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Disappearing articles

Hallo, On my watchlist I spotted a batch of deleted redirects (you know I make a l-o-t of redirects) to Anna Rydlówna and Emmy Dörfel, and found that those two articles had been deleted because they were created by an apparent sockpuppet Queen-washington of blocked editor Slowking4. I've created a new stub for Anna Rydlówna, though without reading Polish I can't go far, but at least she's there now with an image and a link to the Polish wiki article, and I've re-created the redirects I'd made. I'll now have a look at Emmy. Just a heads-up that there may be articles on your watchlists which have disappeared: you may want to do a rescue. I can understand the policy of "We mustn't allow blocked editors to bypass their block by creating sockpuppet accounts", but it always seems sad when what was apparently a reasonable little article disappears, along with its infrastructure of incoming links. Ah well, such is life. @Beetstra: pinging the deleting admin for courtesy as I'm mentioning these deletions. PamD 08:36, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

Just to clarify: the sock has a tendency to use their articles/work as trophies, and the master is currently blocked on 3 different wikis (here, commons, and wikidata). Sometimes there are problems with articles (either they are sloppy, bad translations, or attribution is poor or even close to copyright violations). I try not to delete articles where there is substantial work done by others (though on the couple of hundreds I spotted only 5 or 6, and 2 or 3 that I did delete had some minor content additions). Feel free to recreate everything (but with new content). --Dirk Beetstra T C 08:44, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks @Beetstra:. As someone who creates a lot of redirects from variants of names etc I feel sad to see a target article disappear, as all that work gets lost (just as when something is draftified, too). But I can see the reason for deletion, certainly.
Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Metrics/January 2019 has links to the two I've re-created, and has a few other red links which seem to be part of this cleanup operation, so if anyone is looking for a little challenge they could have a go at some of those - not all nurses, one is dabbed as a volleyball player. The blocked sock seems to have been active from October 2017 to just now, so presumably a month-by-month check of those lists would find a scatter of articles worth rescuing. PamD 09:09, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
Over the last couple of weeks, several socks were blocked and their creations removed (a lot by me, some by checkusers or others). I do feel that quite some/most of their created articles are notable subjects (so, this may be a good list of articles-to-create ... ). And I feel sad as well that these 'need' to be deleted, but then, if the sock was not creating them in the first place they would not have existed either. --Dirk Beetstra T C 09:30, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
One that I watchlist and had made minor edits to (Anna Mazzucato) suffered the same treatment. The writing wasn't very good, though, so maybe better to make a fresh start than to ask for a refund. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:12, 24 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks very much, PamD, for bringing this important matter to our attention, and thanks too to Beetstra for providing a link to the deletions log. I see that the recent deletions cover close to 2,000 articles by Slowking4, of which a considerable number seem to be women's biographies or descriptions of artworks. The batch is likely to impact the WiR WHGI statistics, especially as many of Slowking4's articles cover women's sculptures or their creators. I have looked back over our metrics for August and September and see that about 20 articles for each month have been deleted. Maybe some of our WiR members who are admins could look through these articles and decide whether it would be worthwhile to try to recreate them. The list of articles created by Slowking4 still includes over 1,000 articles and lists of which most are stubs although notably there are also 11 GAs and around 230 start class or better. Perhaps it is possible at least to draftify any GA or B articles which have been deleted so that those of us who are not admins can assess the usefulness of recreating them.(cc @Rosiestep, Victuallers, Megalibrarygirl, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, and David Eppstein:)--Ipigott (talk) 08:40, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Just as a remark: I am strongly against undeletion, I would strongly suggest that articles are independently recreated. This editor will use their creations and edits as evidence that the community wants them to edit. Slowking is likely on their way to a global ban as they are already blocked on 3 independent wikis (here, commons, wikidata). It must be made clear to them that their effort is futile, and that their only way back is what I suggested to him a couple of months ago: stop and go back to your main account. They flat out refused. --Dirk Beetstra T C 09:00, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Would it be possible to provide the content of the GA and Start class and better articles to us somewhere that we could create them without having to do all the associated research for each one - and thus restore them as fast as possible without exactly undeleting them?? ☕ Antiqueight chatter 09:03, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
@Antiqueight: I've emailed a couple of last versions to people already, and yo can ask any admin to do that. I know that user:Ser Amantio di Nicolao has been recreating quite a number of earlier deletions, judging from the edit summary from the deleted content. I forgot to say that to the earlier people that I emailed to (user:Randy Kryn, user:Blue Rasberry and user:Caineh): be careful, I've noticed one case of a very sloppy creation (read carefully through this revid (admin only) - there are 2 big mistakes; revid with translation mistakes that persisted until the last version), and a case of .. insufficient attribution (the latter solved by the sock in a much later edit). --Dirk Beetstra T C 09:43, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
My concern centers on the hopeful resurrection of Sakuntala (Claudel) by Camille Claudel, maybe the most important woman sculptor of the late 19th and early 20th century. Can it please be put back as is if there are no copyright concerns? One reason for its removal is that the creating sockpuppet banned editor is using it as a trophy. I see nothing wrong in that off-site trade-off, let them have their trophy, for a page on this magnificent sculpture by Claudel is trophy-worthy and, much more important, encyclopedia worthy. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:49, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Randy Kryn: It seems to me that the German version is significantly better than the deleted version. This may be a good opportunity to begin rewriting the article. See also [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. There seem to be plenty of sources to build an new article on here. I see you have made more edits than anyone else on the biography of Camille Claudel and that you created Musée Camille Claudel. Are you interested?--Ipigott (talk) 12:44, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, but I would not be able to do the page justice in a total rewrite, especially with much of the information coming from the German version. If you or somebody else wants to open a rewritten page I'd be happy to do what I could to improve it. As I recall (haven't looked at the email copy as yet) the deleted article was pretty good, and with further edits and references, as you suggest, could be enlarged and improved from the sockpuppet trophy-worthy version which is now deleted. Randy Kryn (talk) 15:34, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

I wonder if it would be possible, and helpful, for someone to create a table showing deleted articles created as WiR contributions, showing Wikidata links etc like our usual redlinks lists? That way it would be easier to check for articles which are in multiple other Wikipedias and perhaps priority to consider re-creating, or to look for those of interest if the Wikidata short description was included. I can quite see that undeletion is a bad idea as we need a new edit history which gives no credit to a blocked user. On the other hand, asking to be sent a copy of the deleted version might give a head start to locating possible sources. PamD 14:26, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

Thanks, Beetstra, for your clarification. I could see that all the ones I mentioned had been created by Slowking4 and deleted by you when I tried to re-create them. To answer PamD's query, as far as I can see Slowking4 was not a member of Women in Red. The articles created were therefore not listed in our meetup lists but they were included in our general metrics lists for the months in question as they covered women's biographies or women's works, etc., and were either picked up by bots or added manually (no doubt by me). I hesitate to give Tagishsimon any extra work but perhaps he could just let is know whether it would be possible to set up a Wikidata list of articles coded human and female which have been deleted from the EN wiki on a certain date or during a certain month. In most cases, that could also provide information on occupation, etc. Like Pam, I suppose we could also think about listing the redirects which became redlinks on 24 October. Maybe the best way forward is to look through the deletions for the other months, as I did for August and September. I am still waiting for feedback from the admins, especially Ser Amantio di Nicolao who seems to have been working on some of the articles.--Ipigott (talk) 16:05, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

