Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-10-28/Opinion

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Bradv, you certainly have nothing to feel bad about, you were just doing a volunteer task that you took on and you did it well. A key point you made is that there have been many other Nobel Prize winners who did not have an article before they won the prize. So this was not unusual, and certainly not a gender-bias incident. But journalists and editors "jumped" on the story, and the angle they used - woman wins Nobel Prize previously shunned by Wikipedia - was, given the previous history of the non-existence of articles about many winners, a stretch. "Wikipedia gets unfairly bumped around again by the media" seems more accurate. Thanks for all of your good work here. Randy Kryn (talk) 19:33, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

• Bradv, the only point I can see at which events could have been done differently, which you touch upon as "AfC sorting", is to tag the declined draft with the relevant WikiProjects. It's not in the flowchart, and it's only in the reviewing instructions for accepted articles - and even that is currently being challenged.

There was certainly nothing "wrong" in your assessment of the draft as it stood. Asking AfC reviewers to rewrite and research articles would be inviting the collapse of the system under an un-satisfiable workload. I'm sorry for the grief you took on the wiki's behalf.

As for the news coverage - re-write it in your mind as Lazy journalists turn to Wikipedia for cut-and-paste material to meet their deadlines. Find nothing. Decide to write outraged item about Wikipedia instead as being the quicker and easier option. Cabayi (talk) 20:52, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

• Bradv - My own $0.02 is that you were spot on. AfC deliberately doesn't involve a BEFORE check (given our current backlog set-up we'd melt under it - it would be more like an enforced RA). No attempt to reach out by the news sources to anyone who actually knows something about AfC. Rather unimpressed by the press statements by a couple of senior figures in Wiki who should know better. Thanks for writing this nice and calm response in the wake of a fair chunk of unwarranted hostility. Nosebagbear (talk) 21:18, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

• A very common misunderstanding is over "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject"; this is a requirement for notability, not for high-quality sourcing of the article. It doesn't mean, as one editor thought, that an article on netball needs to be written from books about cricket. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 21:46, 28 October 2018 (UTC)
• Bradv, I looked at the draft you declined, and you were correct to decline it as lacking independent sources, which are required for every article on any subject. You did nothing wrong here; the media just (rather understandably, I suppose) doesn't understand how our processes work. This was not a case of "gender bias", as evidenced by the finding that a third of Nobel winners had no article at the time of their win. I would not support AfC reviewers having to do a "BEFORE" type evaluation, as declining a draft is very different from nominating for deletion. The point of "BEFORE" is to avoid wasting the community's time with a deletion discussion when even a cursory look for references would have revealed that enough exist even if they aren't currently cited. Declining a draft doesn't remove the article or require a discussion, it just tells the creator that they've got some more work to do. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 22:12, 28 October 2018 (UTC)

• I consider the decline unambiguously erroneous. 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 discussion above is based on the view that they had to be fixed first. AfC is not for determining notability, so the question of whether the sources were adequate to show notability in the declined version is irrelevant. (I personally think they were-- that obviously reliable primary sources are sufficient, though not ideal, but even if I thought otherwise I would have accepted. Frankly, I guessed at the time that it was declined because President OSA had not been noticed, which would have been an understandable error. ) DGG ( talk ) 04:32, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

  @DGG: I've been discussing this incident with a variety of editors for nearly a month now, and I'm having considerable trouble understanding your comment. I believe I reviewed my own actions honestly, and I've gone over every aspect of the AfC project from top to bottom trying to understand what might have gone wrong. Every aspect of what you just mentioned is covered within the essay, yet you somehow still see it differently. You characterize my actions as unambiguously erroneous, which, frankly, is incredibly confusing and a little hard to take. Bradv 04:57, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

placeholder until tomorrow, but I'm going to strike the "unambiguously". DGG ( talk ) 05:08, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

• I've been wondering if we should do something about our communication towards editors here.. Our nomenclature is rather clinical and "Declining a draft" might potentially be interpreted as "topic declined" or simply be interpreted as discouraging further pursuit. I was wondering if perhaps the usage of more engaging words like "requires improvement", "not ready for publication" or similar to encourage people might make a difference. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:00, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

@TheDJ: - it's definitely not an evidently wrong idea, but there are cases where I feel that the slightly stronger language of Decline (but not "Reject") is apropos. This disagreement is purely within me, so I imagine that we might get a fair set of mixed views on the matter if you raised it in AfC. Perhaps a gentler one for referencing and a decline for advertorial et al? Nosebagbear (talk) 18:36, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

@Nosebagbear and TheDJ: To 'decline' something is to refuse it politely and rather formally (I am sorry to have to decline your offer). 'Reject' suggests that what is on offer is felt to be not good enough (an article or book which a publisher has rejected). – BET. Reject is the far stronger word and is more final, personally I would reserve it for clearly inappropriate or totally inadmissible submissions. Decline leaves a more temporary notion such as 'decline (for now)'. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:53, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

@Kudpung: - I do reserve reject for very rare cases, hence why I delineated it from the "slightly stronger" - in effect, reject is a rough indication that if it is re-submitted, it should at least be considered whether to send it to MFD. Nosebagbear (talk) 23:25, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

• How is the OSA not a reliable source for its own officers? 73.222.1.26 (talk) 18:12, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

  The OSA is a reliable source for its own officers, but was it clear that being an officer of the OSA conferred sufficient notability? How would that have been established? If I had reviewed the draft as it stands, I would also have asked for better sourcing to establish notability. The problem is not with the subject of the article, it is with the insufficiency of the article. It is not the reviewer's responsibility to fix the article. It is the reviewer's responsibility to not pass the article if it is not ready.

