Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-01-31/The Science Hall of Fame

← Back to The Science Hall of Fame

Discuss this story

• Nice work Headbomb!

  What rankings are Herbert Mayer and Jacob Jaffe on the list? Perhaps we should consider recreating those articles. NW (Talk) 01:47, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Herbert Mayer has a fame of 4.3 mD (ranking 1916th, tied with 33 people) and Jacob Jaffe has 0.7 mD (ranking 4794th, tied with 244 people). Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 02:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• So has anyone started a pool to see when articles on Mayer & Jaffe will be re-created, seeing how we have an arguably objective measure of their notability? -- llywrch (talk) 06:27, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• I started a discussion thread about Jaffe at So where did Wikipedia go wrong?. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 13:41, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

• Lewis Carroll was also a professional, though not I believe an important, mathmetician, which is presumably what he is doing on this list in the first place. Julia Kristeva is also not famous as a scientist, though her work touches on psychological areas. Johnbod (talk) 02:14, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Under "Fame, article quality, and other trends on Wikipedia" (permanent link here), the subsection "Numbers" says "the SHoF contains 5,631 entries ... of these, 1828 are living, 3808 are dead." 5631 ≠ 1828 + 3808.—Wavelength (talk) 04:06, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Right you are, I'll recrunch the numbers. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 04:09, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• This is MegaBullshit Idiocy. Dewey? Give me a break! Edison (talk) 05:00, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• I must confess that I didn't recognise 2 of the top 10 men and Dewey was one of them. Is this US-centricity? S a g a C i t y (talk) 11:02, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• I wouldn't ascribe this directly to US-centricity - although I doubt I'm the only one surprised that Isaac Newton didn't make the list -- or other notable older scientific figures like Galileo, Plato or Aristotle. (Moreover most Americians, if asked to identify John Dewey, probably could do little better than guess he invented the Dewey Decimal System -- which was the work of another man.) But a glance at the John Dewey article offers an possible answer: he has been the target of much vitriol by American conservatives. (Damn that man for working towards te goal of offering the average American a useful & liberal education!) -- llywrch (talk) 18:53, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• There appears to be a high degree of correlation between "fame" and controversy. I think Newton and Galileo might not rank in the top ten because controversy over Newton's primacy and Galileo's polemics had died down well before the advent of the Google era, even if they did fall within the two century timeframe of the project, which they do not. ~ Ningauble (talk) 19:51, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Ah. I missed that small detail about the "two century timeframe". I'm standing by the rest of my comment, though. -- llywrch (talk) 20:21, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Melvil Dewey lived from December 10, 1851 to December 26, 1931 and John Dewey lived from October 20, 1859 to June 1, 1952. Did the last name of the inventor of the Dewey Decimal System somehow help boost the culturomic darwins of John Dewey's name within ngrams.googlelabs.com? -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 11:41, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

• As covered in this 31 January 2011 issue of The Signpost, the New York Times prints an article to announce to the world "Wikipedia's gender gap" merely by selecting a few Wikipedia articles purportedly on "topics more likely to be followed by boys" and "topics more likely to be followed by girls" (which itself has bias, scope, author age, and target audience problems) and eyeball compares them to draw a predetermined conclusion.[1] In contrast, as covered in the same 31 January 2011 issue of The Signpost, the Signpost publishes "Building a pantheon of scientists from Wikipedia and Google Books," an objective analysis based on analytical thought that publishes its support for the conclusions drawn by the article. The New York Times continues to be held out as THE reliable source of reliable sources, whereas The Signpost is held very low on the totem pole when it comes to usage in Wikipedia articles. What's wrong with that picture? Headbomb and The Signpost, congratulations on another outstanding job. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 11:05, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Also 90% of the top ten men are dead, only 60% of the top ten women. That's a significant difference. Rich Farmbrough, 13:59, 1 February 2011 (UTC).
  

• Interesting to compare surnames only (unigram) for Newton,Asimov,Einstein,Darwin (Newton scores far higher), and contrast those results to bigram data Isaac Newton,Isaac Asimov,Albert Einstein,Charles Darwin where Newton looses top spot to Darwin,who in turn looses it to Einstein. Rich Farmbrough, 14:19, 1 February 2011 (UTC).
  

• For surnames only, I think in general Newton and Darwin are more common in uses other that the scientists' names; especially for Newton, many results found from the periods at bottom are not related to Sir Isaac. With the bigrams you misspelled Newton's first name and probably noticed how common typos or misreadings are instead (at least in the link above): here's the real link. —innotata 14:48, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Thanks thought I had fixed that typo - I have now. Rich Farmbrough, 14:59, 1 February 2011 (UTC).
  

• Haidar Abbas Rizvi's birth year was reported incorrectly in this article, listing both his Science and Wikipedia birth years as 1967. I changed it to 1969, the correct value. And while I was looking into it, I determined that the 1967 date was actually vandalism that had been left in the article for over five months. Oops. I've fixed it, but it's probably a good idea to check the other articles on this list for vandalism. In particular we should be looking at those who are alive (according to either Wikipedia or Science), died recently, or have discrepancies in birth or death dates. Reach Out to the Truth 22:00, 1 February 2011 (UTC)

• Bizarrely the SHOF list is missing Mary Anning. I would have expected her to make the top 10 list of of women scientists. I left a comment at their website about her being missed. She should easily qualify as a search for her name at Google books returns more than 9000 results.

• She was born in 1799, and this list covers people born from 1800 onwards. Headbomb {talk / contribs / physics / books} 16:49, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

• And again Miss Anning is denied her due by the scientific establishment. -- 15.252.0.76 (talk) 18:46, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

• Culturomics "least likely to succeed" word of 2010? By creating a mechanism for others to stroke the egos of both Google (who can give grants) and Wikipedia (who can boost fame) at the same time and to 'scientifically' validate what these two giants do, I think that that culturomics soon will be on the lips of everyone. In researching the term, Google books shows "culturomic" being used in 2008 as in "genomic-proteomic-culturomic enterprise". I think the first two relate to enterprises/organisms based on hereditary (genomic enterprise) and an enterprises based on proteins (proteomic enteprise). In that context, does anyone has a guess as to what culturomic enterprise might be? -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 11:41, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

• Michael Grzimek: Science has probably confounded the birth and death dates of Michael Grzimek with that of his father Bernhard Grzimek. --Longbow4u (talk) 18:13, 2 February 2011 (UTC)