Talk:Algorithms of Oppression

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 25 January 2021 and 17 May 2021. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Alenaley.

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Something fishy

What is meant?:

This result encloses the data failures specific to people of color and women which Noble coins...

and

 ... expressed criticism of the book, citing that the thesis of the text, based on the text of the book's official blurb ... could not be reproduced.

The latter is plain nosense. What was cited? How a thesis may be "reproduced"? Maybe cite=>claim and thesis=>results were meant?

At best, these are sloppy mental shortucts. At worst, I smell a COI here. Zezen (talk) 12:22, 17 November 2019 (UTC)

Drafitification

@Confetticookie: @Kmk1108: @TennisLover4Ever: Wikipedia should not have a standalone article about a book if it is not possible, without including original research or unverifiable content, to write an article on that book that complies with the policy that Wikipedia articles should not be summary-only descriptions of works, contained in criterion 1 of WP:INDISCRIMINATE.

This article body is almost entirely a summary or otherwise WP:Synthesis which use the subject of the article as source, or which cite promotional materials which are insufficient to establish notability. Please modify the article body to remove excessive detail on the contents of the work and focus on why it is notable to retain information on it of an encyclopedic nature. Otherwise please move it to draft space. Pursuant to draftification process if you have any objections to why it should not be draftified or have modified it for further review, please reply within at timely manner (2 weeks) with your objections or changes.Ethanpet113 (talk) 04:19, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Ethanpet113 You are right that the summary is currently too long and detailed. If you wish to constructively edit the article for concision, that would be very helpful. A new "background" section would also be welcome. However, it is absurd to challenge the notability of a book which clearly passes WP:NBOOK from the sources present in the article, namely reviews in not just Booklist but even LARB, a highly selective review venue. It would be trivially easy to add dozens more reviews. Book reviews are not "promotional" sources, but exactly the secondary sourcing upon which contemporary book articles typically rely. I strongly oppose draftification on the grounds that the article is already more than a "summary-only" description of the work, and it is eminently possible to expand it further with excellent sourcing. If you are concerned about non-notable books you might start by looking at those which cite no sources for articles like Nanny Ogg's Cookbook. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 17:56, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Actually, I added a background section myself while it was on my mind. The summary of the book can certainly be improved, though I find that sort of work less interesting than researching when and how books were composed, so I will probably prioritize my other editing instead. I welcome your edits to improve it. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 18:52, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

---

I am basing my assessment of notability primarily on a cursory google review which yielded primarily listings of the book for sale, pages which seem to have a close connection with the author. I am applying general notability guideline of significant coverage "Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. In reviewing the current internal citations, omitting those by Noble, there are in total a single short press mention by someone described as "communications and marketing staff" at a buried blog page on an .edu domain which appears to have a connection with the author, a routine blog post at a book review website, 2 short throw away puff pieces on entertainment news sources a dead page and a book review, and barely functional page page that mention of a tweet of someone in the IEEE which does not appear to exist.

This is not to say that the book is not important, only that its importance currently seems to be inflated wp:puffery. So far the only peer review appears to be only 1 citation of high quality [1], which would probably be the best place to start to establish notability in replacing parts of the article which are a summary more with how it is significant. However this listing appear to be actually just a tangential mention in a single page of a single 1 paragraph review of a new publication in the appendix of a journal, and not an important subject of the work This is also not to say that the work may not become more notable in the future, only that currently its notability is weak and I believe it should be drafted until this is resolved.

It also has not escaped my notice that this article was almost entirely constructed by students at CSUCI[2], the same institution as the author of the book, as part of courseware. This does not necessarily constitute a WP:COI as mentioned earlier in the talk page, or lessen notability if additional third party citations can be established however I think this should raise a few eyebrows in the consideration of whether this article exists because it is genuinely considered notable or whether it solely to promote the work.

