Talk:The New York Journal of Mathematics
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Retraction allegations
[edit]I removed the retraction allegations section because primary sources and unreliable sources cannot be used to support claims regarding living persons. We need to wait for coverage in reliable, third-party, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. Per WP:BLP we must be very firm about the use of high-quality sources. All editors are welcome to join the discussions at Talk:Amie Wilkinson, Talk:Benson Farb, or here. Woodroar (talk) 18:19, 7 October 2018 (UTC)
- Most of my discussion on this has been in edit summaries already. I have re-added in a more carefully worded passage. This has now been reported on by both The Scientist and the Boston Globe--that are both referenced. I think we can avoid naming editors and BLP issues here---especially as this article is more about the journal's role in this and less about individuals. If editors think there are still problems, let's discuss the particulars further. -Pengortm (talk) 16:49, 8 October 2018 (UTC)
- The Boston Globe piece is an opinion-piece (it's from their "Ideas" section, which is a WP:NEWSBLOG); even The Scientist piece is in its "news and opinion" section. Beyond that, I feel it's pretty WP:UNDUE to devote over a fourth of this article to a single paper based on such spotty coverage. If this actually is a significant event in the history of The New York Journal of Mathematics, more coverage will be forthcoming, but until then it seems WP:UNDUE here. Placing it here raises WP:EXCEPTIONAL requirements - essentially, even the more cautious rewording reads like a breathless coverage of a major scandal, which is absolutely not supported by the generally-weak sources. If there was genuinely a major censorship scandal at a major publication, we would expect to see much more and much higher-quality coverage than this. Of course, such coverage might eventually appear - there's no reason to yield to WP:RECENTISM and add a section devoted to opinion-pieces or blogs; if this is genuinely such a big scandal, more mainstream news coverage should be forthcoming soon. Absent that, I feel the appropriate place to cover it, if anywhere, is on the pages for its authors. --Aquillion (talk) 02:48, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
- It's hard to know where to start here. The Scientist, The Boston Globe and Retraction Watch are all reliable and secondary and in this case they are not even being used to substantiate claims about a living person. Every allegation smaller than Watergate is going to run into the issue where reporters don't have the resources to investigate every aspect. Should we go to the Wikipedia pages of all companies that have been verifiably criticized and remove discussions of this simply because those companies have living employees? And WP:UNDUE doesn't work very well on articles with historically low traffic like this one. Any of us could probably double the size of the article by taking some time to Google NYJM and then the retraction addition would only be one eighth. Silently deleting a published paper is of course a significant event for this journal and one of its editors, Thomas Scanlon, has said that its reputation will take a long time to recover. Connor Behan (talk) 05:53, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
- Retraction Watch is a blog and does not pass WP:RS for anything but the opinions of its authors. The Boston Globe piece is from a WP:NEWSBLOG, as I outlined above. (You have to be cautious with many online publications nowadays - just like with the Forbes contributor model, many are relying on blogs to produce additional online content. The Ideas section of the Boston Globe, which is what's being cited here, is such a blog; and since this particular blog within it is run by the author of Retraction Watch, it provides no meaningful weight or sourcing beyond Retraction Watch itself.) The Scientific American is the only potentially non-opinion piece cited, and even that is filed under "news and opinion", making it unclear. Either way, WP:RECENTISM and WP:NOTNEWS both apply; there is no rush to add a comparatively-obscure controversy to a stub that lacks even basic coverage, and if it is indeed a significant event that will have major long-term impact, there is no harm in us waiting until the higher-profile sources that would support such an implication appear. In the event that this article is eventually expanded to the point where it would be WP:DUE a sentence or so within it, it can be added then, but there's no rush to add something with such sparse sourcing. And WP:UNDUE absolutely applies to stubs and to short articles with little traffic - in fact, that's one of the places where it's most important to observe it. Part of the purpose of that policy is to avoid (for instance) having one incident get blown out of proportion simply because a few people are passionate about it and want to add it everywhere as quickly as possible without regard for its relative weight in the target article. Without that principle, articles on obscure topics - especially little-trafficked articles - would be easily overwhelmed by minor controversies related to them and would provide lopsided coverage to anyone reading them. Wikipedia has a responsibility to maintain the quality (including proportionate coverage) within lightly-trafficked articles just as much as major ones - in fact, lightly-trafficked articles are often the ones where it's most difficult to do so. --Aquillion (talk) 09:09, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
- A paragraph here wouldn't make the event look blown out of proportion. It would create the impression that Wikipedia is living up to its mission of supporting access to knowledge. It could also help prevent a future back-and-forth by people who might be tempted to analyze everything in the Quillette article. The fact that the Wikipedia articles of six notable people involved had no mention of this was extremely conspicuous. There are of course shortcomings to the sources that you've identified but this speaks to the sad state of science journalism, not an intrinsic obscurity within the academic community. Something does not get on the American Mathematical Society website, The Panda's Thumb, Boing Boing and the blogs of two Fields medalists by being nothing. Connor Behan (talk) 17:45, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
