic space, you may lack the ability to distinguish the reliable sources, and you may simply not recognise an "obviously notable" topic (Americans are unlikely to recognise significant cricket players, Australians are unlikely to recognise leading political figures in Sierra Leone, etc). We really need to look at creating a series of sub-pools within AfC around topic areas, so reviewers can focus on the topic spaces they are more expert in. I think that would improve AfC reviewing for both the reviewers and the submitters. Much of the AfC work relates to Biographies (often probably Autobiographies) of Living People so having that pool broken down into the various sports and professions that seem to be massively over-represented would be a good start. Kerry (talk) 21:08, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I think an underappreciated aspect is that by and large the incentive is for AfC reviewers to decline. It seems far more likely that an AfC reviewer will catch flak for accepting an article than the reverse. Therefore the incentives make decline the "easier" option for reviewers. This is not a comment on Brad's actions specifically, just on the overall state of AfC. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:13, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I very much appreciate GreenMeansGo's piece. It is incredibly inspirational and motivating. The "alternative timeline" makes me feel quite proud, and I think the piece is a good overall takedown of the general coverage on the controversy. I also appreciate Chris Troutman's criticism of the "linguistic error." It may seem like nitpicking, but it is a use of language I pay attention to quite a lot as well, as language shapes thought. We write about subjects, we don't write for the subjects. Similarly, I agree that having a stub or poor start-class article is honestly little better than just having no article on a subject at all. In general, I very much enjoyed reading this article. It is a shame that this incident may have caused a lot of stress on quite a few people. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 21:27, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm glad you found it motivating Maplestrip. I compiled the timeline first and wrote the rest second. There was a lingering doubt about what I would find when I started tracking down the diffs, and I was very pleased that our worldwide community of volunteers wound up mostly getting me excited about their own motivation. I was somewhat later saddened by the fact that when the MacArthur Geniuses were announced this year, everyone had already beat me to the punch and I couldn't write any of the articles myself :P. GMGtalk 21:35, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Actually, Nobel Prize winners are taken care of within seconds after the announcements. The only one I ever managed to start myself when the peace prize was given to four human rights organizations in Tunisia, I got to write one of them and only because I speak French, and all sources were in French.--Ymblanter (talk) 16:59, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would like to comment on the original deletion of the article as a copyright violation. This practice must cease. If the subject is presumed notable, the article should be reduced to a stub with a single lead sentence, preserving, if possible the sources, categories, talk page and infobox. I've had a lot of copyvio-deleted articles re-created in this manner. In the early days I also retrospectively authorised dozens of articles that were copyvios of my own work. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:36, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Hawkeye7, I'm not convinced a tiny stub is better to have than no article. I know I'm drawn to redlinks; I don't know about others. Is a good article more likely to evolve starting from nothing, or from a stub? I suppose that's the kind of question that could be answered by research. Ntsimp (talk) 01:51, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    An example. Some thoughts:
    • Not every new article is linked to, so red links may not exist.
    • Many editors will not touch red links, the assumption being that the creator will return to them. (This is often the case with stubs too.)
    • Others annoy me by going around removing red links
    • A common assumption about deleted articles is that they should not be re-created.
    • The best thing that you can provide a future article builder with is sources. In the case of Donna Strickland, the Optical Society bio would have provided the bedrock of a complete article. It was the main source used for both the draft and the current rewrites in any case
    • The presence of a link on a Wikipedia page assures that it will get archived. If an article is deleted, its sources may become lost as well.