The rationale for this whole deletion campaign does not make sense to me. This idea that someone might take creations as "trophies": so what? Why do we care what some puppetmaster thinks of their work? Why are we using what they might think of their work to influence decisions on whether to keep or remove content? Why are we allowing the sockmaster to continue to influence us by allowing ourselves to be influenced by their trophy-collecting behavior? —David Eppstein (talk) 16:11, 25 October 2019 (UTC)

David Eppstein, do you take pride in your creations? Would it encourage you if your articles stay? Would it discourage you to see all your work destroyed? Dirk Beetstra T C 17:17, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Of course, but I don't think other people here should be making content decisions based on whether it encourages or discourages me. Even less so when the decisions are based on how it affects banned editors. We took the effort to exclude them, so we should exclude them, not continue making content decisions based on what they think or do. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:52, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
David Eppstein, OK, so then the decision becomes: leave them, they are blocked and they sock, but because they do good work they stay. Where did I see that before? (I know how this would normally end for me, the last admin who did not follow the popularity vote did not come to a good end). Dirk Beetstra T C 18:28, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Are you trying to threaten me, merely for expressing my opinion here? Really? —David Eppstein (talk) 19:59, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
David Eppstein, threaten? No. My apologies if my post is interpretable as such, but that is really the last thing that is/was on my mind. Dirk Beetstra T C 20:01, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Ok, but then I don't understand what you might have meant instead. To me it read as "the last admin who disagreed with me came to a bad end and I will see to it that the same happens to you". —David Eppstein (talk) 20:03, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
David Eppstein, The part between brackets was about myself ... Dirk Beetstra T C 20:05, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
I guess the only way I can read it as a threat is if I omit the 'I know,', I have expanded it a bit now. --Dirk Beetstra T C 20:12, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Sorry for misinterpreting you. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:28, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
David Eppstein, no problem, written text is sometimes unclear, and I’m not a native. Dirk Beetstra T C 20:31, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
But the underlying discussion occurring before this detour is David Eppstein's good point that articles shouldn't be deleted because of an off-site trophy case. Because that point of view seems fair, and the trophy case of the sockpuppet was a main reason for deleting the Claudel sculpture page, can it please be put back? Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 20:45, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Randy Kryn, you can rewrite it from what I have sent you.
There is more than only the trophy issue. This editor was dragged before AN/I because of what I call coatrack articles:: create articles so they can insert a non-free image. Those are still issues here. Moreover, as exemplified above, there are sloppy creations of BLPs. There are copy paste errors, there are translation errors. I err on the safe side, And if checkusers would have noticed the editor 2 years ago (but their software is crappy) we would not have had the articles in the first place. Leaving this is just enabling, encouraging the behaviour. Dirk Beetstra T C 05:03, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
In addition to what David Eppstein said above, who is actually hit by these deletions? What percentage of the deleted revisions was attributed to sockpuppets? Also, if the problem is "coatrack articles: create articles so they can insert a non-free image", it's enough to delete the images; in fact it's better, because an article without image, or with a free image, would be a stronger and more visible form of WP:DENY than something hidden in the logs. Nemo 08:29, 26 October 2019 (UTC)
Nemo bis, the vast majority of prose is due to edits be these sockpuppets, the rest is almost exclusively repairs and categorisation. And it is not just coatrack, it is not just trophy, it is not just creation of BLPs with errors, it is a combination. Leaving their material is what enables this sock, it is what keeps them continuing to work. If that is what we want, keep the bad people because they deliver good thing, then it is time to discuss abolishing G5 and wait until their crude copy-paste errors get to more serious BLP issues than a mistaken birthday or gender swaps. Or stop this editor when they start with a fresh sock. Dirk Beetstra T C 11:08, 26 October 2019 (UTC)

Apologies for being late to the party...I'm starting a new job on Monday and so my mental bandwidth for anything that requires critical thinking has been somewhat limited.

I recreated a number of the sports articles that Slowking had created by copying and pasting the originals back into new articles; I thought that as an uninvolved editor, I could do that with impunity as long as I checked the articles at the point of creation. Two things changed that: one was this discussion on my talkpage, and the other was the discovery, in my spot-checking, of inaccuracies in some of the articles. Ultimately I think there are enough of the latter that the articles are not worth recreating. It's far, far better to start from scratch than to undelete most of the articles. That being said, I'm not entirely against undeleting a few, if there are substantial contributions to them from other editors. But otherwise I don't think undeletion is in the best interests of the project. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 02:27, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Ser Amantio di Nicolao, Ithere are about 6 or 7 articles that I did not delete because I noticed really significant edits, for the rest the articles solely contain only categorisations, wikimarkup repairs, taggings, copy/edits of the common mistakes. Some have nonsubstantial additions but I have tried to judge all histories since the sock edits (I don’t exclude that I have missed another one or two, one was already brought to my attention. Note as well that I have noticed pages which had edits that persisted past repairs by others. Dirk Beetstra T C 03:45, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Creating new articles

I've started with scratch for three of these so far (Bonnie Dorr, Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize, and Anna Mazzucato) and let one other go after investigating but being unable to find enough material to convince me (Sema Salur). It's obviously a lot more work than just copying the old text but (even beyond the licensing/attribution issues) if it's going to be credited to me I want it to meet my own standards for new creations and I don't think that's true of a lot of the deleted articles. —David Eppstein (talk) 05:28, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
David Eppstein, quantity over quality ...? Dirk Beetstra T C 08:36, 28 October 2019 (UTC)

Just to exemplify the sloppy creation of pages: the recreated Sakuntala (Claudel) had in its latest version the sentence (that was included in the original): "The title is given from the background of the group of figures in the play Shakuntala by the Indian poet Kālidāsa." .. That is a literal translation from the sentence in the German article on this subject (de:Sakuntala (Claudel)): "Titel gebender Hintergrund der Figurengruppe ist das Schauspiel Shakuntala des indischen Dichters Kalidasa, das die Geschichte einer Liebe beschreibt." .. which is better translated as "The title of this group of figures is based on the play Shakuntala by the Indian poet Kālidāsa." Note that reference to the source (the German article) is only given in the 4th edit to the page. --Dirk Beetstra T C 14:01, 27 October 2019 (UTC)

