Research talk:Automated classification of article importance/Work log/2017-03-23

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Today I will respond to the comments by the WPMED members and get moving on processing the clickstream dataset.

WPMED importance and scope

Based on the feedback it's clear that WPMED has a strictly defined scope and focus. Per their documentation the project works on articles related to medicine, and per Wikipedia, "medicine" is "the science and practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease." See also this diff where the project's main focus is described as "diseases, medical conditions, and treatments."

Given that main focus, having their importance scale define "very rare diseases, lesser-known medical signs, equipment, hospitals, individuals, historical information, publications, laws, investigational drugs, detailed genetic and physiological information, and obscure anatomical features" as Low-importance seems reasonable. They also have task forces for some of these categories, individuals are in the scope of their Society and medicine task force. In the scope of that task force, the default importance for an individual is Mid-importance.

I still find their usage of Low-importance ratings to be contradictory. If Alexander Fleming is important enough to be in the scope of WPMED, then how come he is nothing but Low-importance? Might as well define him as outside the scope of WPMED then… Also, I wrote a SQL query to find WPMED individuals that appear to be candidates for importance reassessment.