
Donna Strickland won her Nobel prize in Physics before she got a wikipedia page - kaboro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Donna_Strickland
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sp332
Did anyone else hear her interview on BBC radio? They ended by asking why she
hadn't applied to be a full professor yet, and she clearly didn't want to talk
about it. Wonder what's going on there.

Edit: this episode
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172w25chfb2c1f](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w172w25chfb2c1f)
Interview starts at 12:55, awkward question at 16:45

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Upvoter33
I also noticed this -- clearly, not a lot of love in the dept for her. A bit
awkward now, and I suspect soon, she will be a full prof, perhaps at a
different university....

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dbcooper71
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2018/oct/02/nobel-p...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/live/2018/oct/02/nobel-
prize-in-physics-2018-live)

“Sumner says the fact that Strickland’s Wikipedia page has only appeared today
is telling.

“It took a Nobel prize for Donna Strickland to be noticed enough to have a
(short) Wikipedia page written about her. Another example of how womens’
contributions to science go unnoticed and uncelebrated,” she says. “It takes
the science equivalent of an Oscar for a woman in Stem [science, technology
engineering and mathematics] to get noticed!””

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jbob2000
Scientists don’t have TV shows, if they don’t win awards, how else am I
supposed to hear about them?

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elektor
Wow that's pretty sad. It looks like Wikipedia has a gender gap task force
(GGTF) to counter the gender gap.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Counteri...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Countering_systemic_bias/Gender_gap_task_force)

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chaostheory
This is one of the main reasons I started
[https://theymadethat.com](https://theymadethat.com) (IMDB for everything, not
just movies). Not many people have the privilege to have their own Wikipedia
entry. The qualifications for getting one also seem very arbitrary.

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jcrawfordor
Per the deletion log there was an article on her in '14 that an administrator
deleted due to unambiguous copyright infringement. It seems no one ever took
interest in taking it up after that.

The speedy deletion process has always made me a bit uncomfortable, I wish
there was any kind of public information about that deletion besides the
deletion comment which consists of a single template without further info.

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tzs
Jacques Dubochet (2017, Chemistry) got his Wikipedia page on the day he won
the Prize, too.

One of the men he shared the prize with, Joachim Frank also got his page in
the year he got the prize, although his page came a few months before the
prize.

One of the 2016 Chemistry winners, Ben Feringa, didn't get his page until the
year before.

Maybe someone got confused at Wikipedia and thought Strickland won in
Chemstry!

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spunker540
It's a real problem -- "only 18% of biographies are of women" on wikipedia and
"between 84 and 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are male".

I also remember reading in the past year about how the male skew in wikipedia
editors leads to all sorts of bias. They approve all sorts of wikipedia
entries on fictional sci-fi characters and reject entries for female leaders
worldwide (in the west but even more so when it comes to developing nations)

Source for the stats: [https://www.wired.com/story/using-artificial-
intelligence-to...](https://www.wired.com/story/using-artificial-intelligence-
to-fix-wikipedias-gender-problem/)

~~~
chooseaname
Why is there so much bias? Do these men just hate women? Is it cultural?

I really don't understand this.

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spunker540
I'm not saying its malicious or deliberate, but any non-diverse population
will tend to exhibit some bias.

I don't think its that surprising that a group of men share different view
points about worthy posts than a group of women would. The point is wikipedia
doesn't have good coverage in this regard. I'd say the same thing for a group
of American editors vs a group of African editors. Or a group of wall st
professionals vs blue collar workers.

Wikipedia's editors have a diversity problem in light of their goal to be the
"world's encyclopedia".

~~~
lostphilosopher
I suspect the underlying bias is, "have I heard of this before?" If not, it's
more likely the entry gets rejected. The more homogeneous the population of
editors, the more narrow their experience scope. This is amplified by external
biases that make women's contributions less visible - it's harder for new
awareness to be built.

Just a theory.

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trynewideas
Also an indictment of the godawful WP draft process. That article by a new
editor sat in the till for two months before getting rejected in a manner that
made it unclear that it could be later revised and accepted.

The actual article that went up doesn't look like it went through the useless
draft process at all. It was drafted and published directly to the main
namespace, ironically enough by copying Gérard Mourou's article and then
deleting everything from it.

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cafard
Right now, there are something around 20 article on the front page of
Wikipedia, about half of them connected to recent news or anniversaries
(birthdays, historic events, etc.) There are about 5.6 million articles in
Wikipedia, it says. So how far would a Wikipedia page about Donna Strickland
have contributed to her fame among those of us who are not physicists? And
would the physicists among us have needed Wikipedia to learn about her?

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wil_wheat_on
the other two winners, male, had pages
[https://twitter.com/clancynewyork/status/1047098079097380864](https://twitter.com/clancynewyork/status/1047098079097380864),
there's a broader argument about bias here

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booleandilemma
How can an encyclopedia that _anyone_ can edit be biased?

Anyone could have added her page, no one did, until now.

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cpeterso
Someone created a wiki page for her back in May, but it was deleted because a
Wikipedia editor decided she wasn't "notable". Anyone can edit Wikipedia, but
it still has the bias of the most recent editor.

[https://twitter.com/resolvingdust/status/1047135142978801664](https://twitter.com/resolvingdust/status/1047135142978801664)

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suckerburg
Wikipedia has arbitrary rules for a lot of people, some youtubers have pages
but others with bigger reach don't. Some blogs are considered proper critics
but youtube critics aren't.

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RickJWagner
That's awesome! Smart AND humble. Hats off to Ms. Strickland.

Edit: I assume a less humble person would have pushed to get their page long
before getting a Nobel prize.

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qbaqbaqba
Good for her!