- Retraction Watch is a blog and does not pass WP:RS for anything but the opinions of its authors. The Boston Globe piece is from a WP:NEWSBLOG, as I outlined above. (You have to be cautious with many online publications nowadays - just like with the Forbes contributor model, many are relying on blogs to produce additional online content. The Ideas section of the Boston Globe, which is what's being cited here, is such a blog; and since this particular blog within it is run by the author of Retraction Watch, it provides no meaningful weight or sourcing beyond Retraction Watch itself.) The Scientific American is the only potentially non-opinion piece cited, and even that is filed under "news and opinion", making it unclear. Either way, WP:RECENTISM and WP:NOTNEWS both apply; there is no rush to add a comparatively-obscure controversy to a stub that lacks even basic coverage, and if it is indeed a significant event that will have major long-term impact, there is no harm in us waiting until the higher-profile sources that would support such an implication appear. In the event that this article is eventually expanded to the point where it would be WP:DUE a sentence or so within it, it can be added then, but there's no rush to add something with such sparse sourcing. And WP:UNDUE absolutely applies to stubs and to short articles with little traffic - in fact, that's one of the places where it's most important to observe it. Part of the purpose of that policy is to avoid (for instance) having one incident get blown out of proportion simply because a few people are passionate about it and want to add it everywhere as quickly as possible without regard for its relative weight in the target article. Without that principle, articles on obscure topics - especially little-trafficked articles - would be easily overwhelmed by minor controversies related to them and would provide lopsided coverage to anyone reading them. Wikipedia has a responsibility to maintain the quality (including proportionate coverage) within lightly-trafficked articles just as much as major ones - in fact, lightly-trafficked articles are often the ones where it's most difficult to do so. --Aquillion (talk) 09:09, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
- It's hard to know where to start here. The Scientist, The Boston Globe and Retraction Watch are all reliable and secondary and in this case they are not even being used to substantiate claims about a living person. Every allegation smaller than Watergate is going to run into the issue where reporters don't have the resources to investigate every aspect. Should we go to the Wikipedia pages of all companies that have been verifiably criticized and remove discussions of this simply because those companies have living employees? And WP:UNDUE doesn't work very well on articles with historically low traffic like this one. Any of us could probably double the size of the article by taking some time to Google NYJM and then the retraction addition would only be one eighth. Silently deleting a published paper is of course a significant event for this journal and one of its editors, Thomas Scanlon, has said that its reputation will take a long time to recover. Connor Behan (talk) 05:53, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
- The Boston Globe piece is an opinion-piece (it's from their "Ideas" section, which is a WP:NEWSBLOG); even The Scientist piece is in its "news and opinion" section. Beyond that, I feel it's pretty WP:UNDUE to devote over a fourth of this article to a single paper based on such spotty coverage. If this actually is a significant event in the history of The New York Journal of Mathematics, more coverage will be forthcoming, but until then it seems WP:UNDUE here. Placing it here raises WP:EXCEPTIONAL requirements - essentially, even the more cautious rewording reads like a breathless coverage of a major scandal, which is absolutely not supported by the generally-weak sources. If there was genuinely a major censorship scandal at a major publication, we would expect to see much more and much higher-quality coverage than this. Of course, such coverage might eventually appear - there's no reason to yield to WP:RECENTISM and add a section devoted to opinion-pieces or blogs; if this is genuinely such a big scandal, more mainstream news coverage should be forthcoming soon. Absent that, I feel the appropriate place to cover it, if anywhere, is on the pages for its authors. --Aquillion (talk) 02:48, 9 October 2018 (UTC)
- As won't surprise most of you, given our discussions on the BLP noticeboard, I am more inclined to agree with Connor here. This journal seems to be a fairly rinky-dink small journal that is generally less noteworthy than many other journals. If a higher profile journal did this, I think it would be covered much more broadly. If one of these higher profile journals did this and the only coverage that was marshalled was the sources that have been here, I think I would be more inclined to agree that this is not noteworthy enough to include. However, given the caliber of this journal I think these articles are quite noteworthy. I would venture to guess that this incident is probably the most noteworthy thing to ever have happened with this journal. BLP issues are basically irrelevant here on this page as long as we are not naming individuals. More generally, while I think we need to be careful on wording. The basic facts of this case and the controversy do not really seem to be under question and this call for more and more authoritative sources seems quite unnecessary.-Pengortm (talk) 21:35, 11 October 2018 (UTC)
- The issue appears to be the last paragraph of the 02:30, 8 October 2018 version of the article. That is totally WP:UNDUE and the issue should be omitted. If Brian Leiter's opinion is significant, include his thoughts there. However, the implication of academic fraud should not stand on the basis of an ephemeral fuss. Johnuniq (talk) 07:03, 13 October 2018 (UTC)
- The most recently removed version didn't mention of the BLP problematic allegations (heck didn't mention any of the names or allegations of secondary involvement) so that's not relevant. I don't see any issue with UNDUE given the sourcing, and certainly not an argument to remove all mention of the issue completely. JoshuaZ (talk) 01:24, 15 October 2018 (UTC)
- @JoshuaZ: and others - Please note that there is also a discussion going on at http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard#The_New_York_Journal_of_Mathematics_retraction_controversy surronding this. -Pengortm (talk) 03:34, 16 October 2018 (UTC)
- More coverage: https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/10/30/university-professors-involved-retraction-controve/ - This incident really should be added to the journal page. -Pengortm (talk) 14:16, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
- I'm sorry, I've been very busy with work over the past few weeks. I added a brief (2 sentence) statement sourced to The Scientist. Woodroar (talk) 20:29, 3 November 2018 (UTC)
- More coverage: https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/10/30/university-professors-involved-retraction-controve/ - This incident really should be added to the journal page. -Pengortm (talk) 14:16, 31 October 2018 (UTC)
- @JoshuaZ: and others - Please note that there is also a discussion going on at http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons/Noticeboard#The_New_York_Journal_of_Mathematics_retraction_controversy surronding this. -Pengortm (talk) 03:34, 16 October 2018 (UTC)