Beetstra: As you mention Sakuntala (Claudel), which we're recreating, I must say that I am surprised you mention a minor translation problem as a factor in support of the article's deletion. Not everyone is a born translator. In my opinion, the information drawn from the German version was pertinent. If you look carefully at the new version of Sakuntala, you will find there are also a number of translation problems which are fortunately being addressed by another editor. (After spending hours trying to sort out the lack of inline referencing, I thought I would leave it alone for a while and work on one of the other deletions.) I wouldn't mind betting that you will find minor translation problems in a fair proportion of articles about artworks created outside the English-speaking world.--Ipigott (talk) 09:08, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Ipigott, again, the translation errors alone are not the issue, and I did not delete because there were translation errors. In this case the translation becomes completely nonsensical (so your argument that not everyone is good in translating would be more correct as ‘the creator may not be good in English'). A) these are clearly translations in line with the community rejected automated translations, b) the creations are sloppy, c) many of the articles are BLPs, and a wrong translation there can easily be a problem and d) as these sloppy creations are combined with sloppy copy/pastes that may have even be worse on BLPs.
Many of these creations are exactly the problematic edits that the sockmaster made and that are part of what got the sockmaster blocked. This example is not about a human, but there are on (even still living) humans often mistakes of gender, birthdays, or name of subject. I did not read deeper into articles, but it is just waiting for more serious BLP errors. Dirk Beetstra T C 09:51, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Forgive me if I've missed it, but is there a list of the deleted articles in question? Perhaps a separate list of deleted articles created by socks...so at least they can be recreated without concerns as to notability? Might be a useful subject for a month's focus, too. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 18:56, 27 October 2019 (UTC)
Ser Amantio di Nicolao, my deletion log is at the moment the only list. Easy to copy/paste/parse/copy/paste into a wikipedia list I guess. Dirk Beetstra T C 05:10, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
I dumped the list of deleted pages into my to do list - but I haven't sorted which are women or removed the completed pages etc. Anyone is welcome to move the list to a page for recreation and investigation..User:Antiqueight/Draft#previously deleted pages.. ☕ Antiqueight chatter 16:42, 28 October 2019 (UTC)
I would agree that if there were consistently serious translation errors in BLPs, that could be a reason for deleting articles en masse but Sakantula is an article dealing with a work of art. When I come across mistranslations in the articles I review or copy edit, I simply try to correct the mistakes myself. Despite what you say about machine translation, editors are strongly encouraged to draw on non-English versions of the articles they create. It is therefore to be expected that translation errors occur. I was able to find copies of the deleted Sakuntala on several Wikipedia look-alike sites as well as a cache on Google. I found it was reasonably well presented and well sourced. For me, it was exactly the type of article which could have been draftified as a basis for the creation of an improved mainspace version. I was unable to see the edit summary but it appears the article had incorporated additions from other editors too. Many of Slowking4's other deleted articles also seem to be worthwhile, especially those about outstanding figures and their works which can be found in the other language versions of Wikipedia. Not being a specialist in sports, I am unable to appreciate the importance of most of Slowking4 mini-stubs which form the bulk of his creations, though I expect the most important ones will be picked up fairly quickly. In this connection, I appreciate the comments from Ser Amantio di Nicolao. As for the longer articles dealing with the general area of women's history and culture, I will continue to search through those which have been deleted from our past monthly listings and bring the titles of the most useful ones to the attention of our editors. I'm pleased see we now already once again have articles on Bonnie Dorr, Dora Barrancos, Anne Harrington and Frigga Haug as well as Ruth I. Michler Memorial Prize and Anna Mazzucato (also mentioned above).--Ipigott (talk) 11:46, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Ipigott, as I said, I was not deleting them because of translation errors, I mention them mainly to warn people to be cautious when using the deleted content.
And as I said earlier, there are NO substantial edits. In the case of Sakuntala (Claudel), there are 15 edits in total, the first 4 by the sock, then 1 {{refimprove}} tagging, 1 addition of a random space, 1 revert of the addition of said random space, then a handful of edits by User:Randy Kryn, who first consolidated sentences into paragraphs (the article was one-line paragraphs), and added a template; an edit with adding and removing wikilinks; a typofix/wikilink edit; another wikilink, consolidating dates, and a rewrite of a concept ('..small' to 'including .. smaller copies'); two hotcat categorisation edits; a capitalization-edit; and finally a hotcat recategorisation. In terms of prose, the rewrite of the concept is the only 'substantial' part, which has not changed anything (and the utterly nonsensical sentence remained untouched). By far most of the articles, including the creations from 2017, are like that. 70% of the subsequent edits to their creations are (re-)categorisations, 10% is reference formatting, 5% is infobox consolidation; 5% is bot-performed improvements on discouraged formatting, 5% is improvement tagging, 5% is typofixing. Of the 500 or so deleted articles, on only 5-1012 I've seen substantial additions by other editors (which sometimes boiled down to just 2 sentences of added prose). Dirk Beetstra T C 13:20, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Beetstra: Thank you for your explanations. I really did not expect such a detailed response and have obviously been misled by earlier contributors. I appreciate your looking through the deleted articles for additions from other editors. We now have a clean redlist from Antiqueight (possibly including articles from other editors) which should make it easier to monitor progress. As you have probably gathered, the problem for Women in Red is that many of the articles were about women. Bit by bit, we should be able to restore the most important ones. It's just a pity that we have to spend so much time on re-creating articles when it might have been possible to base work on existing versions. (I'm not too sure how permissible it is to draw on copies from the Wikipedia look-alike sites or Google caches which are still accessible in most cases - without the edit summaries, of course.) But I do sympathize with the need to take action against sock puppets and realize you have probably taken the only viable course of action.--Ipigott (talk) 15:50, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Ipigott, thanks for that answer. I do feel that I have to explain, accountability for how I made the decision I took on a case-by-case basis (and I undoubtedly did mistakes, I was pointed to an article I deleted where I did not notice that a +208 bytes edit followed by a -209 bytes edit both were constructive an adding significant prose).
Technically taking cached copies and use them verbatim would be a copyvio. I however will also gladly give (mail) you that last version (but please, don’t overload me now, bug some other admins as well :-) ), with the remark that the prose needs to be rewritten, but ELs and refs can be used for info. Dirk Beetstra T C 17:33, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
From June and July we have: Eleanor M. Fox, NY law professor; Margherita Oggero, Italian novelist; Maria Tarnowska (nurse), Polist nurse; Franziska Schutzbach, German sociologist; Juliet Macur, American journalist. Most of the others were short stubs on footballers and academics.--Ipigott (talk) 12:30, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
I am happy to userfy an article on request (as I have always done), or email the text if it is a copyright violation. I am confused by the above dialogue - as I understand, the articles have been deleted because numerous factual errors have been found and the corpus of work cannot generally be relied on as suitably accurate material for a free encyclopedia. Is that a fair assessment? One possible solution is Beetstra could select a random article to undelete, nominate it at AfD, and see where the consensus lies. In particular, the "trophy hunter" claims sound wide of the mark - are we going to start deleting things like Cottingley Fairies because Eric Corbett did most of the work of it? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 17:47, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
Ritchie333, no, they were deleted under G5, created by a sock in violation of their block/ban. The bad translations, copy/paste errors and possibly some fair use issues are just on top of that, but not the basis for the delete. (Please, just send the last version by email to the requester and leave the history deleted, we have G5 for a reason). Dirk Beetstra T C 19:39, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
And material from EC is not in any form deletable under G5 .... Dirk Beetstra T C 19:41, 30 October 2019 (UTC)
@Beetstra: "they were deleted under G5, created by a sock in violation of their block/ban" That is not what G5 is designed for. It was created in June 2003 [7] in order to stop sockpuppets repeatedly recreating the same or similar type of article (such as a non-notable hedge fund, rapper, corner shop or bus shelter) that had already been deleted via an AfD discussion under slightly different guises (it predates A7 / G11 which did not apply when the policy was created). So, if somebody was repeatedly creating articles about non-notable Pokemon, and got blocked, we could use G5 to delete any other non-notable Pokemon pages if we knew it was the same editor socking, on the grounds we would assume the pages would be deleted at AfD. The policy gained traction around 2006-07 as a war of attrition between Jimbo Wales and Gregory Kohs after Kohs decided to basically troll Jimbo by creating marginally notable articles and dared Jimbo to delete them. It was not designed to delete articles about notable women from the encyclopedia. Please don't do this again. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:10, 1 November 2019 (UTC)
Ritchie333, no. That is not what G5 is for. It may have been be designed for that, but articles of notable subjects can be deleted just fine. There is nothing in the wording of G5 that takes the notability factor in account. Dirk Beetstra T C 05:49, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
I'm just gobsmacked by that. All I can say is : You are wrong, policy does not agree with you, and your opinions are completely against everything this project stands for. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 11:52, 2 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Ritchie333: Thanks for stepping in here. We obviously need the kind of expertise you are able to offer. While I can understand the frustration experienced by our good friend Beetstra, I think perhaps the deletion of over 500 articles by Slowking4 without leaving more than a handful of drafts goes beyond the usual follow-up on the suspicion of sock-puppetry, especially as many of the deleted articles seem to have been fairly well researched and sourced. Several of my fellow members of Women in Red have been working on the re-creation of important deleted articles but it would have certainly been much easier had we been able to build on draft versions, as for example we were able to do with those created by our inquisitioned "Flying Dutchman" which survived for several months. I have been going back over the recent WiR deletions month by month and would be grateful for access to draft versions of the articles which appear worthy of re-creation. I have not looked into the deletions of ministubs on footballers and water polo players but many of those might be considered by others to be in need of revival too.--Ipigott (talk) 21:43, 30 October 2019 (UTC)