  Do we see anyone blaming the author of the article? That would also be unreasonable, as they were under no obligation to write it. One might as well blame everyone else who didn't write it or fix it. There is nothing special about the way this draft was handled. Cheers, · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 19:32, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

• Bradv, I have a great admiration for your transparency and bravery in this Opinion piece. Not everyone would have responded as you have and I think knowing the background of the event (not-having-a-Strikland-article event) is very helpful in sorting things out. Barbara ✐  ✉ 09:20, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
• I don't recall having worked in AFC, so I don't have a full understanding of the process. From Bradv's explanation above, it seems that what he did was standard, which I find odd. What is the purpose of AFC if all that happens when an unregistered, inexperienced user submits this article, is that the article gets a template, and the user gets a template, and the article is then ignored. Nobody is benefiting from that at all. If the article had been created in mainspace it would have fared better, especially if it had been taken to AFD where people would have made an attempt to strengthen sources. While I understand and sympathise with Bradv's explanation that this is what AFC does, and they can't do any better, it does seem odd that an article that is not obviously crap, and has significant enough indicators to alert people to the notability of the subject (there is clear assertion of notability - enough to withstand a Prod or a Speedy, and clues are that she co-invented something on which we already had an article which mentioned her by name - Chirped pulse amplification, and was given several awards, two of which we have articles on - Research_Corporation#Grants_Programs:_Cottrell_Scholar_Awards and Sloan Research Fellowship - the latter indicating that "Since the beginning of the program in 1955, 43 fellows have won a Nobel Prize", and she was an Optical Society President - all of whom, bar two at the time of submission, had articles on Wikipedia: The_Optical_Society#OSA_presidents). If the article had been created in mainspace and submitted to AFD, it would have fared better than going through AFC under the current system. So, I don't see that Bradv did anything wrong, but I do see causes for concern in AFC if the system is geared not to assist an article other than put templates on it and the user who created it. If, as Bradv argues, asking the reviewers to do a bit more than accept or reject articles will lead to an even greater backlog and a reluctance to get more volunteers involved, then perhaps we need to consider the process itself, or even if AFC should continue. Does the AFC acceptance process set the bar too high (after all we do have AfD for dubious articles)? Or could the process be more geared to assisting the article, rather than accepting or rejecting a user's submission. The inexperienced user who created the article has done their bit, and should not be expected to carry the burden - we should take that on as experienced Wikipedians. One suggestion could be to send declines to AFD rather than back to the creator (who may, as in this case, already have left Wikipedia). Whatever we do, we cannot allow decent draft articles like Donna Strickland to be simply templated and left ignored in limbo. SilkTork (talk) 11:20, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
• Where BEFORE comes into play at AfC is when nominating a draft for deletion at WP:MFD, which is an attempt to gain community consensus that a draft has no value to the project and should be deleted. Bradv is wrong here, BEFORE plays no role in the normal AfC process whatsoever. All AfC drafts are automatically deleted with no BEFORE after 6 months with no edits per WP:G13, and had the Nobel been awarded just a couple months later this draft undoubtedly would have already been speedied in this fashion. This is the normal state of affairs; as many have noted, Bradv did not act out of line with community norms. This case can hopefully lead the community to recognize some of the more perverse consequences of the relatively new G13 criterion, especially in combination with the importance ACREQ has conferred on AfC. A2soup (talk) 01:03, 2 November 2018 (UTC)
• Thanks for writing this, but you don't mention the strongest claim for notability in the draft, in the last sentence ".... and served as the OSA president in 2013." Being one of their fellows isn't imo prima facie evidence of notability, but being president probably is - we have at The_Optical_Society#OSA_presidents a huge list - all now blue though at that time at least one was red. But I must say when I first looked at it (after the Nobel) I missed the significance of that too, and thought the draft didn't demonstrate notability - but then I don't edit declining things in areas I'm not very familiar with. Looking further at the OSA presidency & hearing what those better informed said about her citation index figures then pursuaded me I was wrong. I hope the University of Waterloo (Associate Professor only) and Royal Society of Canada (not a fellow) feel equally embarassed. Johnbod (talk) 04:38, 4 November 2018 (UTC)
• Writing a first article can be bewildering, and the AfC system appears to only cement that state of affairs. I miss the days when someone could actually write a stub and other editors would expand upon it rather than rushing to delete it. I'm all for deleting when it's appropriate but the climate of eradication has given rise to yet another bureaucratic hoop through which no one should have to jump. This isn't the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, it's the encyclopedia that only the few have the tenacity to study the culture over a long enough time that they are willing to edit.--~TPW 02:04, 21 November 2018 (UTC)
• What an interesting read, and terribly insightful as well to someone as unfamiliar with the AfC process as myself ^u^. (Reading this after it being mentioned on the December edition of the Signpost). Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 22:05, 28 December 2021 (UTC)