    • Had the article in question not been deleted, it would never have had to go through the AfC process
    Hawkeye7 (discuss) 04:27, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • All the newspapers and websites criticizing Wikipedia for not having an article about Strickland have no idea how Wikipedia notability works (and apparently made no effort to find out). If any of those newspapers and websites had done a good article about this physicist, we would have had a good source about her and evidence of her notability. Wikipedia is a "trailing indicator" indeed. We are doing good work, but we don't do original reporting. That's the media's job. They didn't do it.  SchreiberBike | ⌨  22:19, 28 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I've been here from the start and I don't understand the rules any more, and you're complaining that the rest of the world doesn't? One cannot imagine a better illustration of the problems the Wiki is having. 13:06, 29 October 2018 (UTC)
I understand where you are coming from. There was a time where people who have made a significant contribution in their field and with a source to back it up are notable. The Chirped pulse amplification was deemed to be notable and I see no reason why the inventors cannot be notable, the issue of AFD then is not necessary. I like the response of the foundation, because if you edit enough you realise, internally, wikipedia editors give an image that they have created a great system but it is an imperfect system and acknowledging the imperfections and moving when you cannot do anything about it is fine. A key imperfection is we do not have enough expert content writers and most of us are not experts, but we all do our best and we move on.Alexplaugh12 (talk) 00:28, 3 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • This was a great addition to this month's The Signpost. The three perspectives are all valuable in their own right, and are much better than anything the professional media wrote about the lack of a Wikipedia page for Strickland. GMG's alternative timeline is something seriously worth repeating offsite by WMF or by an independent journalistic outlet, and is something truly remarkable (I see a future TED Talk in the works). While I don't necessarily agree with Chris Troutman's choice of polemics, I think he makes the valuable point that this got so much coverage due to two main factors: (1) Public ignorance over the internal functions of Wikipedia, and (2) The popularity of the narrative that women are discriminated against in society. I don't mean to debate the realities of the gender gap (there is one, and its significant) or reject the notion that women face bias here and elsewhere (they absolutely do). But its quite obvious that it's "trendy" to discuss misogyny right now in the Western media, especially on Wikipedia. Not only does this unnecessarily drag our website through the mud, it creates a single-minded focus on fixing only one problem (which I worried about in an op-ed several months ago) and potentially creating a few others. Hopefully some more-informed journalists will in due time give us the in-depth, comprehensive coverage we deserve. On a parting note, I wish someone here had conceded that Maher did emphasize that Wikipedia's biases are reflection of what it takes in, and that affirmative action is not the solution here.-Indy beetle (talk) 00:53, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with a lot of what User:Chris troutman wrote, but if they're going to give a lot of attention to the precision of wording, they should be taken to task for their own failings in this regard. Two places where it's especially egregious amidst all the bile is 1) where they say that Women in Red encourages slacktivism, as if the whole point of the project wasn't to actually edit and create articles, and they have results to show for it as well. And 2) that to create articles about women on Wikipedia is to introduce bias. Countering systemic bias doesn't mean introducing bias. That's not what bias means, and we should stop extending the meaning of bias to suit the narrative of the op-ed. Opencooper (talk) 01:13, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm quite sure Chris chose the word "slacktivism" deliberately because we discussed this prior to publication. I'll let him speak for himself further on this subject. ☆ Bri (talk) 01:40, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • I've reviewed tens of thousands of new articles and AfCs, and I've looked at even more reviewed by others. I've made errors, and so has everyone else who has done any substantial amount. Thinking back over my past work, I've made about 2% errors in these processes. I could do better if I were better at recognizing when I was too tired to continue, but I doubt that I or anyone else would ever do much better than 1%. I'm not suggesting these are exact numbers, and I mean clear errors, not ones where I and the eventual consensus disagreed--the community is often erratic. Ideally each AfC decline should be checked by someone else, but in practice this only happens when it gets resubmitted. Since there are too few AfC reviewers for the workload, this is not now practical. It is exceedingly unfortunate when an error is this conspicuous, but it could happen to any of us. DGG ( talk ) 03:31, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@DGG: I think your estimate of the best reviewers having an error rate of 1-2% is correct. Based on your experience how would you say those errors are distributed? Is the error rate more likely to be in declining notable submissions or accepting ones that aren't? Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 03:41, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