I have brought my deletions for review (again) to WP:AN. --Dirk Beetstra T C 06:48, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

It makes an interesting read: see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#mass deletion of pages created by a sockpuppet of Slowking4. It's interesting to see how much discussion has come from my initial observation of a handful of deleted redirects to a couple of winners of the Florence Nightingale Medal! PamD 15:51, 6 November 2019 (UTC)
Just one other article was enough to trigger even more attention: Noam Cohen wrote that «The slowking4 episode further exposes how capricious Wikipedia’s article creation and deletion process can be. Initially, 559 profiles disappeared from Wikipedia because of an administrative fight. Those deletions are under review, and 28 have been "recreated" thus far, but still: hundreds of pages once lived happily on the site, and now they’re gone». Nemo 18:41, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Help with women BLP

Hello everyone, today I want to discuss about Lisette Cooper an American entrepreneur founder and managing partner of Athena Capital Advisors, she is an altruistic woman and an affiliate to the Kripalu Center. does she have enough coverage to satisfy [WP:GNG]? here some of her coverage:

In case she has what it takes to be included, how shall I proceed? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Torontotonian (talk • contribs) 20:15, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

This is the type of subject that attracts both spammy news-by-press-release sources and spammy undisclosed paid Wikipedia editors. It would be helpful if you could make some effort to winnow down your list of urls above to the highest quality ones: sources that are truly independently published by a publication that exerts editorial control over its publications (rather than just copying press releases) using words written by someone not associated with the subject (rather than copying a press release), and that provide in-depth detail about Cooper rather than merely quoting her or listing her among other similar people. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:29, 23 October 2019 (UTC)
This advice cannot be bettered. BIOs that are open to challenge at AfD because of inadequate notability waste the time of everybody. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:10, 23 October 2019 (UTC).
For those still invested in this thread, User:Torontotonian has been blocked as a sock of a editor previously involved in trying to create the article in question, likely for undisclosed payments; see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Josher8a for more. SamHolt6 (talk) 02:27, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Kate Killick

Written by Schlossbergfes, and currently up for deletion here. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 16:46, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia causes Google AI gender bias

I found this very interesting. Not sure if anyone can do anything about it.--Ipigott (talk) 16:30, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

I found Wikipedia Still Hasn’t Fixed Its Colossal Gender Gap interesting too. The write-up is based on Katherine Maher's presentation at the Lisbon Web Conference. I hadn't realized Wikipedia had now dropped to ninth place among the most popular web offerings -- I thought we were still among the first four or five. Also interesting, the apparently negative effect of so many Wikipedia editors coming from North America or Europe. Had a feeling that as I am not only British but also male, I might do better to withdraw. But of course Maher should find an African to take her place too.--Ipigott (talk) 16:44, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
I see our own List_of_most_popular_websites puts us in 10th place with six of the first ten being Chinese.--Ipigott (talk) 17:00, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
There's also the effect of so much key data now being in the box at the top of many search engines - the loose change google etc donate to us is a very minimal gesture, given the benefit they get. One day the Indians will set up their equivalent of the big Chinese sites.... Johnbod (talk) 17:08, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Hiltrud Werner: New article for review

Hi all! Reaching out here to see if anyone would be willing to review a draft I've submitted at AfC for Volkswagen's only female board member: Hiltrud Werner. The draft was declined for not demonstrating notability; I've since responded to the declining editor to provide some more information and made a couple of edits, as has another (uninvolved) editor. I'd like to try resubmitting but before I do so, would anyone here be open to reviewing to give feedback? As a disclosure: I do have a financial conflict of interest as I have written this draft on behalf of VW via Finsbury, as part of my work at Beutler Ink. Thanks in advance for any feedback anyone is able to provide. 16912 Rhiannon (Talk · COI) 19:56, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

Is there any reason you haven't used the German article on her to flesh out the English article? -Yupik (talk) 08:05, 15 November 2019 (UTC)
Hi Yupik, that's a good question! Basically, German Wikipedia is more accepting of primary sources and the additional detail in that article is supported by sources such as the VW website, websites of organizations re: speaking events, and a video interview with Werner. From what I've seen at AfC, editors want to see in-depth secondary sourcing and reject details that are supported by primary sources, especially from drafts submitted by COI editors, so I focused on just including the information I could source to secondary coverage. It would be great to include more of what's in the German article, hopefully it can be added in future if editors think the current draft works as a starting point. Does that help answer your question? Thanks! 16912 Rhiannon (Talk · COI) 19:31, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata-based statistics

Although the WHGI statistics have not yet been updated, I can see from Denelezh that, as a result of the "Disappearing articles" discussed above, there has been a slight drop in our progress from 18.07% on 14 October to 18.06% today. We now have 300,168 women's biographies (down by 591) out of a total of 1,662,210.--Ipigott (talk) 12:10, 31 October 2019 (UTC)

Ipigott, This is a shame, but thank you for the update. I guess it's to be expected that sometimes, it's "two steps forward, one step back". By the way, at Wikidatacon, I met the creator of the Denelezh website, and he has plans for additional enhancements in the next few months. --Rosiestep (talk) 12:29, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Rosiestep: Envlh has indeed been doing a great job over the years, also in connection with the French Wikipedia. We have in fact been discussing the proposals on further developments but I cannot remember exactly where (probably on Meta). I've been looking through all the deleted articles and see that about 90% are mini-stubs on women in sports but there are also quite a number that are around start class, most of them about women from the other areas we have been covering on Women in Red. Up to now, 18 articles have been recreated and 13 more were not included in the batch of deletions as other editors had contributed to them. When I have a bit more time, I'll prepare a list of the ones I think we should work on. As you have access to the deleted versions, you should be able to contribute more easily than the rest of us.--Ipigott (talk) 12:59, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
At least it didn't drop us below the 18% again. If someone can pick out the articles with details like what they did or where they were from I will tackle any Irish, writers, artists, academic types. If there are deleted version information email it to be at gmail. I should be able to get a few dozen done in a short while if there is any information about them already. If there are none fitting the above then I will basically start at A next week....I'm hoping to do some Nanowrimo so I may be slower on articles where I'm starting from no information... ☕ Antiqueight chatter 14:52, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
I spoke with Envlh on Monday before taking the train back from Berlin and he said they were thinking of merging WHGI and Denelezh - there is overlap, but I like the birthdates in Denelezh so that you can look at coverage per period. There are so many other visualizations possible, but each one causes women to drop off the list because it adds an additional check for a Wikidata statement that might not be there. As you know, sometimes we should be happy these articles are marked with just two: identifying the article as Q5 & Q6581072. Sigh. Jane (talk) 14:58, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
A quick reply: Denelezh has not been updated for a month due to a technical issue (downloads of Wikidata dumps fail every week, retries don't work; the root cause has not been identified yet, but it comes from Denelezh server). I'm working on it. Rosie & Jane: I was very happy to chat with you. The merge of WHGI and Denelezh is discussed in phab:T230184. We'll formalize what we want to do, but feel free to drop ideas/needs in the Phabricator task. — Envlh (talk) 18:06, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Then I must apologize. The last update was indeed at the end of September, not the end of October. We'll just have to wait for the real figures.--Ipigott (talk) 19:42, 31 October 2019 (UTC)
Ipigott: statistics from 11/11 have been loaded into Denelezh. I don't understand why it worked this week, but at least it's there. — Envlh (talk) 21:53, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

