This gets *worse* the more editors are involved, of course. After twenty editors get involved, bringing their standards and taste for inclusion to bear, a 9:8 bias becomes a 10:1 bias in final coverage.
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The presence of "activists" biased in the opposite direction doesn't help, unless they are willing to preferentially delete articles about men. (e.g., in the case that normative coverage should be even, they would have to flip the delete ratio.)
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Any activist who does this has two problems. First, from their point of view, they're eliminating good content—if they share the norms of their colleagues, they think the men they're deleting to balance the ratio should be included after all.
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Second, their actions are exponentially suppressed relative to their share of the population—to counterbalance ten others with bias (say) 2:3, they will need to be not just "ten times more biased", 30:2, but around 120:2 (3/2)^10. They will be extremely salient.
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Of course, all this is even worse when it comes to feedback effects. An editor who has an 9:8 bias in favor of men will think he's actually exceedingly fair—because the current content is actually 2:1 in favor of men. He may even feel like an activist himself!
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Simon DeDeo Retweeted Simon DeDeo
To be clear, all of this happens with the best of intentions. All that's required is that the editor think he's without bias. As appears to be the case with the editor responsible for excluding Donna Strickland this year. (See thread for more on this.)https://twitter.com/SimonDeDeo/status/1048611161049063424 …
Simon DeDeo added,
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo
no particular reflection on your thesis, but this is awful support for it. deletions based on abject failure to meet basic Wikipedia standards *that are nothing to do with anyone's subjective judgments about the topic* are being touted as OMG BIAS in that thread, it's not good
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Replying to @chaosprime
Take a look at the Donna Strickland case (linked in thread). You’ll be surprised at the sequence of events.
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Replying to @SimonDeDeo
i'm really not. the first event, speedy deletion as copyright violation, was unambiguously correct (your interpretation of that as being about an image is a misread; the speedy deletion criterion cited would be invoked because the *entire article* was substantively her OSA page)
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Replying to @chaosprime @SimonDeDeo
the second event was a deletion of an article because it failed to include independent reliable source citations, which is extremely ordinary, if not a faultless event (many inclusionist editors like myself get irritated when people use deletion as a way of demanding citations)
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from there followed a lot of discussion, a lot of interpretation, a lot of misinterpretation, a lot of correction of misinterpretation. nothing a bit surprising about it, and none of it to do with anyone's personal interpretation of Donna Strickland as a notable topic
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Replying to @chaosprime @SimonDeDeo
the most you could say is that someone involved in the second deletion could have done a few minutes' work to find notability-establishing citations for the article and add them. possibly bias could influence somebody's decision not to do so
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Replying to @chaosprime @SimonDeDeo
but quite frankly, editors on notability patrol generally get pretty tired pretty fast of having above-and-beyond unpaid labor extracted from them by way of writing articles without citations, and i would assign a lot more determinativity to that than to anything topic-related
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