The lack of citations on Nancy Ogg's cookbook does nothing to modify my criterion for inclusion of notability of this work. It inclusion is actually even weaker, except that it is currently a stub which suggests that someone in the future intends to establish its notability. Otherwise my conclusion is also that Nancy Ogg's cookbook does not meet criteria for inclusion as it has no body justifying why the article exists. Ethanpet113 (talk) 22:02, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

I am confused. I linked WP:NBOOK because it unambiguously addresses the question of notability, so I don't understand why you have brought up GNG criteria. NBOOK establishes special notability guidelines for books precisely because they are subject to different kinds of press coverage than persons or events, and have different standards for the "best sources". Books which pass NBOOK do not need to pass GNG. One of the NBOOK criteria is "The book has been the subject of two or more non-trivial published works appearing in sources that are independent of the book itself. This can include published works in all forms, such as ... reviews." The article, before my edits, was already sourced to two such reviews, in Booklist and LARB. I added three more reviews, from Kirkus, New York Journal of Books, and the American Journal of Sociology. Your comments on the AJS review make me think you might not be very familiar with editing articles about books or assessing their notability, because it is a completely normal academic review which clearly contributes to NBOOK criteria 1. That is why I linked the Nanny Ogg book: to contextualize what a book of highly questionable notability actually looks like.

It sounds like you have concerns that are not related to notability, but rather to NPOV. Here too I think you may not have seen many low-quality book articles and may not have the context to spot what a "promotional" book page looks like. I don't see even one sentence that reads as "puffing," as even the quoted reviews focus largely on the content of the book rather than praising it. The fact that the book has been the subject of four different WikiEd projects, none of which are a university affiliated with Noble (as CSUCI is not the same school as USC or UCLA) actually just shows that the book passes NBOOK criteria 4 as well as criteria 1.

Both notability and NPOV strike me as red herrings. Where you are right to point to problems in the article, it is that the chapter summary is a bit long and detailed. To be in keeping with the norms for other kinds of books, WP:NOVELPLOT suggests 400-700 words for a book's summary. Some nonfiction books are sufficiently complex that a longer summary is warranted (as indeed is the case with fiction as well) but this book could be summarized more concisely. That is a matter for normal polishing edits and by no means the kind of severe flaw which warrants draftifying an article. I encourage you to improve the article to match your standards. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 23:35, 5 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi, @LEvalyn: I see. I am only noting that to a layman there does not appear to be sufficient coverage that is not momentary and a secondary source. When I looked at these listings they seemed to be a mention in passing, but perhaps that is because the greater body of the work is behind a paywall( enhancing a citation with the verbatim quotes would help to alleviate this problem). For clarification yes I do recognize now that it would be subject to WP:TBK given its publisher is NYU press, but that in this scope I found a general search lackluster, and many of the press(or whatever you seem to want to call them) citations dead, however the reviews in journals do seem to be alive. I still consider a review, rather than reference in other works to be pretty weak but technically viable. The presence of the academic reviews and nature of the publisher is the reason in fact that I am considering draftification rather than deletion. My opinion on draftifying the article is based on its present structure and content not my feelings about its notability as an outside observer. My opinion on the notability of the work is just an additional note I have about the article's content, I feel we could surely do better than reviews because praise or detraction are really weak inclusion criteria for what is an academic work, as compared to say a work of fiction. Reviews are just not as good as compared to a 3rd party citing the body of the work to reinforce an argument in other notable work in the specialist field or across fields. If these "reviews" are not what a layman typically thinks of as a review, but actually do apply the body to some very notable work this would be the ideal kind of thing to include in the citation with a verbatim quote. If possible I am just saying that on top of modifying the body to not be a play-by-play summary, more such citations are ideal. In particular WP:TBK stipulates:

• whether the book is published by an academic press
• how widely the book is cited by other academic publications or in the media
• the number of editions of the book
• whether one or more translations of the book have been published
• how influential the book is considered to be in its specialty area
• or adjunct disciplines, and whether it is,
• or has been, taught, or required reading, in one or more reputable educational institutions.