Discussion at MediaWiki talk re blacklisting titles containing Wikidata Q numbers

A request was opened 2 days ago at MediaWiki_talk:Titleblacklist#Request_to_prevent_"Wikidata"_titles_from_being_created to "Prevent the creation of titles with any of the 4 following character strings: (1) (Q[number] (2) (q[number] (3) (P[number] (4) (p[number].

Many of the redlists created for our Women in Red projects contain redlinked titles consisting of a name plus the Wikidata Q number, particularly where the name is already in use as an article title for a different woman (who has a different Q number in Wikidata).

The editor who proposed this change has clarified that "The blacklist doesn't prevent redlinks from being created or typed out; it prevents content (such as an article or a redirect) being created at that title." Another editor suggested that "we can configure it here so that - even if ListeriaBot continues to create redlinks to these bad titles - when someone tries to create a page at that title, it'll show a message like "Please don't create your article at this title, give it a meaningful disambiguator like '(Nigerian politician)' instead of '(Q424242)' ".

Please could more knowledgeable WiR members consider the implications of this and comment at MediaWiki_talk:Titleblacklist#Request_to_prevent_"Wikidata"_titles_from_being_created? Perhaps the original proposal wouldn't affect WiR projects at all, or perhaps the suggested message about changing the Q number to a disambiguator when creating a new title would address the concern I had about new editors being able to create articles at redlinks as easily as possible.

Pinging @Tagishsimon and Ritchie333: who were also pinged at MediaWiki Talk. I hope other experienced WiR members will see this here. RebeccaGreen (talk) 01:14, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

The only negative aspect of all this is that people are annoyed when they create a new biography and see that there is still a red link on the Listeria list they used to identify the person they wanted to write about. Once the new article has been correctly linked to Wikidata, the name disappears from the Listeria list. It looks to me as if adding the Q item number is a sensible temporary solution.--Ipigott (talk) 12:36, 16 November 2019 (UTC)

Participate in #WikiForHumanRights

Hi all, as you may have noticed, we are beginning work on the WikiForHumanRights Initiative: meta:WikiForHumanRights. This year is a pilot collaboration with UN Human rights, and we are looking for local language organizers to support hosting on Wiki events. Would Women in Red be interested in participating? There are two ways that make a lot of sense in my mind to still be within your scope: first making December or January a Women Human Rights Activist month (see an initial evaluation of the space at wikidata:Wikidata:WikiProject_Human_Rights/human/activists) or by focusing on the topic of "youth standing up for rights" highlighted by the UN. If you all are interested, please report it at: meta:WikiForHumanRights/Organize. Cheers, Astinson (WMF) (talk) 17:06, 15 November 2019 (UTC)

  • While WiR tends to focus on activists every March, and we will again in March 2020 as the online node supporting A+F, I suppose we could also have Activists on our January calendar as many of us like to work in that area. I'll bring it up for further discussion at our events scheduling page. --Rosiestep (talk) 16:42, 17 November 2019 (UTC)
Rosiestep I always enjoy writing about activists! This will be great, Astinson (WMF)! Megalibrarygirl (talk) 16:51, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

A rant about Wikidata

While stub-sorting I came across a little stub on Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis. I improved it by adding the fact that she's a professor emeritus (helping her to be considered notable), and stub-sorted it and, as ever, added a l-o-t of redirects from the various versions of her name which cropped up in the sources used or were found by googling on various components of her name. I created the surname page at Tesfagiorgis because it turns out there's someone else of that surname with an article.

And then I looked at Wikidata. She's listed there as "Frida High-Wasikhongo". Mis-spelled first name which I've not seen anywhere else, hyphenation of 2nd and 3rd names which I've not seen anywhere else, no sign of fourth name. It offers "Freida High" as an "Also known as". It's been edited 18 times since being created in 2017.

Where does Wikidata get its information from? The record includes a dead link to a University of Wisconsin-Madison staff page at https://afroamericanstudies.wisc.edu/people/tesfagiorgis.html (interestingly the "tesfagiorgis" is part of the URL so presumably was included in her name on that page, suggesting that someone mangled her name in the original data gathering). The current equivalent page is https://afroamericanstudies.wisc.edu/staff/freida-high-w-tesfagiorgis-emeritus/, which shows her name as "High W. Tesfagiorgis, Freida".

I've made a redirect from the Wikidata version of her name, in case it exists anywhere else which a reader might find as a source, but how can we get the Wikidata record corrected? And how come Wikidata can include such mangled information? And why are we importing this unsourced data blindly into Wikipedia (automatic population of infoboxes etc, I understand - either already or planned). I'm seriously unimpressed by what I see of Wikidata.

The April 2017 archived version of her staff page, at https://web.archive.org/web/20170429151325/http://afroamericanstudies.wisc.edu/people/tesfagiorgis.html shows her name as "Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis", as do earlier and later versions of the page, so the Wikidata data doesn't match the one source which is linked from the Wikidata record. Yes, Googling the version used in Wikidata finds 56 hits, but googling "Freida High" produces 2450 hits (but at least one of which is about high-heeled shoes called "Freida"), and googling Freida and Tesfagiorgis another 2060.

Meanwhile the article could do with a bit of help - she appears to be a much-exhibited artist as well as an academic, but there's not much body to the article, so if anyone is interested in visual arts they might like to have a go. PamD 18:35, 18 November 2019 (UTC)