At AfC, I think it's at least 3/4 erroneous declines. The usual cause is reviewing too fast or when tired, and the very large number of totally unacceptable submissions at AfC creates considerable skepticism. To see that something is not hopeless requires thinking. For my more extended comment about this, see [1] I note that the reviewer of this particular article does not think they made an error in declining it, [2], but I consider them unambiguously wrong in their interpretation of our guidelines. The guideline for accepting drafts is that as an article it would probably pass AfD, and this would, because the referencing inadequacies were easily fixable. The reviewer thought they had to be fixed first. (There's also disagreement over whether they were adequate even as they were in the declined version, [3]) DGG ( talk ) 04:22, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@DGG: I am obviously familiar with the Stickland incident - we are leaving comments to an article all about that after all. What I find interesting is that if your 75% estimate of errors in declining is true, my guess is that AfC reviewers receive 75% (or more) complaints about articles they've accepted rather than rejected. This feels like a structural problem that only reinforces what mistakes there are. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 04:28, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Erroneous declines probably vary by subject area. For academics it is probably like 80% or more since many reviewers have a disdain/disregard for WP:NPROF/the actual standards at AfD for academics, while for corporations it is probably much lower since the standards are actually (and should be) high on sourcing. I agree on there being a structural problem; because NPP and many people review accepts, erroneous or quick accepts get flak while quickly declining hundreds of drafts with many incorrect ones can easily be missed/ignored, because most of the declines are correct because of the sheer number of unacceptable drafts, and any complaints from the AfC submitters are swept away into obscure user talk pages (and how many people are going to still be active to complain two months later when the decline is done?). Galobtter (pingó mió) 06:27, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I can only talk about mine: most objections I see on my own talk p. are about articles I declined. Most of them are by coi editors; a few convince me I may have been wrong. Almost nothing I accept has ever been challenged successfully at afd. DGG ( talk ) 05:17, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • All the healthy discussions here about the Strickland case just proves how vital The Signpost is, and why it needs to be kept. Frankly, no Signpost, means no central place where such vital issues can be discussed. werldwayd (talk) 12:44, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Re Troutman's "Honest Wikipedians will admit that Strickland ... did not clearly satisfy academic notability criterio prior to her Nobel win": I will admit no such thing. Strickland's stellar citation record (two papers with over 1000 citations in Google scholar and half a dozen more with over 100, WP:PROF#C1) is largely unchanged by the new prize, and the declined draft clearly stated her fellowship and presidency of a major society (#C3 and #C8 respectively). So she easily passes three criteria when only one is enough. I find the implicit assumption of bad faith by Troutman offensive. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:38, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • +1. What the honest Wikipedian should admit is that, whether one likes NPROF/the way it is interpreted at AfD, the article 100% would have survived AfD. Galobtter (pingó mió) 16:44, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
nonsense. PROF says nothing about "two papers with over 1000 citations in Google scholar and half a dozen more with over 100" because it's very subjective. PROF says nothing about h-index, numbers of citations, etc. Bradv made a call and I agree. I'd've !voted to delete that article, too. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:24, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I mentioned three criteria. You are arguing against only one of them. Even that argument would fail, badly, at any actual academic AfD. And your personal ignorance and repudiation of our academic notability standards does not justify your claims that people disagreeing with you must be dishonest. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:58, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I also would have !voted to "keep" per WP:PROF#C1, #C3 and #C6. Had the draft come to my attention back in May, I would have promoted it to main space, with some cleanup work. XOR'easter (talk) 21:20, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It is nonsense to claim that Strickland ... did not clearly satisfy academic notability criteria prior to her Nobel win. Take a look at her citation profile on Google scholar which can be viewed by anybody with an Internet link [4]. It shows that over 8000 other scientific papers had cited her work before she was awarded a Nobel Prize. There were 8000 sources: no more were needed to give notability under WP:Prof#C1. The mistaken decline of the AfC came from the failure to follow the WP:SNG WP:Prof guideline. However, there is no gender bias here. I see many BLPs of male (and female) academics taken to AfD at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Academics and educators on similarly spurious grounds. Such things happen frequently, and the AfD nominators usually get away with a WP:Trout. The reviewer in the Strickland case had the misfortune to be caught in the headlights. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:13, 30 October 2018 (UTC).[reply]
