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Talk:List of Jewish Nobel laureates

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Former FLCList of Jewish Nobel laureates is a former featured list candidate. Please view the link under Article milestones below to see why the nomination was archived. Once the objections have been addressed you may resubmit the article for featured list status.
Did You Know Article milestones
DateProcessResult
October 4, 2004Articles for deletionNo consensus
July 22, 2007Articles for deletionDeleted
March 7, 2010Articles for deletionKept
April 27, 2010Featured list candidateNot promoted
December 3, 2010Articles for deletionNo consensus
March 23, 2012Articles for deletionNo consensus
Did You Know A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on March 10, 2010.
The text of the entry was: Did you know ... that of the 802 individual Nobel Prize winners, at least 162 (20%) were of Jewish ethnicity?
Current status: Former featured list candidate

Why are Roger Penrose, Ilya Metchnikoff, and Adolf von Baeyer on this list?

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Myself being ethnically at least 3/4 Jewish, I have always felt skeptical about this kind of arithmetic.

Both von Baeyer and Metchnikoff would be puzzled to see their names mentioned here. Von Baeyer was a son of a German lieutenant general, and hardly cared much about the Jewish roots of his Lutheran mother. Metchnikoff was born into the family of an officer of the Imperial Guard, baptised Russian Orthodox, raised as a normal Russian noble and, just like von Baeyer, had little time for the Jewish origins of his mother.

It is even more surprising to see on this list the name of Sir Roger Penrose. Well, yes, one of his grandmothers was of Jewish origin. Is that sufficient to count him in?

Why is Richard Feynman on this list?

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Feynman's Wikipedia page contains a reference to Feynman specifically declining to provide information for a book on Jewish Nobel laureates being compiled by Tina Levitan. He was an avowed atheist, uninterested in Jewish sociology, and found the concept of linking Jewish-ness to academic worth or professional achievement as opening "the door to all kinds of nonsense on racial theory". While he was certainly born into a Jewish family, given his public stated atheism and a particular instruction to not be included on any lists of Jewish Nobel laureates, it seems actively perverse to include him.

This article needs serious editing. 214.9.101.8 (talk) 02:03, 18 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Baeyer just deleted. --Dioskorides (talk) 10:13, 18 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Remove comparative section

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"Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world's population, meaning their share of winners is 110 times their proportion of the world's population."

I don't think this "evaluation" belongs in a factual article. 2601:600:8F81:E080:B125:E819:2B45:7F68 (talk) 00:40, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You haven't provided a reason to remove this statement, which has approx. 17 sources. Scare quotes are not persuasive. Grayfell (talk) 01:30, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with him. That statement violates WP:NPOV. It sounds like something that would be written in a jewish-supremacist blog. In reality, the nobel prize is eurocentric with over half of laureates being from Europe (54%). Using statistics in a biased manner to suggest inherent superiority in comparison to the entire rest of the world is not neutral point of view. Greenlion88 (talk) 15:33, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That's not what WP:NPOV is. And that statement has been repeated over years in WP:RS that aren't Jewish supremacist blogs (whatever those are). Longhornsg (talk) 17:26, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Googling it extensively I only found 3 sources talking about "110x" their proportion of the world's population - this article, a reddit post, and a blog website run by an individual called romanjews.com. If you claim that something is repeated over the years by reliable sources - you should actually name the alleged reliable sources.
The problem however is not that it is necessarily statistically false - the problem is that it's not WP:NPOV because a wikipedia editor created it (again only seen here, on a reddit post, and presumably copied to the blog website from this article) and then misused it to imply something that is misrepresenting. Again - 88% of nobel prizes are given to someone in Europe or USA. (source). And the nobel's eurocentric status is well known and discussed in reliable sources like The Guardian and The Economist.
That statistic effectively implies that everyone everywhere in the world has equal access to the nobel prize and one group beat them all by getting 110x their share. Wikipedia editors should not themselves create statistics that misrepresent ideas to heap laudatory praise on one group over another. Greenlion88 (talk) 21:53, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well, your opinion certainly may be shared here, to a point (WP:NOTFORUM), but it sounds like there is a consensus to retain the information as written. The sources are linked in footnotes 4 and 5. Andre🚐 22:02, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely none of the sources in footnotes 4 or 5 include the "110x" statistic. "0.2% of the world population" and "27% of Nobel prizes" is not the problem. The problem is that a Wikipedia editor created the 110x statistic themselves.
Surely we can't be advocating for editors to create statistics themselves that are misrepresenting? Greenlion88 (talk) 22:16, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Simple calculation is allowed under Wikipedia's policies; see WP:CALC Andre🚐 22:43, 10 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Biased misrepresenting calculations w/o context? Why not crunch up the numbers of the homicide rate per capita of Black Americans vs all other Americans and present it w/o context too in a wiki? Or how about the deaths per capita by government actors of Palestinians vs Israelis? A creative person can think of a million calculations that while factual are misrepresentative. Greenlion88 (talk) 17:51, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see what's biased or misrepresentative about it. Regardless, it's been around for a long time and there's a consensus to retain it. Andre🚐 18:33, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Well like I said earlier - the misrepresentative part is that the statistic implies that everyone everywhere in the world has equal access to the nobel prize and one group beat everyone else in the world by a huge amount. That's probably why none of the reliable sources calculated it that way. But I concede that the consensus is against me so I'll accept it now.
Would it be acceptable to at least add a sentence of context after it? For example: "Jews comprise only 0.2% of the world's population, meaning their share of winners is 110 times their proportion of the world's population. However, 88% of Nobel prizes have been awarded to persons from either Europe or USA and the prize has faced criticism for being euro-centric. [source of stat][sources of euro-centric criticism]" Greenlion88 (talk) 19:59, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Read WP:NOR. Longhornsg (talk) 20:02, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That seems irrelevant anyhow. There are Jews in many countries in the world, many of them for example in Israel, which is not in Europe but West Asia, Argentina which is South America, Canada, which is not the USA but North America, Russia, which well, I doubt you meant Russia when you said Europe even though it's Eurasia. See Jewish population by country. You can separately add something about the Nobel Prize's Eurocentricism if you have sources, to a different article, but unless you have a source that talks about both that, and the Jewish Nobel laureates, it's WP:SYNTH on this article. See why? Andre🚐 20:15, 11 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The "110 times" calculation is not factual and trivially wrong from the statistical point of view (and this is the reason why Wikipedia editors must be extremely cautious in creating statistics by themselves). The reason is simple: the Editor that wrote that number was not correctly considering the ratio of Jews vs world population along the entire period during which the Nobel prize has been awarded since 1901. In 1939, for example, Jews were the 0.7% of the population, and not the 0.2% (source: third paragraph in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews ). A better calculation would imply integrating properly the ratio (Jews award winners/total winners per year)/(Jews with 30+ years/world population 30+ per year) in the period 1901-2023 (the 30+ comes of course from the fact that Nobel prize is not awarded to newborn). This should be enough for considering cancelling that sentence. 130.251.218.6 (talk) 09:35, 29 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]