University of Waterloo

[ijmorlan]

After further reading, the wikipedia thing is quite a bit different than initial stories. It's relatively common for Nobel prize winners not to have a Wikipedia page prior to winning the prize. Also, although a draft page was made and rejected earlier this year, it was rejected because the sources were not considered independent. There are likely still systemic issues in Wikipedia at play here, but it's not really a straight-cut case of her not receiving recognition because she's female.

My thought was that if the Nobel committee was able to figure out that she deserved a Nobel, Wikipedia should have been able to figure out that she deserved a Wikipedia page. Except… Wikipedia doesn’t claim to systematically evaluate every possible page for inclusion; if the specific submission made relative to her was poorly sourced, it may well have deserved rejection, and that is not evidence of any sort of bias.

Actually, more generally, I’ve seen a lot of very questionable claims around the bias issue. For example, I saw a number of how many Wikipedia entries about people are about women compared to men, given in a context which seemed to suggest we were supposed to infer a bias at Wikipedia. It’s a fairly small percentage. But historically, isn’t it a fact that most of the people considered important have been men? So of course an encyclopedia will reflect that. Now, I think a major, probably even the main, reason for this is that historically women were excluded from participation in society; of course a group that is kept out of an activity won’t contribute much to that activity. But the problem isn’t the encyclopedia that summarizes the historical record; it’s the attitudes which led to this exclusion, attitudes which still exist today.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t bias at Wikipedia, but surely part of being progressive is being rational and evaluating evidence correctly.

It further occurs to me this bears a similarity to climate change. People will frequently observe a hot/cold year and tie it to climate change or a lack of climate change, depending on their pre-existing opinions. But it’s the overall trend, not individual cases, that constitutes the evidence for climate change and its causes.