Surely Troutman meant that the Strickland article did not meet the notability criteria! --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:53, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@John Maynard Friedman: Please read the relevant criterion more carefully. It is entirely about the achievements of the person the article is about, and not about the state of the article. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:16, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales himself, publicly threw Bradv under the bus Am I missing something obvious about where this is coming from? It looks like this was the relevant thread on his talk page, but it doesn't look like he ever responded. GMGtalk 17:07, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    @GreenMeansGo: I was writing in response to this tweet. I had wanted to include a screencap in this piece for context but I was told fair-use images can't be used in The Signpost. Not only did Jimbo tweet this misleading qz.com piece he blamed Wikipedia (qz.com linked to the diff of Bradv's declination) rather than provide some nuance about our notability criteria. Chris Troutman (talk) 17:20, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    Ah. I suppose you could have used Template:Tweet, but it may be a bit too late for all that. GMGtalk 17:29, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The uproar has been unfair to Bradv. Most reviewers would have followed standard notability guidelines and declined the article. AfC is inundated with articles about entertainers, businesses, and business people and we are in great need of reviewers. There are many fewer articles about professors. So we don't expect reviewers at AfC to understand the nuances of notability for academics. WP:PROF outlines what we see as forming the reliable, independent, in depth written record of notability. This is quite different from that expected of topics that get covered in the press, and rules which cover regular notablitiy are applied differently. As a result most articles about notable professors get declined at least once, if not multiple times. Some of us come along later and look at the declined articles for academics, but we don't get to all of them. (My list of those to rescue has been neglected.) The solution is for more editors to become AfC reviewers and frequently look for drafts in their areas of knowledge and interest. This would reduce the load on those who are carrying most of the review burden. Some projects, such as Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics#Newly created articles already display drafts in their areas of interest. The Donna Strickland draft was on that list in March, and could have been seen by a knowledgable reviewer. StarryGrandma (talk) 22:29, 29 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
to clarify, I agree with StarryGrandma that this has been unfair, and I apologize for overly strong language myself. There is a range of way to do reviewing, and the way Bradv does it is well within the accepted way, and his determinations are in general similar to mine. DGG ( talk ) 05:24, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • User:GreenMeansGo's article is solid and impressive, and the timeline is so inspiring! Meanwhile, we know why the newspapers jumped on this. They had little on Strickland, and so turned to Wikipedia for information, and felt let down when we had nothing to give them. Journalists these days rely on Wikipedia quite heavily. But we are not writing for paid professionals who should already know this stuff to slack off by copying our research, we are writing for the general public. And by the time the general public wanted to know about Strickland, we had the article they needed. We didn't have the copy ready for the journalists to republish under their own name and take the money and grin, but we had it by the time the public wanted it, and that's what we are about. We did our job, unpaid, collaboratively, and we did it well. The journalists did not do a good job, moaned about us, and took home their pay. SilkTork (talk) 17:09, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • "The so-called journalism" ... "these so-called news sources". You may as well have called them "fake news", Chris troutman. This kind of wagon-circling rhetoric may be comforting but does nothing to help the community improve our editing or engage with journalists and readers. Fences&Windows 00:05, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Fences and windows: "You may as well have called them "fake news" but that's not what I did because that's not what I mean. I think Wikipedia and its many left-leaning editors deserve better than to be pilloried for imagined misogynist bias. My so-called "wagon-circling rhetoric" has brought condemnation from editors like you, so please remind everyone I am merely trying to defend this institution where we volunteer. I meant to deride partisans who act based upon political beliefs rather than stick to the facts. Chris Troutman (talk) 02:04, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks to all who put in the work writing these. Things are always more complicated when you look at them closely. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 04:51, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The only insightful journalism on this topic is here in The Signpost because this is the only place to get a comment from the subjects in the story. The negativity that traditional publications have against Wikipedia is getting tedious. The external media are so quick to blame Wikipedia for their own bias against women and other underrepresented groups, as if those publications expect Wikipedia to do the original journalism and research which is their work in addition to our usual activities of promoting their articles with summaries, citations, and a huge audience. Wikipedia's biggest fault is that it merely lessens rather than eliminates the bias which originates in other media. Other media outlets should quit framing their ethical problems as a reason to seek a competition with Wikipedia. They should be cooperative to us in the same way we show good faith to them. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:59, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