The original record in Wikidata was created in good faith. Frida High-Wasikhongo is shown as the co-author of Traditional African Art: A Female Focus on Amazon. At the top of each Wikidata entry there is a Label (in this case the name of the person), a Description and Also known as. Just now an editor has changed the Label to "Freida High Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis", left the Description blank and added "Freida High W. Tesfagiorgis" in Also known as. I have added "Frida High-Wasikhongo" to Also known as and provided a Description. Easily fixed. Oronsay (talk) 19:07, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
(ec) The Wikidata entry was created in March 2017, based on information in Wikipedia:Meetup/Black Lunch Table which at the time gave her name as 'Frida High-Wasikhongo'. In December that year, information was added on her education and employer, but without sources so it's not clear where that came from – though it is correct, not having a source means the information is only really useful as a starting point for a BLP. Each statement can include a reference, apart from the names (AKA 'labels') which currently don't allow sources. I've updated her entry to reflect the spelling in the Wikipedia article and added a couple of other variants she's used while publishing.
From my limited understanding of Wikidata, there are a couple of ways information finds its way into the database: large-scale imports of datasets and small-scale edits. The former can include stuff like VIAF and ORCID, and is as good as the source database. A good chunk has been imported from Wikimedia projects, but then is one step removed from the source in the Wikipedia article. My impression is there is greater emphasis now on referencing, but still plenty of stuff that needs better sourcing (or even 'some sourcing' would be a start in some cases!).
To change the title of a Wikidata entry, there should be an edit button near the top, next to the box which lists the names of the subject in a bunch of different languages. In the meantime, I've updated it and included the page you linked to as a source. Richard Nevell (talk) 19:13, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
For what it's worth, she's mentioned as 'Freida High (Wasikhongo Tesfagiorgis)' in this source. Richard Nevell (talk) 19:18, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
My impression is that Wikidata's requirements for sourcing, especially for biographies of living people, are a lot looser or nonexistent compared to the English Wikipedia's requirements. For this reason, bulk import of information from Wikidata (such as using it to populate infoboxes) should not be done. Wikidata can be used to find and link articles in other languages, and to collect authority control records for people, as those uses are much less likely to raise sourcing problems. It is also my experience that when incorrect or private information finds its way into Wikidata profiles, as it does often, and Google then picks up the information for its search results, the subjects typically blame us here on Wikipedia for breaching their privacy or saying incorrect things about them, even though we had nothing to do with it. In that sense, Wikidata is dragging us down. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:23, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
Cards on the table, I like Wikidata and think it can be a very useful tool but sourcing does need to be improved. When information lacks a provenance it's difficult to put weight on it, but for curated sets of information I'd be quite happy to import information to Wikipedia. Richard Nevell (talk) 08:54, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
"Wikidata is dragging us down" is a simplistic and unfair comment. Folks are quick to overlook the many years of large-scale deficiencies and inaccuracies of Wikipedia, while quickly pointing out any of the flaws in Wikidata. That recency bias helps no one, so I'd encourage folks to learn more about the actual practices of Wikidata rather than fear it from afar. -- Fuzheado | Talk 20:19, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
  • I've just experienced a similar problem with Wikidata which lists the Danish journalist Christine von Kohl "Christine Kohl" despite the fact that all the authority files refer to her as Christine von Kohl. Can anyone fix it? (The only way I could get rid of the Listeria redlink was to make a redirect from Christine Kohl which should not really have been necessary.)--Ipigott (talk) 20:06, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
Some of you may be interested in joining the Wikidata Telegram channel. I find it to be a good place to discuss specific Wikidata issues (around my "Women Writers in Review" project), make requests (e.g. create a new Cradle), and so forth. There are >400 people subscribed, so someone seems to always be available to help out. --Rosiestep (talk) 22:46, 18 November 2019 (UTC)
Richard Nevell: Thanks for helping to sort out Christine von Kohl. Looks fine now.--Ipigott (talk) 07:47, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Yes, my thanks too to @Richard Nevell: and @Oronsay: for explanations and editing. I've also added back "Freida High" as an "Also known as", as it seems to be a version she has used. And @Rosiestep: I'd never heard of Telegram and am reluctant to join yet another social media time-sink, but it's good to know there's something out there. Thanks. PamD 08:22, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
  • More Wikidata questions: What rule does it use to decide on the English-language "Label": does it follow en.wiki naming rules? Do those labels get updated automatically if an existing article is renamed by moving the article? Is there somewhere an easy summary of info like this about Wikidata? Thanks. PamD 08:22, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
    • I think it's more or less like here: some person edits it and it stays that way until someone else edits it. The initial creation of the label might be created by a bot rather than a person, depending in part on how the Wikidata entry came to exist. —David Eppstein (talk) 08:41, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
      • I spend quite a bit of time finding and merging duplicates on Wikidata, often because a bot or editor creates a new Item without checking for existing entries or a Wikipedia includes a middle name or initial. Am happy to look into any Wikidata issues that arise in WiR and refer to others, e.g. User talk:Tagishsimon if I'm stumped. Oronsay (talk) 09:12, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
Comment - In the course of participating the in "Focus on Suffrage", I too have been learning about wikidata. It appears the wikidata editors have imported the data from Women and Social Movements in the United States,1600-2000. That in turn is populating Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Missing articles by occupation/Suffragists. It is all very useful in discovering possible new biographies. As an added step, I do try to review the data in wikidata to compare it with my research on the web. I use my best judgement to edit the wikidata information, make sure my article is linked to the wikidata page, and include an image if there is one on the commons. It is an interesting challenge because so many suffragist were referred as "Mrs. Blah Blah" rather than "Mary Blah". My point, and I do have one :), is that I consider it another step in writing women into history and correcting misinformation. Wikidata seems to be what google scrapes for biographical data, so I am happy I can fix an error at the source. Best, WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 16:01, 19 November 2019 (UTC)
I already spend a lot of my time in Wikidata correcting stuff about indigenous people, so if anyone needs help fixing stuff over there, drop me a line and I can look into it if Tagishsimon and Oronsay don't get there first. -Yupik (talk) 07:37, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Dorothy Seymour Mills

I created a new article about Dorothy Seymour Mills and welcome any help. It's a fascinating tale that is all too common – the wife's contribution to scholarship was overshadowed by the husband's name and unwillingness to credit her in the work. Fortunately, the Society for American Baseball Research helped correct this in later years by giving her an award alongside her husband, and by naming a new award after her in 2017. -- Fuzheado | Talk 20:24, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

Content and Conduct: How English Wikipedia Moderates Harmful Speech

This may interest some of you: Clark, Justin, Robert Faris, Urs Gasser, Adam Holland, Hilary Ross,and Casey Tilton. "Content and Conduct: How English Wikipedia Moderates Harmful Speech". Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University, 2019. --Rosiestep (talk) 02:14, 22 November 2019 (UTC)

This is interesting but I must say I have always felt our bots and content monitors usually do a pretty good job of catching inappropriate language in articles, especially from vandalism. What is far more important for Women in Red is the way some of our contributors have been treated on talk pages or in connection with article deletion discussions. The bad language usually seems to survive in these cases unless it is really unacceptable. I'm not sure how clear the guidelines are for the level of language to be used on talk pages. There's not really very much on Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines, maybe a bit more on Wikipedia:Etiquette but not really on level of language. I must say when I first started to edit Wikipedia I was really surprised at all the swearing and cursing that went on. Maybe it's not as bad today as it was in the early days. I wonder if it would be useful to develop a code of conduct for Women in Red.--Ipigott (talk) 15:26, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
An important sentence in the above link is: " The evidence suggests that efforts to remove malicious content are faster and more effective on Wikipedia articles compared to removal efforts on article talk and user talk pagesItalic text." I see a problem,however, if one even tries to call out someone who is abusive, they can get tagged or warned, with or without a template. We are, above all things, suppose to assume good faith, despite evidence contrary staring us in the face.Oldperson (talk) 01:16, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

I

December events with WIR

December 2019, Volume 5, Issue 12, Numbers 107, 108, 144, 145, 146, 147


Check out what's happening in December at Women in Red...

