Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-02-28/Recent research



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  • @HaeB: if I get 8.5/9 do I get a barnstar? I understand that you can't give everybody a barnstar - but I'm the first to claim it! Smallbones(smalltalk) 22:02, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Is that without looking at the article? I was very proud of getting 5.5/9 without looking (gave myself half a point for guessing 6.2 million) given that two are very specific statistics and at least three are not really unambiguous clearly-expressed questions. — Bilorv (talk) 23:30, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • I have to admit that I briefly copy edited the article, but that's not really reading for comprehension. I agree that some of the questions are ambiguous, so I answered to mysekf "If they mean W then my answer is X, if they mean Y the my answer is Z." Smallbones(smalltalk) 23:46, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Re: The article "Most scientific articles cited by Wikipedia articles are uncited or untested by subsequent studies" is surprising given our favouring of secondary sources (which are more highly cited on average). Although it's higher than the literature as a whole ("28.5% of articles referenced in Wikipedia have a supporting citation vs. 11.7% of articles in Web of Science"), I wonder to what extent it is an artifact. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 05:47, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Ah, it may be something to do with the way that they define "untested by subsequent studies". In the Smart Cite system they use from scite.ai, only 2.99% of citations are indicated as "Supporting citations" (i.e. "provide supporting evidence"). I suspect that most secondary sources don't get these sorts of citations as often as primary research. It'd be more interesting to separate out primary/secondary/tertiary sources cited by WP and specifically ask what percentage of those sources have Supporting citations. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 06:02, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • This paper includes a "supporting evidence" section which appears to include an xls file containing a list of "retracted" sources cited on Wikipedia. Presumably we could use that list to remove sources that been retracted, but I have not opened the xls to verify. -- GreenC 16:16, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • @Evolution and evolvability and GreenC: Ooh, that sounds like a good task for a bot, actually: Retracted citation patrolling. Perhaps with any articles found to be citing retracted papers added to a hidden tracking category, and/or templated with a cleanup notice to that effect? I wonder if the data set for that (the list of retracted papers to be flagged) could be maintained programmatically / updated periodically based on some machine-readable list of retractions, assuming there even is such a thing? -- FeRDNYC (talk) 01:09, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • FeRDNYC, I agree retracted sources could be monitored programmatically and flagged with a trackable inline template. WP:RSN would be a good place to open a discussion and if consensus open a bot request at WP:BOTREQ. -- GreenC 01:17, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
          • @GreenC: Mmm, lest we imagine this is a bigger problem than it actually is, though, I did open that Excel file. It's a list of 50 citations (total!), divided into three categories:
            1. 15 are listed as "Acknowledges retraction", so IOW they're not the problem — there's nothing inherently wrong with referencing a retracted study, when it's done in the context of it being a retracted study.
            2. Another 10 are listed as "No longer referenced", which sort of undermines the title of the dataset, no?
            3. Of the remaining 25 listed as "Not acknowledged", there are actually only 13 retracted papers there. It's just that one of them happens to be cited in TWELVE different articles (and another one is cited in two). Nearly all (> 80%) of the articles in question are hyper-specific stubs on individual chemical compounds, like OLIG1, PTF1A, MED24, GCN5L2, etc. (Which IMHO is just further evidence that such articles have no business being part of Wikipedia in the first place, but that's just my bias talking.) -- FeRDNYC (talk) 01:33, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
            @FeRDNYC and GreenC: It's also wirth noting the meta:WikiCite/Shared_Citations proposal as a relevant avenue for this sort of monitoring and notification. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)talk 02:20, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Based on the title of this piece, I was assuming I'd find an article about how we're biased against creating articles about nobility. signed, Rosguill talk 16:16, 1 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • I noticed that the entire corpus of scientific article did no better. So WP is doing in this respect about as well (or as poorly) as the world scientific community as a whole. analogous to the old finding that we were about the same as Brittanica. DGG ( talk ) 07:41, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Surely the opposite is true, if anything. I've always been surprised that WP:GAN has these two categories for history: "World history" and "Royalty, nobility and heraldry". But to each their own and there's plenty of interesting content in that category. — Bilorv (talk) 11:22, 2 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Question: What does Wikipedia use to maintain it's [sic] content? Sorry, that thud was the sound of my head hitting the keyboard. An algorithm came up with these? And even our computers aren't capable of differentiating between "its" and "it's"? Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. Methinks they've learned to emulate humans a bit too well. -- FeRDNYC (talk) 01:13, 18 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]