    • BR is correct. In my experience working in topics a bit beyond the more familiar, a major challenge is to simply find adequate information. Take, for example ancient Roman history, which was a very male-dominated environment (to say the least): beyond a few dozen individuals, our knowledge of women of the time -- no matter how prominent or important -- is often limited to little more than a name, if that. (Consider the example of Ignota Plautia, whose existence is presumed by experts; we don't even know her name.) The best book on women of the Early Roman Empire is by M.T. Raepsaet-Charlier, Prosopographie Des Femmes De L'ordre Sénatorial (Ier-IIe Siècles) (1987), in French, which is rather difficult to use if one does not know the language. Or to paraphrase BR, when it comes to bias, if the material is not easily accessible (or not accessible at all), Wikipedians cannot eliminate it, only lessen it as far as the material allows us. -- llywrch (talk) 04:03, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note: Sociologist Salvatore Babones has come out in our defense. I wonder if anyone in the media will take notice. -Indy beetle (talk) 15:45, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Unfortunately he misunderstands the issue. Before her Nobel Prize, Strickland qualified for a pass of the WP:Prof#C1 guideline with flying colors on the basis of her science citation record [5]. The omission of her article was not due to any systematic bias in Wikipedia, but because an editor did not follow the guidelines. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:04, 31 October 2018 (UTC).[reply]
@Xxanthippe: It is you that misunderstands. PROF is a subjective criterion. It does not specify how many citations are enough to pass, just as it does not specify which academic societies are prestigious enough. Your belief that she passes PROF only exists in your imagination. Bradv was not wrong to come to a differing conclusion and you should apologize for your accusation. Chris Troutman (talk) 22:30, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Almost all of our criteria are subjective criteria. There is nothing special about WP:PROF in this regard. (Or did you somehow think that the "in-depth" part of GNG was purely objective?) In all cases, what the criteria mean is how they are interpreted at AfDs and AFCs. And according to how these criteria have been interpreted in the vast majority of past academic AfDs, the declined draft was an easy pass of multiple criteria. Your hand-wringing about how we can't specify anything completely objectively so we can't use these criteria at all and must hold blameless the people who interpreted them badly comes off as casting around for excuses rather than a worthwhile argument. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:47, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The interpretation of guidelines, as is everything on Wikipedia, is established by consensus. In the case of WP:Prof, the consensus has been established by hundreds of AfDs and over a decade of debate on the WP:Prof talk page. By that consensus Strickland was a clear pass before her Prize. Before editors enter a new area they would do well to familiarise themselves with consensus that exists there. For any area in Wikipedia, the more prior knowledge that an editor has, the better will be the edits they are likely to make. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:09, 1 November 2018 (UTC).[reply]
The point is he gets the main point - she was failing GNG because of the media's lack of coverage. The technicalities of whether deletion was correct in the light of BEFORE/PROF and such are secondary. I could as well note that in theory, PROF cannot override GNG, through of course, yes, it often does. IMHO, the draft was poorly written, it was essentially declined because in the AfC process it was reviewed by someone with above-average requirements. It could've been accepted, and if it was submitted to namespace without AfC process it probably would'be never been considered for deletion. But bottom line it was a poor draft, because it was hard to find good sources for her, and she was not famous until she got the Prize. Wikipedia still is missing articles on many people with borderline+ level of fame, just like she was (until she became famous). The problem is not that we occasionally err on the side of caution, given the spam/vanity flood we are facing. The problem is that we lack volunteers to write more content. If we had people writing this, up to and including people interested in gender-gap related issues, there'd be no problem. The media coverage which implied the article was deleted because we are sexist was plain wrong, as SB points out, we are no more sexist then the world's coverage at large. Wikipedia is the reflection of the worlds' gender gap problem, not a source of it. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here 06:49, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
I could as well note that in theory, PROF cannot override GNG, through of course, yes, it often does. Incorrect. The Notability page itself says that a topic "is presumed to merit an article [if it] meets either the general notability guideline below, or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific guideline listed in the box on the right" — the very first of which is WP:PROF. XOR'easter (talk) 14:26, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and I'd very much like to see where the consensus for that is, because the most recent RfC I'm seeing on the relationship between SNGs and GNG concluded There is clear consensus that no subject-specific notability guideline, including Notability (sports) is a replacement for or supercedes the General Notability Guideline. GMGtalk 14:36, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