Online events:


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Stay in touch: Join WikiProject Women in Red / Opt-out of notifications

--Megalibrarygirl (talk) 18:42, 25 November 2019 (UTC) via MassMessaging

Fellowships

Is anyone interested in tackling the redlinks in List of female fellows of the British Academy? Currently there are 3 from the 1990s, 5 from the 2000s and 22 from the 2000s meaning there are 30 overall redlinks. I'm interested in going for the oldest inductees first as there are lesser amount of redlinks as well. There are also 29 redlinks at List of female Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering (4 1990s, 1 2000s, 23 2010s). I've also made WP:WikiProject Women in Red/Fellowships where these names are all listed. Feel free to add to this list! --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 01:27, 7 November 2019 (UTC)

MrLinkinPark333: The list is a good idea, as election to FBA/FREng makes all instantly notable. I have started checking against Wikidata and adding references and info there as I go. Have already looked at FBA down to Rachel Bowlby and added Lorraine Tyler (academic) as the link for her is a redirect to a silent movie! In the meantime, happy translating Isabel de Madariaga - from Catalan, Spanish, Italian and/or Russian - see Wikidata. Oronsay (talk) 20:15, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
@Oronsay: Thanks! I can help add anything I find for de Madariaga. I was going to do her article, but I'm getting bogged down in sources LOL! Perhaps you'd have better luck making her article fuller then I can fill in whatever else I find ;) For the fellowship list, I just went by articles that began with List of female fellows. The only other one List of female fellows of the Royal Society currently has all bluelinks :D --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 20:20, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
MrLinkinPark333This write-up may help Isabel Margaret de Madariaga 1919–2014
This seems to be an interesting avenue to explore. One way of expanding the lists is to turn up categories beginning "Category:Fellows of" and compare the lists from the "learned society" with those already listed in the category. For example, many of the women listed in AGU 2019 fellows are not included in Category:Fellows of the American Geophysical Union. But is a fellowship in these organizations necessarily a passport for acceptance of a biography? There seem to be over 70 such learned societies in the UK (see Category:Fellows of learned societies of the United Kingdom) and over 50 in the United States (Category:Fellows of learned societies of the United States).--Ipigott (talk) 09:45, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
The award of a fellowship may not warrant the creation of an article but it certainly warrants the creation of a Wikidata item, if missing, in order to list all the recipients ever. Nemo 12:47, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
For instance Category:Fellows of learned societies of the United Kingdom currently has 72 subcategories with some 16k articles while Wikidata currently lists over 45k recipients of 26 awards. (Probably more awards need to be classified as "fellowships" and more orgs as "professional societies"/"academic societies".) Nemo 13:17, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Depends on the society. Some are incredibly notable. Adam Cuerden (talk)Has about 7.4% of all FPs 14:05, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Others are not - in some cases "fellowship" (as opposed to membership) just requires a time qualification, working in the industry concerned, and a payment. Johnbod (talk) 17:13, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
Yes, it depends from one society to another, and in some cases from one time period of a society to another. Fellowship in either "a highly selective and prestigious scholarly society or association" or "a major scholarly society which reserves fellow status as a highly selective honor" has been deemed to grant automatic notability according to WP:PROF#C3, but the qualifiers are important. I'm pretty sure FBA meets the first criterion, of being highly selective and prestigious. Some others, such as FRSA, don't count for much because their selection criteria don't correspond to great scholarly achievement. —David Eppstein (talk) 22:57, 8 November 2019 (UTC)
No indeed. There are some 30,000 FRSA, & it is essentially an arty/intellectual club with nice premises in Central London, and an annual subscription. I've had mailshots inviting me to apply. There are around 1300 FBA, about the same as the Royal Society, of which it is the equivalent in the arts (of course they also both have nice premises in Central London too, but no subscription). Johnbod (talk) 05:22, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

@Johnbod and David Eppstein: So it looks as if we need a list of which societies are considered notable enough for their fellows to warrant articles. Perhaps you could each contribute to a selection from the UK and US. We can then try to put together lists of redlinks.--Ipigott (talk) 10:52, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

A useful thing to do, but not a task I fancy myself, or am very qualified to do. In many cases, different classes of membership need to distinguished carefully - the top, awarded, ones may be decent evidence for notability, but the much larger, paying, memberships and fellowships are not. Johnbod (talk) 18:15, 9 November 2019 (UTC)
There are probably hundreds of discipline-specific fellowships in the US that might qualify. The top and more broad-topic ones are membership in the National Academy of Science, National Academy of Engineering, or American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Below those but still broad and still notable enough for WP:PROF#C3 are Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (note: two different AAAS's). Among the discipline-specific ones that connect to my own editing interests, Fellow of ACM, ASA, AMS, APS, AAAI, INFORMS, and SIAM all probably qualify, as maybe also do honorary members of IMS and elected members of ISI. I'm pretty sure I've filled in all the missing women among the Fellows of the ACM, AMS, and SIAM but I know I'm missing some in ASA (see list) and haven't even really tried for thoroughness with the others. Currently I'm looking at Fellows of the AWM, which probably doesn't pass WP:PROF#C3 (even though it's selective) because it's oriented more towards service to the profession than to scholarly accomplishment; nevertheless it can provide something of an anchor to build a new article around, because (like many of these) it comes with a little blurb explaining what the subject is being honored for. —David Eppstein (talk) 19:05, 9 November 2019 (UTC)

On a somewhat connected topic, I created Titles of Distinction awarded by the University of Oxford a while back. Essentially, Oxford awards personal chairs (i.e. professorships) to distinguished academics at the university; they do this because of an oversupply of talent and a limited number of statutory chairs and endowed positions with which to reward. Many other universities offer personal chairs, but Oxford's size means there are a lot, and it's almost unique in having an official, public record of all academic appointments (allowing us to build a list of appointees). Anyway, as you will notice, there are dozens and dozens of red-linked women academics (I count well over 20 appointed in this year's cohort alone), most of whom would easily pass WP:PROF. I've said it here before, but comprehensive, reliably sourced lists of people meeting specific notability criteria (like this list of people meeting WP:PROF or the female FBA lists mentioned above) really help to combat biases on here and guide article creation; if you're interested in women in academia, it might be worth a look at this Oxford list. Thanks, —Noswall59 (talk) 14:15, 14 November 2019 (UTC).

Like many UK universities, Oxford is transitioning from the old British system, where only a few senior academics were "Professors" (and most senior people "Senior Lecturers", and in Oxford a range of other funny historic titles), to the American one, where only junior people aren't professors. So I'd question whether most recent appointments "would easily pass WP:PROF", though no doubt many would. Johnbod (talk) 15:13, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
Another fellowship which has been mentioned here before: the Guggenheim Fellowship. That alone is enough to confer notability, and I know the lists of Fellows by year have quite a large number of redlinks, many of them women. There's also a searchable database here. --Ser Amantio di NicolaoChe dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 15:49, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
@Ser Amantio di Nicolao: Agreed as it automatically passes WP:ACADEMIC. I didn't put it in cause I would get exhausted going through all 76 years to find which women is missing. Perhaps a separate list for Guggenheim would be useful. --MrLinkinPark333 (talk) 15:33, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Lists in the Wikimedia movement? Why? What?

This piece, which mentions WiR from the get-go, may interest some of you. I saw a link to this post on FB and commented there with the following:—

"Thanks, Alex, for drawing attention to the importance of lists. Early on, Women in Red (WiR) recognized that our redlists (lists of redlinked notable women) are as important as all the articles we are writing. We have multiple types of lists: those that are generated by SPARQL queries, crowd-sources ones, those that are based on a biographical dictionary, and still others that are based on a website. Without the redlists, it is easy to forget about or lose "redlinks". So we "mine" them, and we display them in lists, and, as editors around the world have access to these lists, anyone can write the articles, as long as the subject meets guidelines for Notability, Reliable Sources, etc. One thing that we haven't done yet (best done by a tool, as we have >400 lists), is to create Wikidata items for each of our lists. Once en.wp redlists are in Wikidata, perhaps other language Wikipedias would be interested in adding links to their WiR redlists. The current en.wp WiR Index is here (http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_in_Red/Redlist_index), but once it can be generated by running a SPARQL query, that will be a big step forward."