We have a good start since it's published by an academic press although obviously that's insufficient or wikipedia would include every journal regardless of whether it is of value. Mention of the work in other subject matter that is in a well established field as part of an argument, rather than a review on the nature of the contents of the book would greatly improve the quality of the article. If the book is commonly used as part of courseware at a noted institution or many institutions this would also be sufficient. If the book has undergone several revisions and has been internationalized this also shows that it is not a flash in the pan put out because of the "Publish or Perish" mentality.

Regarding the structure of the work, I still believe that this article should be moved to draft space if nobody is actually willing to rework it in mainspace, as it is as start-class article clearly not ready for publication following Wikipedia's layout and content guidelines, as noted in in the opening paragraph of this talk seciton. Perhaps you might like to do the rework since you seem to be keenly interested. A 400-500 word summary as you mention seems sufficient up to a maybe a few thousand in 2 or 3 sections for critical response, and importance to the field and related fields along with content summary. Ideally this should cover the major thesis of the work, and why it is influential in one of the manners noted above. I will check again in December to see if progress has been made towards a rework to remove the excessive summary, and hopefully salvaging the important bits for the summary. If it has not I will assume nobody has taken an interest subject to WP:Draftify (3a. There is no evidence of a user actively working on it.), and plop it into draft space so somebody can work on it until it is ready for mainspace. Ethanpet113 (talk) 21:37, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Hi Ethanpet113, I'm afraid I'm still confused by your arguments here. This book is not a textbook so WP:TBK does not apply, only WP:NBOOK does. Reviews are the best sources for book articles, because they discuss the book directly and tell us how people have taken note of it. A "start" class article by definition exceeds the minimum standards for inclusion in mainspace, since it is higher quality than a "stub", which meets those standards, so WP:DRAFTIFY 2 does not apply; the article is thus ineligible for draftification. It is also impermissible to draftify an article if an editor has objected to draftification, as I have; per WP:DRAFTOBJECT the article must either stay in mainspace or be nominated at AfD. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:24, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

Ethanpet113, LEvalyn As per the discussion here, this article should not have been moved to draft space. Ethanpet113, you either have fundamental misunderstandings of how book articles are evaluated or have some ulterior motivation for trying to remove this article. Regardless, it was explicitly stated here why this article does not qualify for draftification, yet you still went ahead and did it anyway. If you find the summary too long, feel free to edit it down, but as the author is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow and this is her seminal work, it’s far from irrelevant. I have submitted the article for republication as is. Please don’t edit articles or try to remove them just because you are unclear on the guidelines for book articles or because you have some political motivation for removing the article. Stick to what you know. Thank you.

Ethanpet113, it was completely inappropriate to draftify this article over a minor content dispute, especially one which you have made no constructive edits to remedy. Because of the redirect, I can't move the page back to mainspace myself, so I have requested a move. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:23, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

User:Ethanpet113, User:LEvalyn - I have moved the article back to article space via the AFC acceptance script. In my opinion, moving it from article space to draft space was a serious error that reflects a misunderstanding either of the role of the reviewer or of the deletion process. It appears that the article had been in article space for three years, and should only have been moved to draft space as an Alternative To Deletion. User:Ethanpet113 - Do you understand that your move appears to be an abuse of either the role of a reviewer or the deletion process? Robert McClenon (talk) 22:59, 29 December 2021 (UTC)

User:Ethanpet113 - I have re-read the policy on moving articles to draft space. Your action, in moving an article to draft space that had been in article space for three years, after objection by another editor, was so unusual that I wanted to check the policy to make sure that I hadn't misunderstood something. I had not misunderstood. You misunderstood. The policy says that an article may be moved to draft space during New Page Review under the circumstances that you listed. This article was not in new page review, and there was objection. Please reread the policy on moving an article to draft space again. You are an inexperienced editor, and an inexperienced editor occasionally will make mistakes. However, when several more experienced editors say that a less experienced editor made a mistake, the best response is to apologize for the mistake and to learn from it, and to use more caution at least for a while. Robert McClenon (talk) 23:13, 29 December 2021 (UTC)