WP:NSPORT is not WP:NPROF. The former says that it is a supplement to the GNG; the latter says that it is an alternative. XOR'easter (talk) 19:06, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
And the RfC seems to have reached a pretty clear consensus on SNGs generally. GMGtalk 19:07, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
An RfC that spent almost all of its time talking about sports figures reached a consensus that has apparently had vanishingly little impact on later, lengthy debates on the same topic (see also here). I don't think that's much of a consensus, particularly when the RfC was listed as being about whether the criteria of WP:NSPORT should be tightened or not. And, on general principle, I'm fine with different notability guidelines playing somewhat different roles. Sometimes, we're trying to make judgments about topics that get a lot of news coverage on a regular basis, and sometimes, we're not. So, sometimes the relevant question is, "How much coverage until it counts?" and sometimes it's "What, other than mainstream media reporting, indicates significance?". XOR'easter (talk) 19:21, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It is indeed presumed to merit an article, and then WP:GNG is needed to prove that it actually does merit an article. The point of having specific criteria is just to make our life easier, since someone who meets WP:PROF or WP:NFOOTY is very likely to meet the general notability criterion, and it is much easier to check these criteria than to perform a thorough literature search (and remember sources could be in other languages, offline, or behind the paywall, and often need an expert to understand what they are saying). If someone really insists on checking the article no WP:PROF would save it. In the case of Strickland (which I know because I am a physicist and in a related field) there must be some specialized review articles which say that the chirped pulse technique was first proposed by Strickland and Coumou and is a widely used method in ultrafast optics. Just to dig them out, one needs an expert in ultrafast optics.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:08, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
It is indeed presumed to merit an article, and then WP:GNG is needed to prove that it actually does merit an article. That does not reflect the practice of actual deletion discussions. Nor is it indicated by the plain wording of WP:N. Presumption refers to the fact that a "more in-depth discussion might conclude that the topic actually should not have a stand-alone article", but would instead be better treated as part of another article. XOR'easter (talk) 18:55, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • The article could have been improved with a discussion of the issues relating to academic notability. There was also an opportunity to critique the incentive structure of Wikipedia by pointing out that reviewing articles is a way for editors to earn status from the Wikimedia community. This "grind" combined with a poor understanding of academic notability results in summary rejections. AugusteBlanqui (talk) 21:12, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • As several have already noted, the draft that was declined (and I don't fault Bradv too much, he was following accepted practice if not explicit guidelines) would have certainly survived AfD. It is distressing that that drafts must meet a far higher standard to be accepted than articles do to be kept. Until these standards can somehow be brought into agreement, and I have no idea how, AfC is functioning to exclude worthwhile content and to distract new editors from the far superior option of simply moving the draft to mainspace themselves (or even, heaven forbid, building a page in mainspace). This is the most significant of several interconnected issues—others include automatic G13 deletion, lack of collaborative tools, and allowing giving some editors a non-discussable veto over others—that make draftspace/AfC a net negative to the project at this time. (Of course, given ACREQ, it's also essential to the project—what a mess!) A2soup (talk) 22:07, 1 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks to those who wrote these insightful perspectives, and the Signpost team for publishing them. I echo the comments that the accuracy of the facts and the thoughtfulness of the discussion here is of a far higher standard than that seen in external media. the wub "?!" 19:03, 2 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • This, collectively, is a fabulous defense of our work at Wikipedia. I think the takeaway is that it was easy to spin this into an eye-catching story about a solidly noncontroversial source of knowledge. I'm not going to vilify media companies for using this angle, because the motivation comes from a good place. The problem here is a lack of awareness about how we edit. A great alternative spin that journalists should consider is the idea that Strickland's article didn't pass the review process because women don't get their fair share of press or even peripheral website coverage that often passes for a notability reference. Is that a problem with Wikipedia, or our society as a whole? Icebob99 (talk) 20:09, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Maybe we ought to ask these publications that want to vilify Wikipedia a simple question: Why weren't THEY writing about her prior to the Nobel win? If they had been, the article would have had enough sources and been accepted, and we'd never have had this conversation. Seraphimblade Talk to me 02:47, 7 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
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