--Rosiestep (talk) 16:45, 21 November 2019 (UTC)

I vaguely remember creating wikidata items for redlists a while ago - http://w.wiki/CTb - though doubtless there are a few lists created subsequently for which there is no wikidata item, or an item which doesn't follow the established pattern. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:10, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
July diff --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:26, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
Well, wow, Tagishsimon, I didn't realize this task was done. Huge thanks. Can the list (an index, actually) be displayed on Wikipedia as a Women in Red Wikidata-list? I'm thinking, at least for the time being, it would be valuable to keep the "crowd-sourced" index and also have the Wikidata-generated index; two ways to view the same thing (with a clickable button at the top to toggle between them). Again, thank you. --Rosiestep (talk) 17:46, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
BTW, I edited my comment on FB to include: "673 of WiR en.wp redlists have Wikidata items (http://w.wiki/CTb). I'd like to encourage other language versions of WiR to add their links to Wikidata, too." --Rosiestep (talk) 17:54, 21 November 2019 (UTC)
  • Rosiestep: While I certainly agree that the redlists are a key feature of our project, I certainly don't think they are "as important as all the articles we are writing". Surely the number and quality of the articles we contribute to the encyclopaedia are by far the most important aspect. The redlink lists are just one of the tools we use to create them. They may be of considerable interest to the editing community but certainly not to all those who use Wikipedia to find information about women and their works. That's my perspective, at any rate.--Ipigott (talk) 09:50, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
The point is that it's not "either lists or articles." Lists are a complementary tool that provide a view in another dimension that casual users of Wikipedia don't see. Most folks experience Wikipedia article by article. Maybe someone might check out a category, which is a very crude version of a list. However, as a 2D matrix, Listeria-generated lists provide lots of info spatially and in one view – which women have articles, what data do we have about them, is there an image for them, what aspects to they have in common? So rather than seeing things as a competition between what is more important (which Rosie didn't make but you are inferring) see it as being a good thing that we can have such powerful tools in our hands now in ways we did not just 10 years ago. This is thanks to Wikidata, thanks to tool makers like Magnus Manske, and thanks to folks who take the initiative to think of different ways of visualizing our content. -- Fuzheado | Talk 20:07, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
My sincere apologies for inferring competition. It was certainly not my attention. It just shows how careful you have to be in expressing your ideas.--Ipigott (talk) 20:23, 22 November 2019 (UTC)
Just popping in to say how excited I am to see the blog series already getting people thinking about the lists over here in WIR :) Astinson (WMF) (talk) 17:32, 26 November 2019 (UTC)

Wikidata lists of redlists -> major redlist re-engineering?

Quick heads-up for those interested in the SPARQL of redlists. I'm thinking that there might be benefits to be had from listing the occupations that are queried within a WD Redlist, as part of the redlists's wikidata item - so for example, in http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q65184008#P360 for the Psychologists redlist we can list occupation=Psychologist.

Having done this, we can amend the SPARQL of redlists to query for occupations listed in the wikidata record - SPARQL rather than maintaining the list of QIds in a VALUES statement within each Redlists' SPARQL.

The two main advantages of doing this are a) to provide a means by which mortals can inspect the occupations that make up a listing (the redlist can point the user at the redlist's wikidata item for a definition of its scope), and b) so that we can provide more information in the table of redlists which Rosiestep requested, above, and enable better analysis of which occupations are covered, in which reports - .e.g. we can create a table of occupations, which point to the redlist they're incorporated within (remembering that some redlists have many discrete occupations making up the results set).

It would also provide the means by which other language wikipedias could mirror the en.wikipedia WD redlists should they wish to.

Anyone have any thinks on this? --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:59, 23 November 2019 (UTC)

Tagishsimon: Impressive! It's just the kind of description that even I can understand. Nevertheless, as our redlists have been designed specifically for the English version of Wikipedia, shouldn't there be something to explain that in the description? And when you say other language versions could use our lists, how exactly would they go about it? Furthermore, if it is possible to provide this kind of description for an existing list, it makes me wonder whether would it be possible to devise a similar description for facilitating the creation of new lists by simply allowing non-initiates to add a new occupation? I have suggested one of our upcoming focuses could be on classical music with an emphasis on musicians. In this connection, just as we now have pianists, we could also easily create violinists ( violinist (Q1259917) ), cellists ( cellist (Q13219637) ), flautists ( flautist (Q12902372) ), clarinetists ( clarinetist (Q118865) ), etc., etc. (Unless of course we can continue to rely on you for all our future additions.)--Ipigott (talk) 07:39, 23 November 2019 (UTC)
On item descriptions; no. The item is a general description of a redlist of a certain sort - psychologists, for example. Each langage wikipedia can have its version, which'll have different contents and, things being what they are, probably slightly different scope. That's fine.
Making new redlists will still be complex, involving a new page with the appropriate listeria template in it (hopefully a standard template the user does not need to edit at all), and in addition a linked wikidata item with appropriate properties. I'd like to think more people will grok how to do it, but doubt that will be the case. If we adopt this approach, I'll do a how-to. Adding, amending and inspecting occupations should be easier, but it's still in wikidata and those who are apprehensive may remain apprehensive. Your need for more musician lists is noted & I'll attend to that.
Here, illustratively, is one of the reports enabled by having occupations within the wikidata record: Wikipedia:WikiProject Women in Red/Redlist index/Listeria redlists by occupation - a list of discrete occupations mapped to the redlist they're found in. I'll amend a few redlists now to be driven from the wikidata item - users will notice no difference whatsoever. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:44, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
All of the -A- occupation redists, bar Academics & Art Historians, now have new SPARQL driving them from the wikidata item. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:29, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
I've been thinking about this for a while myself, Tagishsimon, but I didn't know how to describe it like you do. Totally support going in this direction, even though it's a lot of work. Also adding Camelia.boban to the convo as I know she has created redlists for Italian Wikipedia, to get her thoughts about how other language Wikipedias will be able to collaborate. --Rosiestep (talk) 04:26, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
It's getting closer to WiR-in-a-box. Implement a standard invariant template such as this. Link that page to a wikidata item like this. All done. --Tagishsimon (talk) 04:45, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
These are the Listeria SPARQL lists I created for WikiDonne. --Camelia (talk) 17:51, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
Tagishsimon, It's definitely the direction we want to go: WiR-in-a-box. And you've certainly simplified it with the "standard invariant template" and the Wikidata example. Do you have time to clean-up all the Wikidata redlists we have which don't currently follow the "standard invariant template" you describe? ...or maybe others want to help with that? Camelia.boban, you've done a nice job with Italian redlists and I hope you consider attaching them in Wikidata. I realize you probably have some that en.wiki doesn't have and vice versa, but I'm guessing there's significant overlap? Eventually, I hope we can create a "standard invariant template" for other language Wikipedias, (e.g. maybe start with Swedish because of the WikiGap efforts?; or with Finnish if Yupik has the time/inclination to collaborate), but that can wait till en.wiki side is sorted out. --Rosiestep (talk) 18:14, 24 November 2019 (UTC)
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