Talk:Algorithms of Oppression

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 23 August 2019 and 15 December 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): English429813 (article contribs).

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): SBdolphin90 (article contribs).

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2020 and 7 April 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): GN75 (article contribs). 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 (article contribs).

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)

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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)