Talk:Jacob Lurie

Removing link to Quora

‌I have removed a link to a Quora discussion about the subject of this article. (It consists of the opinions of two people who are not reliable sources on the subject.) It does not fulfil any of the criteria of the policy page on external links (WP:EL). In fact, my estimation is that it falls under "questionable sources or sources of dubious value" of the WP:ELBLP section. Timeline:

• 20 August 2015‎ Link was introduced (by User:TakuyaMurata)
• 8 November 2016‎ link was removed (by me)
• 15 November 2016 Removal was reverted (by User:TakuyaMurata)
• 15 November 2016 Removed again (by me)
• 1 April 2017 Removal was reverted again (by User:TakuyaMurata)
• 1 April 2017 Rmoved again (by me), after leaving this note on the talk page

Please discuss why the link is appropriate to include (e.g. how it is reliable and/or notable), before adding again. Shreevatsa (talk) 08:53, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

@Shreevatsa: Generally speaking, it is ok to have a link to a post in a discussion forum in the "external links" section. How is this one different? Yes, the opinions are speculative and are unreliable but we are not citing them so the reliability isn't an issue. It makes sense to have the quality controls on the opinions but that Quora's job. Ithink Quora is sufficiently reputable. -- Taku (talk) 18:09, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

@TakuyaMurata: I don't agree that "Generally speaking, it is ok to have a link to a post in a discussion forum in the "external links" section". Especially for biographies of living persons. See Links normally to be avoided:

10. Social networking sites (such as Myspace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram), chat or discussion forums/groups (such as Yahoo! Groups), Twitter feeds, Usenet newsgroups or email lists.
11. Blogs, personal web pages and most fansites (negative ones included), except those written by a recognized authority. (This exception for blogs, etc., controlled by recognized authorities is meant to be very limited; as a minimum standard, recognized authorities who are individuals always meet Wikipedia's notability criteria for people.)

And the standard for articles about living people is even higher:

In biographies of living people, material available solely in questionable sources or sources of dubious value should be handled with caution, and, if derogatory, should not be used at all, either as sources or via external links. External links in biographies of living persons must be of high quality and are judged by a higher standard than for other articles. Do not link to websites that are not fully compliant with this guideline or that contradict the spirit of WP:BLP.

I really think it's not fair to the subject of an article, to link to opinions about them or their work by people on a discussion forum. (There may be a case for an exception when the author of the opinion is highly notable, depending on the circumstances, but I think this is not such a case.) Shreevatsa (talk) 19:56, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

@Shreevatsa: I think now I understand why you thought there is a policy-violation. Maybe I shouldn't have used the term "discussion forum"; I don't think Quora is on par with more loose discussion forums like Reddit. The difference is that sites like Quora or mathoverflow are curated; i.e., they have the reputation control so that the opinions are not from some unknown persons.

As for "biography", I agree that we need to be very careful about the type of thr sources we need to write about the subject. But here we are not using Quora as a source; we are merely providing a link to relevant information. (I don't think "external links" is "further reading" and so we are not endorsing any of opinions found in the linked sites.) -- Taku (talk) 21:14, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Having used both Quora and MathOverflow, I know they have some sort of a reputation system, but still the opinions are not necessarily from anyone notable. (E.g. I have posts on both sites.) In this case I frankly don't think the opinions contained at the link count as relevant information either. (One can just search for [lurie fields] and see more results, such as blogs and so on.) Maybe we can ask some third person for an opinion here. :-) Shreevatsa (talk) 00:54, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

If the argument is that the information in the Quora thread in question is not interesting, then that's actually a stronger argument. To give some background, it does seem rather peculiar that Lurie doesn't have a Fields medal; perhaps I'm biased. The Google search yields speculations on this topic (nothing concrete of course) and so it made sense to include some link in the "external links". Anyway, I don't push the inclusion of the link; but I do still think there is no policy-violation if we have included the link. -- Taku (talk) 20:40, 8 April 2017 (UTC)